Religion, Brain and 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

Current Editors