Overview

The Journal of Southern Religion is a fully peer-reviewed academic journal reflecting the best traditions of objective and critical scholarship in the study of religion. As an interdisciplinary venture, the editors invite submissions from historians, religionists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other interested scholars. The journal welcomes submissions on all aspects of southern religion but is especially interested in publishing manuscripts that address the following topics:

• Regionalism in southern religion, e.g., Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, south Florida and the Caribbean
• religious aspects of southern culture, e.g., religion and cuisine, music, and southern literature
• southern civil religion
• local and folk religions, including ethnographic studies of congregations and parishes
• ethnicity including immigration and slave religions
• religion and race, class, disability, and gender issues in the South.

Scholars desiring to submit their research to the journal should read the submissions policy.

Open Access and Copyright

The Journal of Southern Religion is an open-access publication. You are encouraged to make use of the materials published in the JSR in your scholarship and teaching.

All materials are © copyright Association for the Study of Southern Religion, 1998–2012. All articles, book reviews, podcasts, and other material are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This license grants you permission to use the material published in the journal as you see fit, for example, in course packs, on course websites, and in quotations in other scholarly works. In return, you must cite the JSR wherever you use its contents. The citation must include all relevant bibliographic information, as well as a URL pointing to the content. See the sample citations below. Your citation may not imply that the JSR endorses or has published your derivative content.

The grant of these open-access permissions does not remove your professional obligation concerning proper use, citation, and plagiarism.

Citing the JSR

As with print media, any use of JSR materials for scholarly or other purposes should be properly documented. The following format should be used:

Footnote or endnote

Chad E. Seales, “An Old Love for New Things: Southern Baptists and the Modern Technology of Indoor Baptisteries,” Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011): http://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol13/Seales.html.

Bibliography

Seales, Chad E. “An Old Love for New Things: Southern Baptists and the Modern Technology of Indoor Baptisteries.” Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011): http://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol13/Seales.html.

Minimally, all references should contain the author’s name, title, and the name of the journal with volume and year citations. If cited in an online publication, the appropriate URL for that site may be linked for instant reference. The use of the URL is recommended even for print publications.

All articles, essays, reviews, etc. that appear in a given calendar year constitute a single journal volume.

Article Guidelines

Submitting Manuscripts

Submissions to the JSR are fully peer-reviewed by members of the editorial board and their designees. Electronic submissions are preferred. Please submit via email to the JSR associate editor.

• Emily Suzanne Clark, clarke2@gonzaga.edu

Unsolicited manuscripts should fit broadly into one or more of the categories outlined by the journal’s editorial policies. Materials submitted to JSR must not have been previously published nor submitted for publication elsewhere while under review by JSR editors.

All submissions should be accompanied by the author’s name, current institutional affiliation, postal and e-mail addresses. In most cases, authors will be notified within ninety days whether or not their submission has been accepted.

Electronic publication allows for the addition of images and other visual or auditory aids, and the editors encourage authors to include such with articles when appropriate. Authors should make certain that all submitted materials are clear of copyright claims or that they obtain permission as required by law. JSR reserves copyright privileges for all materials published.

Accepted Manuscripts

Acceptance: If a submission is accepted, the author will sign a contract with JSR assigning copyright to the Journal of Southern Religion. After making corrections and revisions, the author should submit the accepted manuscript via email to the editors as a Microsoft Word file (.doc or .docx) or as valid HTML. Please include at the top of the first page of the manuscript, the title, your name, your current academic rank (or equivalent), and your institutional affiliation. The revised manuscript will be copyedited and uploaded to the JSR site for the succeeding annual issue, usually published in the fall. At the present time, JSR does not provide authors with offprints of published materials, but we will notify you by email when your manuscript is published online.

Solicited essays should conform to the same criteria but are not restricted by word length requirements.

JSR Style

All manuscripts must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.

Book Review Guidelines

Thank you for agreeing to review a book for the Journal of Southern Religion. Reviews are a vital part of the journal. At their best, as historian Steven Stowe has observed, reviews are a “vernacular form of scholarly talk” that assess where we are, where we are going, and how we might best reshape our work.

Book reviews should be between 500 and 1,000 words, but we have no formal limit. Scholars interested in submitting book reviews to JSR should contact the book review editor Carolyn Dupont.

• Carolyn Dupont, carolyn.dupont@eku.edu

When you receive your review copy, please send a short confirmation message to the book review editor. Within eight weeks, please email your review for approval and editing.

Book reviewers should consult the book review style sheet before submitting reviews. Please refer to the guidelines below as you write.

JSR seeks reviews that:

1. Tell plainly what the book says and for whom it is written. Most readers read reviews to learn the scope and argument of a book. In addition, a careful assessment of the book’s intended audience is of particular interest to the readers of an interdisciplinary journal such as the JSR.

2. Set the author’s argument in a broad context of scholarly analysis. Reviewers should bear in mind that scholars from a variety of disciplines will read the review. The perspectives of the reviewer’s own discipline will be of great interest, but reviewers should avoid assessments based solely on issues of interest to those in a single field or subfield.

3. Suggest whether the author achieves the book’s stated purpose and assesses the significance of that goal. Criticism is welcomed, of course, but it should be made only on courteous and constructive terms. The editors will either ask reviewers to rewrite sections that breach this standard or refuse the submission altogether.

Writing should be concise yet lively, and should strive to balance a personal voice with careful analysis.

Book Review Style and Format

Most reviews run between 500 and 1,000 words, but there is no formal limit.

All reviews should be submitted as an e-mail attachment in Word format to the book review editor.

The following information should appear at the top of the review:

Author. Full Title of the Book. Place of Publishing: Publisher, Date of Publication. Number of Pages. ISBN. Reviewed by Name of Author.

Please list your name, current status, department, and affiliation at the end of the review; such as: Arthur Remillard is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Saint Francis University.

Reviewers should consult the Chicago Manual of Style on all questions of style. Please supply page numbers for all quoted passages. Use the first name in the initial reference to any person (including the author). With organizations or acts, use the full name in the initial reference; all subsequent references may use initials or acronyms. Please supply publication dates of any books mentioned in the review.

Please proofread the text of the review carefully.

Questions should be directed to the book review editor.

Status of Electronic Reviews

Professional ethics dictate that a scholar can publish only one review of a book. Journal of Southern Religion reviews count as that one review. As indicated above, Journal reviewers have permission to republish their reviews provided that proper credit is given to the Journal of Southern Religion, but should not agree to write a separate review of the same work for a print journal.