First Secular Academic Journal Set to Release

August 4, 2011 By 8 Comments

This is a guest post by Franklin Kramer. He is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the the Illini Secular Student Alliance (ISSA).

“Secularism and Nonreligion,” the first academic journal devoted solely to topics about nonbelievers, is set to begin publication in January 2012. It will take contributions from primarily social scientific disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and economics, although other disciplines will be accepted as well. It is a joint project of Trinity College in Connecticut and the Non-religion and Secular Research network. While the articles will be peer reviewed, it will be open-access, so everybody will be able to access it for free and download articles on the journal’s website.

Their website is still in its early form, but feel free to check it out.

This is exciting news for the atheist community, as it is just another way that society is recognizing our presence. This is especially relevant when you compare the number of secular journals to the number theological ones. Hopefully having an academic journal devoted to secularism will encourage more people to do research on the topic, hopefully educating us more about the various aspects of our subculture. And, if nothing else, it will give those people majoring in Secularism at Pitzer College in California some journal articles to study.

Filed Under: General 8 Comments
About Hemant Mehta

Hemant Mehta is the chair of Foundation Beyond Belief and a high school math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He began writing the Friendly Atheist blog in 2006. His latest book is called The Young Atheist's Survival Guide.

  • Chris

    I am very closely linked with the NSRN and am so thrilled to see this journal getting such publicity. Thanks Hemant!

    • Anonymous

      This post was actually by Franklin Kramer (see top of post). Hemant is actually on vacation without internet, so the students have temporarily taken over. ;)

  • http://www.soulsprawl.com Matt DeStefano

    This is awesome, thanks for showing us this Franklin!

  • Atheist Academic

    The headline is misleading. All academic journals are secular. I suppose there may be religious journals on religion that are quasi-academic, in that really complex bullshit sort of way that is theology, but I wouldn’t really consider that an academic journal.

  • Two Cents

    Very nice! I don’t really think that journals dealing with the religion / metaphysics should be considered non-academic (in reference to Academic Atheist’s comment). I think that many of the papers I had to read for my Philosophy of Religion / Science and Religion classes came from those sorts of journals (usually Philosophy ones) and they certainly provoked some interesting arguments that no doubt opened some people’s minds in either direction. There are some very clever arguments put forth and I would consider them “academic” in nature, especially when dealing with heavily theoretical physics or the like. The articles involve a lot of research indeed.

  • http://www.facebook.com/marky.o.reilly Marky O Reilly

    Hmm, that sounds good. Looking forward to seeing the kind of content they’ll have. I’d be wary of certain biases sneaking into a journal with an ideological focus however. 

    • Chris

      The ideological focus is simply that the ‘nonreligious’ are an under-researched group who are just as worthy of attention as the ‘religious’. The journal won’t be evaluating ‘truth’ claims… but its very existence could be seen as an ideological attack on the privileged position of religion…

  • Anonymous

    This is great. I recently tried to conduct a lit review on atheism as a stigmatizing trait, and found almost no research on the experience of non-believers. This journal will hopefully help to fill that knowledge gap.