The editors of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation welcome submission of articles that deal with religion in its American contexts from diverse methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives. Although articles may deal with specifically focused topics, events or persons, they should be written in a way that casts light on broad patterns or implications of American life. Articles should be fully documented and contain a clear thesis or argument. Articles should be based on original research and must contradict, complicate, or significantly extend our current understanding of the relationship between religion and other aspects of American culture.
Manuscripts will not be considered for publication that are currently under consideration by other journals or presses or if they have been published, or are soon to be published, elsewhere. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, its appearance in Religion and American Culture must precede publication elsewhere.
All articles submitted to Religion and American Culture must include an abstract, no longer than 250 words, on the first page of the manuscript. The abstract should not merely tell what the article is about. It should also state the problem being addressed, the thesis being argued, and the type of evidence being employed.
Manuscripts generally should be 25-35 pages in length, double-spaced.
Because submissions are double-anonymously evaluated at several levels, the abstract, pages (including title page), and notes should not include author identification. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reprint extracts and reproduce illustrations. The permissions must be supplied with the final manuscript, if accepted for publication. All necessary credits and acknowledgments must be included. For information about seeking permission to use copyrighted material, please see here.
R&AC accepts only electronic submissions in Word format. For information on submitting your materials, please see here.
Please address all queries and editorial correspondence to: [email protected]
Authors should check R&AC's Publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.