Religion, Brain, & Behavior

CMAC houses the flagship journal for the biocultural study of religion, Religion, Brain, & Behavior. As an academic journal deeply invested in approaches to understanding religion that combine biological and cultural modes of analysis, RBB is a source of scholarship from and for a variety of fields. The aim of Religion, Brain & Behavior is to provide a vehicle for the advancement of current biological approaches to understanding religion at every level from brain to behavior. RBB unites multiple disciplinary perspectives that share these interests. The journal seeks empirical and theoretical studies that reflect rigorous scientific standards and a sophisticated appreciation of the academic study of religion.

In April 2011, the first issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior was published by Taylor & Francis, adorned then as today with William Blake’s “Web of Religion”. The journal provides “a vehicle for the advancement of current biological approaches to understanding religion at every level from brain to behavior,” welcoming contributions from fields such as cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and physiology to evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and epidemiology. Today, out of 594 religious studies journals, RBB has the second highest CiteScore, a metric that ranks journals by the number of citations articles receive on average each year. This is a big accomplishment for RBB and its editors.

In the 10 years since RBB was born, there’ve been quite a few efforts to try to join scientific and humanities approaches within religious studies. That’s sometimes produced hardening of positions with scientific people blowing off the humanities people as not worth talking to and humanities people blowing off the scientific people as reductionistic and ignorant. And the end result is that things have gotten worse, I think. But fortunately there are a few places where the humanities and the sciences combine readily and RBB is one of those places. And we’re proud of that and it’s important to us. We hope that that way of thinking and working is going to extend its reach over time

Dr. Wesley J. Wildman, editor of Religion, Brain, & Behavior

Subscription information

Individuals can purchase up to 4 titles per volume year through Taylor & Francis, or by becoming a member at the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion. These subscriptions are for personal, non-commercial use only.

Current Editors

Editorial Board

Candace Alcorta, University of Connecticut
Nancy Ammerman, Boston University
Quentin Atkinson, University of Auckland
Scott Atran, University of Michigan
Jesse Bering, University of Otago
Justin Barrett, Fuller Theological Seminary
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Pascal Boyer, Washington University in St. Louis
Warren Brown, Fuller Theological Seminary
Philip Clayton, Claremont Graduate University
Adam B. Cohen, Arizona State University
Emma Cohen, University of Oxford
Lee Cronk, Rutgers University
Daniel Dennett, Tufts University
Robin Dunbar, University of Oxford
Robert Emmons, University of California, Davis
Ernst Fehr, University of Zurich
Daniel Fessler, University of California, Los Angeles
Armin Geertz, Aarhus University
William Scott Green, University of Miami
Joseph Henrich, Harvard University
William Irons, Northwestern University
Dominic Johnson, University of Oxford
Eric Kaufmann, University of London
Deborah Kelemen, Boston University
Lee Kirkpatrick, College of William and Mary
Pierre Liénard, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University
Mike McCullough, University of California, San Diego
Ryan McKay, Royal Holloway, University of London
Andrew Newberg, Thomas Jefferson University
Ara Norenzayan, University of British Columbia
Kenneth Pargament, Bowling Green State University
Benjamin Purzycki, Aarhus University
Ilkka Pyysiäinen, University of Helsinki
Peter Richerson, University of California, Davis
Steven Schachter, Harvard University
Todd Shackelford, Oakland University
Steven Schachte, Harvard University
Uffe Schjoedt, Aarhus University
Jeffrey Schloss, Westmont College
Todd Shackelford, Oakland University
Edward Slingerland, University of British Columbia
Michael Spezio, Scripps College, Claremont
Ann Taves, University of California, Santa Barbara
Robert Trivers, Rutgers University
Michiel van Elk, University of Amsterdam
Fraser Watts, Cambridge University
Claire White, University of California, Northridge
Harvey Whitehouse, University of Oxford
David Sloan Wilson, Binghamton University
Paul J. Zak, Claremont Graduate University