This month’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature is an extravaganza for academic religion publishers, with scholarly books at the heart of the event. PW talked with 14 university press directors, trade publishers, and editors about today’s landscape and what they see on the horizon.

They spoke about launching initiatives on new topics, exploring novel formats, and diversifying their ranges of subjects and experts, while facing challenges on several fronts. They’re dealing with AI’s encroachment, rising production costs, readers’ dwindling attention spans, the struggle to find qualified people willing to do rigorous peer reviews of manuscripts, and the continuing decline in the number of seminaries and university religion studies courses training the scholars of the future.

“This is a tricky time for books in the educational space,” says Christie Henry, director of Princeton University Press. “Many students are not engaging with books through traditional distribution channels. They may be finding them online, but they’re not getting them through the library or getting them from publishers or through bookstores.”

Jennifer Banks, senior executive editor for religion and the humanities at Yale University Press, says, “AI might be useful for rounding up basic data: who wrote what, who is mentioned in citations, what’s in the bibliography, and other time-consuming tasks. But it’s no help when you’re looking for groundbreaking research and analysis.” As an example of such work, she highlights Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Nov.) by New Testament scholar Yii-Jan Lin. “While the metaphor of the New Jerusalem has been useful in portraying a shining, God-blessed refuge with open gates,” the publisher says, “it has also been used to exclude, attack, and criminalize unwanted peoples.”

Drawing on many disciplines

“There’s no question there will be a shrinking number of scholars who are writing in traditional ways about traditional religious traditions,” says Richard Brown, senior executive acquisitions editor for religion and spirituality for Rowman & Littlefield Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury. “But I’m not worried. I think there will be a number of people writing about religion, religious phenomena, and spirituality coming from different places” such as psychology, sociology, and history departments. Forthcoming from R&L Academic is Tongues on Fire: Charismatic Evangelicals and the Neuroscience of Spirit-Filled Activism by Josh Brahinsky (Sept. 2025), which draws on psychology, anthropology, and neurology to, Brown says, “find fascinating correlations between brain activity, speaking in tongues, and, surprisingly, political activism.”

Presses are increasingly drawing their authors from a wider range of disciplines. A forthcoming title on ethics, Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton Univ., Feb. 2025), is by anthropologist Webb Keane. According to the publisher, “It reveals how centuries of conversations between us and nonhumans inform our conceptions of morality.” In The Language of Trauma in the Psalms (Eisenbrauns, out now), religious studies scholar Danilo Verde’s original approach incorporates both historical context and an analysis of the psalmists’ linguistic strategies to offer a new understanding of the meaning and purposes of lament.

“Our mission is to get people to think differently,” says Gisela Fosado, Duke University Press editorial director. “All of our editors are looking for new topics, new trends, new approaches, new ways of thinking. We’re looking at immigration, trans studies, and disability studies. We’re looking at people outside the Global North.” She points to a title in the publisher’s ongoing series on religious cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana’s Drum Wars (May 2025) by theologian Mariam Goshadze addresses a clash between practitioners of traditional African religions, who had long enforced a ban on public noise during a religious festival, and Ghana’s increasing numbers of Pentecostal Christians, whose worship practices involve loud sounds.

Diversification is key

Cambridge University Press is publishing “a whole suite of different things for different people at different stages of their careers,” says senior executive publisher Alex Wright. Along with the traditional hardback monographs and comprehensive overviews of subjects in the Companions classroom series, Cambridge has added 20,000-word “micrographs” called Elements, which are published simultaneously in print and digital formats. There’s also a new-this-year Academic Impact series that Wright says is published “with all the bells and whistles but priced under $40.” One of the first books in this line is by science and religion scholar Peter Harrison, who will headline an author-meets-critics session to discuss his work on the rise of secularism, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief (out now).

For Oxford University Press, sociologist Christian Smith goes behind the statistics about “nones”—the sharply rising number of people who say they have no religion—in his Why Religion Went Obsolete (Apr. 2025). It weaves together the changes in history, culture, and technology driving this demographic shift.

And that’s the preferred approach, says Niko Pfund, president of the press. “We are careful not to publish books too dependent on current events—not to chase after a moving target,” he says. He describes a new line planned for 2025 called Oxford Intersections, a digital-only series of interdisciplinary works tackling topics in the humanities and social sciences with accessible, original research in a short format. Topics will include AI in society, borders, and gender justice.

Eerdmans sales and marketing VP Will Bergkamp says the effort to reach readers today with academic books is like “playing three-dimensional chess. It’s a challenge but it’s fun, too.” The company’s list stretches from New Testament theologian James W. Barker’s Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics (Jan. 2025) to The Victorians and the Holy Land: Adventurers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in the Lands of the Bible (Feb. 2025) by historian Allan Chapman, which Bergkamp says may appeal to both scholars and the general market.

Looking to a wider audience

Notre Dame University Press is tiptoeing into trade titles, adding five or six to its base of 55 to 60 titles centered in Catholic intellectual scholarship, says director Stephen Wrinn. For example, he notes that Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films (out now) by Jesuit priest Ryan G. Duns fits with the publisher’s interest in what Wrinn calls “philosophically oriented books about popular culture.”

At a time when many books are focused on people’s political, social, or cultural grievances, Baker Academic executive VP Jim Kinney says the house is pushing in the opposite direction. “We’re publishing books that are designed to provide nuance and proportionality and perspective to issues,” he says. “My job as an academic publisher is to complicate the picture.” He highlights Grace and Social Ethics: Gift as the Foundation of Our Life Together (Dec.) by Hope College theology professor Angela Carpenter, who applies the theology of grace—that all we have is a gift from God—to current contentious issues such as criminal justice, labor practices, and gun violence.

Zondervan associate publisher Ryan Pazdur says the company is responding to the trend of evangelical Christians deconstructing their faith with books such as Invisible Jesus: A Book About Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ. New Testament scholar Scot McKnight and singer-songwriter and pastor Tommy Preson Phillips coauthored what Pazdur calls a “critique from within the church pushing church leaders to do more to teach and model Jesus’s path of forgiveness, love, and grace.”

Many readers today, particularly students, don’t come to academic texts with a strong base of knowledge about religion, history, and culture, says Bridgett A. Green, VP of publishing and editorial director for Westminster John Knox Press. She points to an example of the kind of book she considers “urgently needed today”: Reckoning with History: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Making of American Christianity (Jan. 2025) by historian William Yoo. The author, Green says, draws on “hard and haunting” stories from Indigenous, African, European, and American perspectives.

IVP associate publisher and academic editorial director Jon Boyd shrugs off the concerns about eye-blink attention spans. “So what else is new?” he says. “I think a book finds its organic length, the one that is right for its mission.” Forthcoming from IVP is Skills for Safeguarding: A Guide to Preventing Abuse and Fostering Healing in the Church (Dec.) by two experts in trauma treatment, social worker Lisa Compton and counselor Taylor Patterson.

At New York University Press, Jennifer Hammer, a senior acquiring editor, finesses the challenge of book length by schooling authors to structure their books in short chapters. “We’re not dumbing down the work,” she says. “We’re making it more accessible.” High on her 2025 list is Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era (July 2025). In it, historian Aram G. Sarkisian examines how Russian arrivals who settled in U.S. mining towns were, Hammer says, “pivotal to all the upheavals having to do with labor and working-class dynamics.”

For all the changes and challenges publishers mentioned and new works they are championing, one thing unites their common commitment in academic religion publishing. As David Aycock, executive director of Penn State University Press, puts it, “Our mission remains focused on humans, writing as humanists, for the benefit of other humans.”