1. Submissions should be made anonymous for blind review.
2. Submissions shall not be considered for publication if they are currently being considered for publication elsewhere. Except in very unusual circumstances, and at the discretion of the Editor, submissions shall not be considered for publication if they have been previously published in English.
3. Submissions should normally be 5-7500 words in length, including notes, though longer articles may sometimes be considered. Submissions should include a word count.
4. All submissions should have an abstract (150-200 words) and 5 keywords describing the contents of the article, for web searching purposes.
5. Submissions may follow either UK or US spelling conventions, provided that they are consistent.
6. Single quotation marks should be used for quotations, except for those quotations that appear with another quotation. For example: ‘She reported him as saying, “I will not comply”’. Punctuation should appear outside of the quotation marks except in those cases where (a) the punctuation is part of the original quoted text and (b) the punctuation is not a comma or a full stop. For example: Socrates once said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. Plato is believed to have asked, ‘Shall I always accept what Socrates taught?’
7. Foreign words/phrases should appear in italics
8. All quotations of texts in a foreign language should be translated. Greek, Hebrew, etc. should be transliterated.
9. References should appear in footnotes, which should be numbered sequentially throughout the article.
10. References should follow these formats:
(i) Gerald O'Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 29.
(ii) John P. Galvin, 'Before the Holy Mystery: Karl Rahner's Thought on God', Toronto Journal of Theology 9 (1993), pp.229-37.
(iii) Werner G. Jeanrod, 'Hans Kung', in David F. Ford, ed., The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 162-78.
11. When listing items in a sequence, authors should use the Oxford comma where appropriate. For example: The list of famous comedians included John Cleese, Eric Idle, Johnny Carson, and Laurel and Hardy.
12. If authors use section headings, the headings should be left justified, boldfaced, and be numbered using Arabic numbers. For example: 1. Aquinas on the Distinction Between Essence and Existence. If a section heading has subheadings, those should be left justified, italicized, and be numbered using the section number followed by a decimal and an Arabic number. Please note that if an author uses subheadings in a section, there should be at least two such subheadings, and the decimals should be ordered sequentially. For example: 1.1 The Different Senses of ‘Exists’ in Aquinas’ Writings
13. If your paper is accepted, before your final text is submitted for production, you will receive an email from ScholarOne with the following text: ‘Please accept all tracked changes in order to produce a clean version of your manuscript. Also, please be sure to insert any references/citations that were anonymized for blind review. If you would like to include an acknowledgment footnote, you are welcome do so. Please proofread your manuscript (both the body of the text and the notes), and please make sure that your submission is consistent with journal style. The style guidelines for preparing your manuscript can be found on the following webpage: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-blackfriars/information/author-instructions/preparing-your-materials
14. If your paper is accepted, the author identified as the formal corresponding author for the paper will receive an email prompting them to login into Author Services, where, via the Cambridge Author Licensing Service (CALS), they will be able to complete the license agreement on behalf of all authors on the paper.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
ORCID
We encourage authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information. If you don’t already have an iD, you can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.