The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture

The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture is peer reviewed and published quarterly (simultaneously in print and online) in March, June, September, and December. Articles and reviews must be submitted exclusively to the JSRNC, have not been previously published, and should not be submitted elsewhere until receiving a response from the JSRNC editors. Every effort will be made to provide timely reviews of submitted work. Submissions must cohere with the guidelines set forth here.

All JSRNC articles should be written for a general scholarly audience.

The JSRNC seeks to publish the widest possible diversity of critical inquiry into the relationships among what people variously understand to be religion, nature, and culture. Authors should not assume that readers share their own, specialized, disciplinary background. Specialized jargon should be eliminated or explained immediately upon first use. The genre of the article should not assume, either explicitly or implicitly, that readers share the author's religious or philosophical presuppositions. Toward this end, authors writing from within a specific religious tradition or making a normative argument should take pains to explain the historical and social context, and what the various perspectives and issues are to which they are responding, so that non-specialist or differently religious readers can apprehend what is at stake in the argument they are reading. This way, both those readers who share the author's presuppositions and those who do not will benefit from the presentation.

The JSRNC strongly prefers that authors write in the simple past tense, even regarding recent events. Past tense articles have a longer stylistic shelf life, for in a few years, phrases like 'recently' are outdated, but the past tense continues to be apropos. The past tense also eliminates the stylistic awkwardness that accompanies references to the dead in the present tense. Even though we may consider the ideas of great thinkers to be of eternal interest, it is nevertheless literally untrue that Socrates still argues, suggests, implies, avers, or contends.

1. The JSRNC is an English language publication; authors may use either British or North American spelling conventions.
2. All articles must be delivered as a Microsoft Word (preferred, any version). Authors using software other than Word should save the file as a Word (e.g., .doc, .docx) document.
3. Times New Roman font, 12 point, should be used for all text. Generally speaking, articles should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words including footnotes and references. In cases where extensive documentation is needed to evidence an argument longer articles may be published.
4. Articles should be single-spaced and have 1-inch margins. Do not justify the right-hand margin. There should be only a single space separating sentences.
5. The Title should be on the top of the first manuscript page (sub-titles on a second line), below that the author's name, below that the author's institution and mailing address, and below that an email address. All of this should be centered.
6. Abstracts should appear underneath the author information. They should be no more than 150 words and should briefly summarize the argument(s) and finding(s). Abstracts should be written in complete sentences and in the active voice without third person (e.g., 'the author', etc.) pronouns, and they should not make reference to 'this paper' or 'this essay'.
7. The second page of the document (the first page of the article) should begin with the article title, centered, as it appears on the first page. The Author's name should be omitted, and the article text should begin after a double space below the title.
8. Articles should be prepared with single-spaced footnotes (not endnotes) in 12 point Times New Roman font. For details, consult chapters 16 and 17 of The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edn.), and see 'Footnotes' below.
9. Citations and references should be given using the author/date system: that is, give the author's surname and year of publication in the text or footnotes. If the citation refers to a direct quote, page numbers should be specified after a colon, e.g., (Jones 1998: 64). For details, consult chapters 16 and 17 of The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edn.), and see 'References' below.
10. Quoted material of more than 40 words should be displayed as an indented block quote, with a blank line above and below, and be single-spaced. Quotation marks are unnecessary for block quotes. Spelling and punctuation of the original should be copied exactly, although whether a word is capitalized may be altered but do not use brackets when changing from upper to lower case or vice-versa.
11. Single quotes should be used for quoted material and double quotes within single quotes should be used when necessary. Punctuation ordinarily will be outside quoted material (this is the style of Equinox Press).
12. For personal or geographic names that have several forms, decide on a preferred version and be consistent. Quotations should, however, retain the spelling of the original.
13. Foreign words and phrases should be italicized, both in the main text and in footnotes. Greek and Hebrew should be transliterated.
14. For dates, use BCE (before common era) and CE (common era). Authors need not use 'CE' if this is understood in context. Full dates should be given in the order of day, month, year, without punctuation.
    
    Examples:
    
    5 March 2003
    Sir Laurens Jan van der Post was born in the Orange Free State of South Africa on 13 December 1906 and died shortly after his ninetieth birthday in London.
15. Gender-inclusive language is preferred (e.g., 'humanity' rather than 'man'), as is alternating genders or using both when using personal pronouns. For further text reference help, the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors is recommended, as is the Chicago Manual of Style, Chicago B style.
16. All articles are anonymously peer reviewed. To ensure the integrity of the blind peer review authors must take these steps when preparing submissions: (1) Author(s) names must be removed entirely from the text except on the title/abstract page. If necessary to ensure blind review, Authors who cite their own works should substitute the word 'author' for his or her own name in the text and/or in the citations and reference list. (2) With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File>Save As>Tools (or Options with a Mac)>Security>Remove personal information from the file properties on save>Save. (3) On any PDF uploaded, remove the author names from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat.
17. A section below provides detailed guidelines for preparing and submitting figures, photographs and artwork.

1. Footnotes should be used for substantive comments or further discussion of sources, not for citations alone, which should appear in text. If citations are needed in the footnotes they should follow the same format as if they were in the text.
2. Internet citations should include active hyperlinks if those sites are still available upon submission of the manuscript.
3. Footnote examples:
   
   a) 'About Us', at http://www.surferspath.com/about-us/, accessed August 2005. [Note: do not included the 'accessed' note unless the source is no longer available online at the time the article is submitted or later, going into production].
   
   b) On Eden's continued cultural currency see Eisenberg 1998 Merchant 2003.
   
   c) Robert Orsi asserts that playfulness can transform individuals and social realities (Orsi 1997: 10, 13). Scholars should be alert to when and how play (including satire) can become invested with religious meaning. For examples see Manes 1990 and LaChapelle 1989.
   
   d) According to Drew Kampion, the word 'aloha' literally means 'experience the breath of life' (2003a: 38).
   
   e) In 2006 biodiversity protection was the first principle among others listed at their website, see http://www.surfrider.org/, accessed June 2006. According to Michelle Kremer, Surfrider's Legal Director, and Rick Wilson, its Coastal Management Coordinator, this principle was incorporated into the Foundation's statement of principles in 1985 (email communication, June 2006).

1. Every work quoted from or mentioned in the text must be included in the references section. The references section should be located immediately after the body of the article. Double-check manuscripts to be certain that all dates given in parenthetical citations are provided and are identical to the ones in the references section.
2. References should conform to the following order: author surname and first name, then initials for middle names, date of publication, title, place of publication, name of publisher. Page ranges should be abbreviated when they occur entirely within a 100-page section. For example, 414-44; not 414-444.
3. Reference and bibliographical lists should always be arranged in alphabetical order by author. If there are two or more works by the same author in the same year, they should be distinguished as 1997a, 1997b, etc. Works should be listed from earliest to most recent date of publication.
4. When quoting a work by three or more authors, use 'et al.' in the text, but provide all the authors' names in the references/bibliography.
5. Note the following abbreviations:
   
   ed. (editor, edited by)
   trans. (translator, translated by)
   rev. (reviser, revised by)
   edn. (edition)
   repr. (reprint)
   vol./vols. (volume/volumes)
6. Reference examples:
   
   Albanese, Catherine L. 1990. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
   
   Guthrie, Stewart E. 1980. 'A Cognitive Theory of Religion', Current Anthropology 21.2: 181-203.
   
   Leopold, Aldo. 1966 [1949]. The Sand County Almanac with Essays from Round River (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1949; expanded version, New York: Sierra Club and Ballantine Books, 1966).
   
   Price, Joseph L. 1996. 'Naturalistic Recreations', in P. Van Ness (ed.) Spirituality and the Secular Quest (New York: Crossroad): 414-44.
   
   Taylor, Bron. 2001a. 'Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part I): From Deep Ecology to Radical Environmentalism', Religion 31.2: 175-93.
   
   Taylor, Bron. 2001b. 'Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part II): From Deep Ecology and Bioregionalism to Scientific Paganism and the New Age', Religion 31.3: 225-45.
   
   Taylor, Bron. 2002. 'Diggers, Wolfs, Ents, Elves and Expanding Universes: Bricolage, Religion, and Violence From Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front to the Antiglobalization Resistance', in J. Kaplan and H. Lööw (eds.) The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization (Lanham, Maryland: Altamira): 26-74.
   
   Taylor, Bron. 2005. 'Ecology and Nature Religions', in L. Jones (ed.) Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: MacMillian, 2nd edn.): 2661-66.
   
   Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley, California: University of California Press).

1. Authors should submit their manuscripts through the Equinox website via http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/JSRNC/about/submissions. If this is not possible, please contact the managing editor at journal@religionandnature.com for assistance.
2. Upon completing the online submission process you should receive an email message acknowledging receipt of your manuscript. Until you have such acknowledgement, do not assume that your submission has been received and is under review. If you do not receive such an acknowledgement within ten days, write the managing editor at the above email address.
3. Online submission is a five-stage process and you may submit articles or book reviews (which should be approved in advance by the Book Review Editor). During this process, you will be prompted to supply various types of information (metadata) along with your actual article, including a 150-word abstract (book reviews do not require abstracts) and three to five keywords, a short biographical statement, contact details, and appropriate Library of Congress subject classification codes, among other things. This metadata is important because if facilitates the indexing of your article once it is published, leading to more citations and greater readership
4. Manuscripts must be submitted in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format.
5. PDFs are not acceptable for submission of articles; but authors may upload a PDF through the system as a supplementary file following submission of the Word file if you wish to bring to the attention of the Editor any particular features that will be required a the layout stage or to clarify font usage. It is advisable to upload a supplementary PDF if your submission includes characters outside the usual Western character set. There is a separate step in the process for this, or to upload any other supplementary material such as (a) research instruments, (b) data sets, (c) sources that would otherwise be unavailable to readers, (d) tables, or (e) audio/visual material. If you intend these to become an official part of the journal, please indicate in a note to the Editor. Some material may be suitable only for the electronic version of the journal.

1. All submissions are evaluated through a blind-review process, may include reviews both by JSRNC editors and, editorial board members, and will always involve external reviewers. The editors will make every effort to have all submissions evaluated in a timely manner. You will be able to track the progress of your submission through the Equinox website when you log in as an author.
2. Authors of accepted articles and reviews will be sent a first proof (PDF Document) by email and are expected to return these with corrections within two weeks from when they were sent. Corrections should be confined to typographical errors or to specific questions raised by the copy editor and JSRNC editors.

1. JSRNC editors and reviewers regularly use the Microsoft Word 'Track Changes' feature to make editorial suggestions and corrections, before returning manuscripts back to Authors for revision.
2. Track Changes is a 'toggle' feature that is turned on and off via the 'Track Changes' command located on the "tools" toolbar under the 'REVIEW' tab in Microsoft Word. When tracking is on, deletions and additions appear in color and can be viewed differently, depending on whether you select 'Simple Markup', 'All Markup', 'No Markup', or 'Original' under the "REVIEW' tab in the 'Tracking' section. It is easy to accept or reject our suggestions by highlighting a section and right-clicking on the modified section, then choosing 'accept deletion' (or 'insertion' or 'changes') or 'reject deletion' (or 'insertion' or 'changes'). Alternatively, you can click the 'accept' or 'reject' icon, which can be found in the 'Changes' pane under 'REVIEW'.
3. If the editorial marks that are in color seem confusing, you can turn this color function off by switching the document from 'All Markup' to 'Simple Markup', which can be located on the document toolbar under the 'REVIEW' tab. In this case, the editorial comments will remain, but all colors in the text become black and white, including the editorial suggestions.

The editors will not consider manuscripts that are under consideration by other publishers. It is assumed that once you have submitted an article to this journal, it will not be sent to other publishers until a decision about inclusion has been made. Only by special arrangement will the editors consider previously published material. For complete details, see the Equinox Copyright Conditions.

Those whose work is accepted for publication must print, sign, and return the Journal Contributor's Publishing Agreement.

1. Submitted artwork must follow these guidelines as well as copyright and permissions protocols. All figures must be supplied separately from the manuscript, in an appropriate digital format. Each figure will be reproduced exactly as you have created it. The typesetter will scale down the artwork, if necessary, to fit the page dimensions. Artwork that is wider than the width of the text column in the printed page will in most cases be scaled to 114mm. This will reduce the size of any text in the artwork, and you should take this into account when creating it.
2. There are two main kinds of digital artwork used in publications: vector and bitmap. This section provides advice as to when each format is most appropriate and guidance as to what to do and what to avoid when preparing artwork.
3. Do not use color in artwork. All artwork must be supplied in greyscale, and you must make sure that any tints used (e.g., in graphs or bar charts) are sufficiently distinct. Do not use tints below 20% or above 80%, and ensure that any tints used differ by at least 20%.
4. Do not embed artwork in the Word files containing the manuscript or supply artwork in Word format. Any such artwork will be lost in the conversion process. Each figure must be supplied as a separate file in PDF, AI (Illustrator), EPS (Encapsulated Postscript), TIFF, or JPG format. JPG should be used only for photographs and should be compressed with a 'High Quality' setting. Never use jpeg format for figures containing lines and/or text.
5. Each artwork file should be named according to its figure number. If a piece of unnumbered artwork is needed, name the file using roman numerals (e.g. Figure V) and use this number when showing where the figure is to appear in the manuscript (see below).
6. All photographs should be supplied at a resolution that will allow reproduction at 300 dpi at the final size.
7. Do not use 'screen grabs' to create artwork except for illustrations of what a screen looks like (e.g. in research on 'E-Religion'). The resolution of a screen shot is typically 72 dpi and is too low for normal reproduction in print.
8. If possible avoid bitmap format for figures containing text or lines. If such a figure must be submitted in bitmap format (e.g. because it has been scanned from another work), it should be supplied at a minimum of 600 dpi in TIFF format.
9. Never use drop shadow effects on artwork.

1. Each figure is supplied as a separate file named after the figure number.
2. Figure artwork is supplied in greyscale.
3. Artwork files do NOT contain captions or any extraneous text (e.g., page numbers).
4. Line artwork is, whenever possible, supplied in vector format.
5. Any bitmap formats (e.g., BMP, JPG, TIFF) are supplied at at least 300 dpi resolution.
6. Any artwork created in MS Word or Powerpoint has been converted to PDF, with fonts embedded.
7. The placement of each figure in the ms is shown by a boldfaced line in the format: [Figure X near here], with X as the figure number. Figure captions are included in the manuscript after this line.
   
   Example:
   [Figure X near here]
   Figure X. (Description). (Source).
8. Figure captions are included in the manuscript after this line.

1. All tables are left in place in the ms.
2. Table captions are inserted before/above the table.
3. Tables do not contain tints in cells.