Writer's Guidelines for Touchstone

• We welcome submissions for the Features and Views departments. Before submitting an article, please read several copies of the magazine or read a selection of the articles posted in the archives on our website: www.touchstonemag.com/archives to see the subjects we treat and the way we treat them.

We also welcome submissions for the Book Review and Report departments, but because so many of these are commissioned and the space for them is so limited, you will want to query the editor before writing a review or report (see the next item).

QUERIES

• If you are not sure that an article will work for Touchstone, please send a query to the editor. The query should state for which department you will write the article, give your thesis, describing briefly what it is that you will be arguing, how you will develop the argument, and explaining its importance and appeal. The query will be sent to a group of reviewers, who will need to know in some detail what you will say about your subject to be able to tell if it might work for us.

You should also explain your qualifications for writing on the subject (these need not be academic or indeed official in any way, and may include personal experience.) An example or two of your writing would help if you have not written for Touchstone before.

Please note that a positive response to a query does not guarantee acceptance of the submitted article. The article will still be evaluated by the reviewers. A positive response means only that if the query meets our standards and if written in our form we will take it and that the editor will help you try to meet them.

GENERAL GUIDELINES

• We will consider an article that has appeared elsewhere, if 1) the readership of the magazine or website where it first appeared does not overlap with ours and 2) if you are willing if necessary to radically rework the article for our purposes. You must own the copyright to the article. Of course, original submissions are much more likely to be accepted.

• Touchstone publishes an eclectic range of articles, based on the editorial board’s (fallible) understanding of what makes a mere Christian response to a mere Christian concern. We believe our calling more analytical and journalistic than “practical” or devotional on the one side or scholarly on the other.

This means, for example, that an essay on dieting for Christians would not work for us, but an essay on the cultural sources of anorexia, the medieval understanding of gluttony as a deadly sin, or the traditional disciplines of fasting might. Similarly, a scholarly article on the peasant diet of first century Palestine would not work, but one using much of the same information to understand in a new way some events recorded in the gospels might.

• Our main interest is the engagement of mere Christians with the questions of the day, and we try to answer them from within the shared Christian doctrinal, moral, and spiritual tradition. We try to publish articles that are accessible but not popular and substantive but not academic. We try to treat more theoretical matters in terms of that engagement, which is to say an article needs to make the application clear and explain the this-worldly effects of being right and of being wrong on the matter.

To put it another way, in Touchstone specialists do not give lectures to an audience of their peers but knowledgeable mere Christians use the Christian heritage to answer the questions of the day. An article written in a detached sociological mode offering an objective (or at least theologically uncommitted) analysis would not work for us, for example, but a sociologist using his insights into group behavior to explain (in terms the non-sociologist can understand) some common Christian problem might.

The writer should begin with the concrete and specific, with something you can put your finger on and show to the reader. Articles that begin with some version of “I want to argue that” usually do not work for us, because they are almost always too abstract. But articles that begin with “Look at this” and then draw out the deeper meaning of the thing seen, can work very well. As you write, you might try to read it through the eyes or mind of someone who doesn’t know your subject and ask yourself if every sentence is so clear that he could find, with confidence, its real-world example or application.

• That said, we also publish more general articles on literature, history, biblical studies, and theology, believing that for the mere Christian all of Christian history and certainly its major movements and figures are contemporary and “relevant,” even if the direct application of the information is not obvious. These must be of interest to the general reader and written with some attention to the value of the article for the reader’s lived experience. What is the difference between this kind of article and the scholarly article mentioned already is difficult to define, and you are encouraged to submit such articles in case they fit our criteria.

• We do not accept fiction, poetry, or cartoons. Ever.

• We almost never publish devotional articles. Nor sermons, unless they can be made to read like an essay.

• We do not review current movies. Being a monthly, we cannot get a review into print till at least two months and probably three months after the movie appears, where it will, no matter how good it is, appear old hat. A particularly insightful treatment saying something other reviewers did not might work, however.

• We do not take sides in partisan political matters or make judgments on prudential political matters on which mere Christians are divided, since Mere Christianity allows for a wide range of views on public policy. We do uphold the Christian tradition on matters upon which we believe it has spoken clearly, even when these have implications for politics, the sinfulness of abortion and the nature of marriage as the union of a man and a woman being the most obvious.

• Just as we rarely publish purely scholarly articles, we rarely publish basic teaching — articles that could be presented in an adult Sunday School class, for example — and do so only when the presentation is original or otherwise worth presenting. The ideal article assumes the readers know the teaching and brings it to bear upon the world around us. What is basic teaching differs with the subject, of course.

• Articles, especially those written for the View section, should be grounded in some current event or concern, beginning at a specific place in contemporary experience. Writers must draw upon the resources of the Christian tradition, but do so by addressing some concrete problem or challenge that requires the use of those resources. The reader should be able to see right away the writer’s point in writing and its connection with his life. This kind of writing is more showing than telling and must draw a picture or tell a story in which the insight or argument is incarnated.

AUDIENCE

• Articles should be written for a broad audience of traditional Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox believers. You should use language acceptable to all these traditions and avoid the insider language and jargon of your own. Do not assume the readers’ agreement on points at which these three traditions disagree. Articles of interest only to one group will almost always be rejected. You can, however, and indeed should speak honestly from your tradition and offer its special resources. We want our writers to write out of their traditions, but they have to find some shared point of understanding on which to base their articles, lest they leave some readers saying “Well, yeah, of course,” and others saying “I don’t get this at all.” As a rule, a writer speaking from his tradition should write for a friend from the tradition most different from his, whom he wants to understand the value of what he is offering.

• The readership mixes clerics, scholars, and interested but theologically untrained laymen. For this reason Touchstone uses a brisker, more journalistic style: offering an explicit thesis statement in the introduction, speaking in the first person and in the active voice, using stories to illustrate the claims, identifying everyone quoted or referred to, making the argument and the structure of the article explicit, translating technical terms into common language, and avoiding the tedious scene-setting introductions and endless qualifications typical of academic writing.

LENGTH

• Articles for the Views section should be between 6,000 and 12,500 characters in length (including spaces) and articles for the Feature section should be between 16,000 and 26,000 characters. Book reviews should be between 4,300 and 7,500 characters. Reports should be between 6,000 and 12,000 characters. These are not absolutely fixed limits, but a query is wise before you exceed them.

In all cases, shorter articles are more likely to be accepted and more likely to be published soon.

• We do not use endnotes in the View, Review, and Report sections, where the citation is of the sort used in newspaper columns (e.g., “In his book How to Train Koala Bears, John Smith argues . . .”). We try to avoid them in the Feature section, and use them only for sources readers might want to track down but will be unable to without a note (a paper in a sociology journal cited in an essay on marriage, for example). Endnotes should only be used for sources, not content.

SUBMISSION & REVIEW

• All submissions should be accompanied by a cover letter introducing yourself, describing your article, and containing your contact information (e-mail and postal addresses and phone number). Please include a brief biographical note of 50 to 60 words that could be published with your article, specifying your profession or occupation, your latest book or other identifying mark (office in a national organization, for example), your family (if you wish), and your church affiliation. (See the magazine for examples.)

• Articles should be submitted by e-mail, as an attached file (Microsoft Word is best) addressed to the editor, David Mills. (The editor would be grateful if you used paragraph returns and tabs to separate paragraphs, and not automatic indents. This makes editing easier.)

• Submissions are reviewed by an ecumenically, academically, vocationally, and otherwise diverse group of reviewers, which mixes editors (senior and contributing) and outside readers. You should hear from us within 30 days. If you don’t — and the large number of submissions sometimes slows down the process of reviewing them — please write the editor.

• The articles in Touchstone are closely edited. Submitting an article indicates agreement to work with the editor in creating an article in our style and to our standards. This includes such matters as length of paragraph and level of vocabulary, but also the clarity of the prose and argument, the value of the evidence, and the like.

• We do not accept simultaneous submissions.

PAYMENT & RIGHTS

• Original articles are given an honorarium of $125 per published page.

• Authors receive one author’s copy.

• Touchstone buys the right to the first publication of an original article, with the following conditions: that 1) it not appear elsewhere (including web pages) for 90 days from the date of publication in Touchstone; 2) whenever it is reprinted elsewhere (including web pages), the following notice be included with it: “This article first appeared in the _____ issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity (www.touchstonemag.com)”; 3) we retain the right to use without further payment a portion or description of your article with your name in our promotional materials; and 4) we retain the right to use your article without further payment in any Touchstone anthologies, reprints, or in electronic form (online, cd-rom, etc.). These conditions apply to a reprinted article that has been reworked for publication in Touchstone.

— David Mills (October 2005)

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