Religion Call for Papers | @relcfp

Members and friends of the Center for Religion and Cities (CRC) ,

After nearly eight years of the CRC, we would like to invite you to reflect on our and related work through scholarly publications on religion and cities.

Specifically, we are writing to solicit abstracts (300 word max) for scholarly essays and creative work—including creative nonfiction, short-form essays, photography, and poetry—for inclusion in one of two projects: (1) a roundtable publication on religion and urban life to be published in the scholarly and artistic journal CrossCurrents; and (2) a longer-term collaborative venture designed to provide a network of support for future endeavors to publish and promote scholarly and artistic work on religion and cities. Within the bounds of “religion and urban life,” broadly construed, the topical, geographic, and temporal scope of this call is open.

Abstracts for scholarly essays or other works of nonfiction should clearly outline the arguments, methods, and interventions the piece intends to make; abstracts for creative work should include specifics about genre, theme or scope, and some sense of how the proposed work fits into a broader creative project or portfolio.

Please send submissions directly to Dr. Isaiah Ellis at [email protected].

Submissions are due December 15, 2025.

The city has long served as a fraught site and category in scholarly and artistic approaches to religion. It has served as a landscape for devotion and lived practice, a material stage for narratives of social progress and decline, a narrative device for utopian and apocalyptic visions, and a site where structural injustice is contested and the possibility of new ways of living is organized. Cities are powerful metaphors, but they are also everyday sites of relation. The exercises of power that occur there are both granular and grand, and among those landscapes and relations of power are inscribed the lives and labors of religious ideas and communities. We support a capacious vision of both what religion is and what a city is, recognizing that urban environments often defy easy categorization as “religious” or “secular.” At the same time, we recognize that any effort to understand or represent such dynamic environments requires us to think flexibly across mediums and modes of inquiry—the city cannot be fully understood only through the medium of writing, nor only through the traditional modes of academic writing. We thus encourage prospective authors and creative workers to put forward a sophisticated and expansive approach that can help scholars and the public think in new ways about the relationship between religion and the city.

We seek proposals for a special issue on religion and urban life, to be published in CrossCurrents, a journal that seeks to engage the many ways religion meets the public. Contributions to the journal exist at the nexus of religion, education, the arts, and social justice. Scholars and creative workers who wish to join this submission should indicate that intention clearly in their submission. Dr. Isaiah Ellis (Southern Methodist University) and Dr. Harold Morales (Morgan State University, Center for Religion and Cities) will serve as co-editors for the issue.

We also seek statements of interest from scholars and creative workers who wish to work collaboratively with each other and with the CRC leadership to pave new pathways for scholarly, public-facing, and artistic work on religion and cities. The idea is to put scholars and creative workers with promising new ideas or research topics into a collective of support and collaborative engagement with the goal of seeking venues for future publication and promotion of their work. We are looking for folks who can contribute to and benefit from collaborative workshops (virtual or in-person) and support from CRC leadership in making connections and seeking venues for publication and promotion of their work.

Those who submit proposals for CrossCurrents will also be put into this collective and will also have the opportunity to receive CRC support for current and future endeavors.

For those who wish to join our CrossCurrents roundtable, we invite you to submit brief (200-300 word) abstracts representing works in progress that feature an interest in some aspect of the mutually transformative relationships between religious life and urban environments and issues.

Because CrossCurrents publishes peer-reviewed work as well as essays and artistic work, we ask that you indicate, separately from the abstract, whether your personal and professional needs would be best suited by a peer-reviewed article.

And finally, we ask that you pitch work that will be ready for submission no later than December of 2026.

We welcome all inquiries and submissions–please send them to Isaiah Ellis at [email protected].

And if you’ll be at the 2025 AAR Conference in Boston, come say hi at one of the CRC @AAR events.

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