Journal of the American Academy of Religion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of the American Academy of Religion sits at the center of one of academia's most contested questions: what counts as a legitimate way to study religion? Known by its initials, the JAAR, this peer-reviewed journal carries the full weight of a field that has spent decades arguing about its own identity. It is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, and it is generally considered the flagship journal for the field of religious studies. That designation raises an immediate question. What does a flagship look like when the territory it represents is this sprawling? The JAAR covers the full range of world religious traditions, methodological debates, and book reviews. But the more interesting tension is not what it covers. It is how it covers it, and why that choice mattered enough to build an institution around.

• 2. From Bible to Religion

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  Before 1966, the journal went by a different name: the Journal of Bible and Religion. That older title tells you something about the intellectual world it was born from. Biblical studies and theology had long dominated the academic study of religion in American universities, shaped by seminary traditions and a predominantly Christian frame of reference. When the journal was renamed and the JAAR was established in 1966, the shift was not cosmetic. It signaled a deliberate expansion of scope. The American Academy of Religion itself was built on the same premise: that religion as a human phenomenon deserved examination across history, philosophy, and theology, not only through the lens of one tradition or one set of methods. The renaming was an act of intellectual positioning, a way of claiming that no single tradition, and no single discipline, owned the study of religion.

• 3. A Broader Tent

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  What the JAAR chose to emphasize was, in academic terms, a more inclusive religious studies approach. That phrase sounds neutral, but it carried real stakes. Some fields within the study of religion lean heavily on social science methods, treating religious behavior as data to be measured and compared. The JAAR and the AAR consciously positioned themselves differently. History, philosophy, and theology were all welcome here alongside other methods. This meant the journal could publish a philosophical argument about the nature of religious experience alongside a historical account of a South Asian ritual tradition. The breadth was a statement about what religious studies was supposed to be. A scholar working on medieval Islamic jurisprudence and a scholar working on contemporary Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa could both find a home in the same pages.

• 4. Abstracted and Indexed

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  A journal's reach extends far beyond its subscribers, and the JAAR's reach is wide. It is abstracted and indexed by more than a dozen services, including the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the Humanities Index, and Sociological Abstracts. It also appears in specialized religious studies tools such as Religion Index One: Periodicals and Religious and Theological Abstracts, alongside broader databases like ProQuest and the Wilson OmniFile Full Text Mega Edition. The International Bibliography of Periodical Literature and the International Bibliography of Book Reviews capture its reviews as well as its articles. Old Testament Studies indexes it, a reminder that the journal's older, more biblical roots have not entirely disappeared from its audience. Each of these services extends the JAAR's work into libraries, search engines, and citation networks that researchers around the world rely on daily.