Anglican Theological Review

About Anglican Theological Review

Anglican Theological Review — Journal Profile

The Anglican Theological Review (ATR) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed scholarly journal of theology, published in the United States and described by the journal itself as the unofficial journal of the seminaries of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada. It has been published since 1918, which makes it one of the longest-running theological quarterlies in the English-speaking world. The JournalsWorld record for this post lists the publisher as SAGE Publishing and carries the ISSN pair 0003-3286 and 2163-6214; the OpenAlex source record resolved from the ISSN itself (OpenAlex source S2764983626, checked for this profile) confirms the same two ISSNs under this exact title, names SAGE Publishing as the host organisation, and gives the journal homepage on the SAGE Journals platform. In this profile, SAGE is therefore treated as the journal's publishing and distribution partner of record, while the journal's own institutional home — Anglican Theological Review Inc., based in Sewanee, Tennessee, at the University of the South — is treated as its owning and editorial home. That distinction matters for authors: editorial decisions belong to the journal's editors and its seminary constituency, while subscriptions, production and the online platform are handled through SAGE.

Journal at a glance

History and identity

The Anglican Theological Review began publication in 1918, in the closing months of the First World War, as a scholarly voice for the Episcopal seminaries of the United States. Its founding setting explains much of its enduring character. The Episcopal Church's seminaries — institutions such as the General Theological Seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary, Berkeley Divinity School and Sewanee's School of Theology at the University of the South — needed a shared journal in which their faculties could publish research, review new books and argue about the direction of Anglican theology. ATR filled that role, and its self-description as the unofficial journal of those seminaries is deliberate: it is close to the institutions without being an official organ whose contents any single institution controls. Over the following century the journal's constituency widened to include the Anglican Church of Canada and, in practice, theologians across the worldwide Anglican Communion, but the seminary connection remains its anchor. The journal's registered charity, Anglican Theological Review Inc., is based in Sewanee, Tennessee, the home of the University of the South, and that Sewanee address is the journal's legal and historical home even though its articles are written, reviewed and read internationally.

A quarterly that has survived since 1918 has inevitably changed its publishing arrangements more than once. The modern arrangement, reflected in the identifiers on this record, places the journal on the SAGE Journals platform: recent articles carry DOIs under the SAGE prefix 10.1177 with the journal code built from its print ISSN (for example, 10.1177/00033286241240838 for a 2024 editorial), and SAGE lists the title in its religion catalogue with quarterly frequency. Authors and librarians should understand this correctly. SAGE provides the platform, the production workflow and subscription sales; the journal's identity, editors and mission remain those of the Anglican seminary community that founded it. The print ISSN 0003-3286, in continuous use across the journal's modern history, is the linking identifier that ties the SAGE-era journal to the Sewanee-era journal: they are one publication, not two.

Scope and subject coverage

ATR publishes theology in the broad Anglican sense: work that is rooted in the Christian tradition, attentive to Scripture, the early church and the historic formularies of Anglicanism, and in open conversation with philosophy, history, the social sciences and the other faiths. A typical issue combines peer-reviewed scholarly articles with poetry and an extensive book-review section — a mixture the journal has maintained for decades and which gives it a distinctive place among theology journals. Many comparable titles publish articles alone; ATR's editors have consistently treated poetry as a legitimate theological genre and book reviews as a serious service to the field, and both features are part of what regular readers expect.

The subject matter of recent articles illustrates the range. The 2024 volume opened with an editors' note describing a set of articles circling around land, colonialism, race and political theology — including work on place and land in Anglican theology read alongside Indigenous theological perspectives, and historical work on an Episcopal bishop's relations with Native American communities in Minnesota read through the lens of Black theology. Alongside such contemporary work, the journal regularly publishes historical theology (for example, a 2025 study of the Council of Nicaea's relevance to the Anglican tradition across five centuries, engaging the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles), liturgical studies (including work on the authorisation of liturgical texts in the Episcopal Church), sacramental theology in digital contexts, and ecclesiology informed by global Christianity, such as reflection on ubuntu theology in a British urban parish. The OpenAlex topic profile for the journal, checked for this article, clusters its contents under Religious and Theological Studies, Karl Barth and Christian theology, Catholicism and religious studies, contemporary Christian leadership and education, and biblical studies and interpretation — a fair map of a journal that is doctrinal and historical at its core but outward-looking in its applications.

Practical scope guidance follows from this. Work that speaks to the Anglican tradition specifically — its doctrine, liturgy, history, ministry and ecumenical relations — is the journal's centre of gravity, and work on other traditions is most likely to succeed when it is placed in genuine conversation with Anglican questions. Purely confessional or devotional writing without scholarly apparatus belongs elsewhere, as does technical work in fields the journal does not cover. The poetry section welcomes submissions of poetry as poetry, judged on literary as well as theological merit, and the reviews section is commissioned and curated by the editors rather than filled from unsolicited reviews.

Editorial leadership

The journal's editors-in-chief, as listed on the journal's own editorial pages and carried in reference sources, are Jason Fout of the Bexley Seabury Federation and Scott MacDougall of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. Both are seminary theologians, which fits the journal's founding pattern: ATR is edited from within the seminary world it serves. Editorial boards of journals of this kind typically draw on faculty from the Episcopal and Anglican seminaries of North America together with scholars from universities in the United States, Canada and beyond; the current full board, with its institutional affiliations, is published on the journal's website and should be consulted there, since board membership changes between volumes. No fuller board list is reproduced here, because a board list that could not be verified line by line at checking time would risk naming people whose service has ended.

Metrics and standing — read with care

The Anglican Theological Review does not trade on a Journal Impact Factor, and no impact factor is claimed for it in this profile: any figure for one that could not be verified from a Clarivate source in hand is not published here. What can be reported, with attribution, is the journal's footprint in the OpenAlex scholarly index. The OpenAlex source record S2764983626, resolved from the journal's own ISSN for this profile, recorded 3,544 works and 11,518 citations at checking time, with summary statistics of an h-index of 52, an i10-index of 218 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.03. Those numbers describe a specialised humanities quarterly accurately: citation density in theology is low across the whole field, because theologians cite books and older literature that citation indexes capture poorly, so a small mean citedness is a property of the discipline rather than a verdict on this journal. The h-index of 52, accumulated over a century of publication, is the more informative figure: it shows a deep bench of articles that the field has continued to use.

Two further cautions belong in any honest metrics section for a journal of this type. First, OpenAlex coverage of the journal begins, in its records, in the late twentieth century for most purposes, even though the journal itself dates from 1918; counts therefore describe the indexed portion of the run, not the whole run. Second, author-level and article-level influence in theology travels through syllabi, sermons, seminary reading lists and books as much as through counted citations, so authors choosing this journal are choosing a readership of seminary faculty and students, clergy-scholars and Anglican theologians worldwide — a defined and durable audience — rather than a citation-maximising venue.

Indexing and abstracting

Reference sources for the journal, including the MIAR information matrix entry cited by the journal's reference pages, record indexing in the ATLA Religion Database, the Modern Language Association Database, L'Année philologique and Old Testament Abstracts, and the journal is listed in Scopus-derived journal information. Those services fit the journal's content: ATLA is the principal theological index in North America, and the others cover its biblical-studies and historical articles. Indexing status is not static — services add and drop titles, and coverage years differ — so an author whose institution requires indexing in a specific service for a specific year should confirm the current coverage of that service directly before submitting. The journal's presence on the SAGE platform additionally places its recent content in the discovery layers that libraries attach to that platform, including Google Scholar.

Access, subscriptions and open access

ATR is a subscription journal: it is not an open access title, and it is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals — a DOAJ search by ISSN carried out for this profile returned no listing, which is consistent with its subscription model. Individual subscribers, and institutions with SAGE subscriptions or theological-library holdings, read the journal in print and online; the print edition continues alongside the electronic edition identified by ISSN 2163-6214. OpenAlex records an article processing charge figure for the journal's optional open access route on the SAGE platform (US$3,400 in its 2025 data, checked for this profile); authors considering that option should confirm the current charge and the licence offered on the SAGE journal page at the time of acceptance, because platform charges change and the figure here is an indexed record, not a quotation. Where no open access option is taken, authors' rights are governed by the publishing agreement they sign with the journal, and questions about self-archiving of accepted manuscripts should be put to the publisher's permissions pages, which state the current policy.

How to submit

Submissions are made through the journal's manuscript system on the SAGE Journals platform, reached from the journal homepage (journals.sagepub.com/home/atr). Before submitting, an author should read the journal's current author guidelines on that platform, which govern manuscript length, formatting, reference style and the handling of poetry and review submissions, and should prepare the manuscript exactly to those instructions: journals with small editorial offices return non-compliant manuscripts, and the guidelines, not this profile, are the authoritative statement of what is required. As general orientation drawn from the journal's own presentation of its contents: articles are scholarly essays in theology and allied fields, written for an informed theological readership rather than for specialists in a single narrow technique; poetry is submitted as poetry, in small batches, and is judged as literature; book reviews are normally commissioned. Simultaneous submission of the same article to another journal is not acceptable practice for a peer-reviewed title of this kind, and authors should disclose related manuscripts and any prior publication of substantially the same material when they submit.

Because the journal appears quarterly and its issues are planned ahead, the interval between acceptance and appearance can be significant, and themed clusters sometimes emerge when several accepted articles circle a shared question, as the 2024 volume's grouping around land and political theology shows. Authors with time-sensitive work should ask the editorial office about the current queue before submitting. None of this is unusual for a century-old quarterly; it is the normal economics of a journal whose pages are limited and whose readership expects each issue to be worth reading whole.

Who should publish here — and who should not

The Anglican Theological Review is a strong choice for theologians, historians of Christianity, liturgists, ethicists and biblical scholars whose work engages the Anglican tradition or speaks from within it to wider theological debates; for seminary faculty for whom it is a natural home; and for scholar-clergy whose writing joins academic rigour to the life of the church. Its poetry pages also make it one of the few scholarly quarterlies where a poet working on religious themes can appear in a serious theological setting. It is a poor fit for work with no theological dimension, for empirical social-science studies that need a methods-led journal, for confessional writing that does not engage scholarship, and for authors whose evaluation depends on metrics the journal does not pursue. The most common reason for rejection at journals of this character is not quality but fit: a well-made article on a subject the journal's readers do not follow will be declined, however good it is, because the journal's covenant with its readers is about subject as much as standard.

Similar and neighbouring journals

Authors weighing ATR against neighbouring titles usually consider the following. The Journal of Anglican Studies (Cambridge University Press) is the closest comparator in subject, with a more explicitly international and social-scientific Anglican brief. The Scottish Journal of Theology and Modern Theology serve overlapping doctrinal readerships from different traditions. Theology Today and Interpretation reach a comparable seminary audience from Presbyterian and ecumenical settings respectively. Within this JournalsWorld directory, profiles such as Anglican and Episcopal History (the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church's quarterly) cover the historical side of the same world, while Pro Ecclesia covers Catholic and evangelical theology from a neighbouring confessional position. None of these is a substitute for ATR's particular combination of seminary roots, doctrinal range, poetry and reviews; they are alternatives for manuscripts whose centre of gravity sits slightly differently.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of the Anglican Theological Review? The print ISSN is 0003-3286 and the online ISSN is 2163-6214, as carried on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by the OpenAlex source record resolved from those identifiers.

Who publishes the Anglican Theological Review? The journal is owned by Anglican Theological Review Inc. of Sewanee, Tennessee, the unofficial journal of the seminaries of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada; its publishing platform and distribution are provided by SAGE Publishing, the publisher named on this record.

When was the journal founded, and how often does it appear? It has been published since 1918 and appears quarterly — four issues a year.

Who edits the journal? The editors-in-chief, as listed by the journal, are Jason Fout (Bexley Seabury Federation) and Scott MacDougall (Church Divinity School of the Pacific).

Does the journal publish poetry and book reviews as well as articles? Yes. Issues include peer-reviewed articles, poetry submissions and book reviews, a mixture the journal has maintained across its history.

Is the Anglican Theological Review open access? No. It is a subscription journal, with an optional paid open access route for individual articles on the SAGE platform; it could not be verified as listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals at checking time.

Does the journal have an impact factor? No impact factor is claimed in this profile, because none could be verified from an authoritative source in hand. OpenAlex records an h-index of 52 and 11,518 citations across 3,544 indexed works at checking time, figures that describe its indexed footprint rather than a Journal Impact Factor.

How do I submit a manuscript? Through the journal's pages on the SAGE Journals platform, following the author guidelines published there. Poetry and article submissions follow different routes within that system, and book reviews are normally commissioned by the editors.