Front Edge Publishing’s core team, from left: John Hile, Dmitri Barvinok, Susan Stitt, Patty Thompson and David Crumm.
Who are we?
Read The Spirit (www.ReadTheSpirit.com) is the weekly online magazine of Front Edge Publishing.
We invite readers to sign up for a free email update when each new issue is published. That’s easy to do and readers can cancel that subscription at any time.
Learn about our history: Visit our Front Edge Publishing website’s “About” page for the history of our innovations in publishing, since we were founded in 2007. On our first day in business in August of 2007, we also posted the first column in our online magazine Read The Spirit, headlined: Our 10 Principles of 21st-Century Publishing. Since that time, that visionary 10-point manifesto has been shared with media professionals and in journalism programs around the world. Our team lives by those principles to this day and we have distilled them now into a single promise: “Good media builds healthy community.”
What is Front Edge Publishing’s focus? We produce mainly nonfiction books on a wide range of themes, including religious and cultural diversity, spiritual reflection, health care, cancer survivorship, leadership, history, movies, holidays, education, entrepreneurship, community organizing, peacemaking and family issues. However, we also have published fiction and, in 2024, plan to publish our first mystery series.
What are “Read The Spirit Books”? Like other long-established publishers, we have developed various publishing imprints over the years to help organize our books into basic themes: For example, the “Cass Community Publishing” imprint specializes in books about development of new urban communities, named for the famous Detroit Cass Community where many of those innovations were born. Our longest-standing imprint is “Read The Spirit Books,” which borrows from the name of our online magazine to identify books that especially celebrate religious and cultural diversity. Our writers also explore these themes in each weekly issue of our online magazine.
When do you publish? Our online magazine Read The Spirit is published every Monday by noon ET—each issue consisting of a new front-page lineup of stories. Then, at 1 pm ET Mondays, our free newsletters and other social-media outreach efforts distribute that new issue to our readers worldwide. Our team has never missed a Monday morning deadline in more than 15 years, which means in early 2023 we will have published more than 800 weekly issues, amounting to thousands of inspiring and helpful columns.
What does it mean that you are “journalists”? Read the Spirit strives for the classic journalistic values of accuracy, balance and fairness. In an era when traditional newspapers, magazines and publishing houses are collapsing, Read The Spirit is growing in its rich array of media to help readers build healthy, diverse communities.
Submissions
Through these 800 issues of our magazine, we have built up a global community of contributing writers, mainly drawing on veteran journalists and authors. Our magazine is free to our readers and we do not pay for contributions from our writers. They contribute their work because this magazine is so widely read, especially by other media professionals and community leaders. Our writers share our core value: “Good media builds healthy community.” Appearing in our online magazine is a powerful way to network with other like-minded people.
Contact David Crumm, below, if you would like to contribute to our magazine.
We do not accept paid promotional content.
Meet Our Staff
David Crumm interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu for a series of stories about Tutu published in Knight-Ridder newspapers.
Co-Founder & Editor:
David Crumm
David is known nationwide to journalists and authors who cover the impact of religion and cross-cultural issues on our world today. In nearly 50 years as a journalist, Crumm has won top awards and is a senior fellow with several universities and nonprofits, including the University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship, the Washington DC-based East West Center and the International Association of Religion Journalists. He has reported from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He also is an innovator in professional connections among journalists and authors, establishing a Michigan model for networking professional communicators. On a daily basis, he is building new collegial relationships.
Associate Editor and Marketing Manager:
Susan Stitt
Email: [email protected]
Holidays & Festivals Columnist:
Stephanie Fenton
Email: [email protected]
Faith & Film Columnist:
Ed McNulty
Email: [email protected]
God Signs Columnist:
Suzy Farbman
Email: [email protected]
Contributing Columnist:
Bill Tammeus
Email: [email protected]
Webmaster:
Becky Hile
Financial Management:
Patty Thomspon
Email: [email protected]
Mailing address:
David Crumm, Read The Spirit
42807 Ford Road, #234
Canton, MI 48187
Call: 734-751-7840
Email: [email protected]
Rights & Permissions:
For information about reprinting information from our family of websites, see the Creative Commons License
link at the bottom of each page. Got other questions about reuse of our material? Please email David Crumm.
Privacy Protection
Front Edge Publishing fully complies with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. In fact, we welcome it and we think writers and authors around the world should join us in encouraging such openness about privacy and personal rights. Following the GDPR’s encouragement, we published this plain and clear
explanation of our compliance.