Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies

Signing contract for GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies, with Loes Schouten and Lautaro Lanzillotta, June 2015

Lautaro Lanzillotta and I have been working with the wonderful people at Brill to start a new journal.  This has been a dream of mine for many years, and when I discovered that Lautaro had similar aspirations, we banded together, got many others involved, and Brill decided to give the journal a try.  I want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way, to make this dream come true.  Especially my thanks goes to Loes Schouten, Publishing Director at Brill. 

Here is the link to the official webpage for the journal where editorial board and more information can be found: http://www.brill.com/products/journal/gnosis-journal-gnostic-studies

Our first two issues will be out in 2016.  They will be a special edition of the collected papers from the Gnostic Countercultures conference that we held at Rice University in March 2015. 

Here is a description of the journal.

Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies is a peer-reviewed publication devoted to the study of Gnostic religious currents from the ancient world to the modern, where ‘Gnostic’ is broadly conceived as a reference to special direct knowledge of the divine, which either transcends or transgresses conventional religious knowledge. It aims to publish academic papers on: the emergence of the Gnostic, in its many different historical and local cultural contexts; the Gnostic strands that persisted in the middle ages; and modern interpretations of Gnosticism – with the goal of establishing cross-cultural and trans-historical conversations, together with more localized historical analyses. The corpus of Gnostic materials includes (but is not restricted to) testimonies from outsiders as well as insider literature such as the Nag Hammadi collection, the Hermetica, Neo-Platonic texts, the Pistis Sophia, the books of Jeu, the Berlin and Tchacos codices, Manichaean documents, Mandaean scriptures, and contemporary Gnostic fiction/film and ‘revealed’ literature. The journal will publish the best of traditional historical and comparative scholarship while also featuring newer approaches that have received less attention in the established literature, such as cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, social memory, psychology, ethnography, sociology, and literary theory.

Please send us your submissions.  And please have your library subscribe.  And take out individual subscriptions.  And spread the word!