Visual Theology

Sergey Avanesov, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Visual Theology, and Elizaveta Speshilova, Executive Secretary, took remote participation in the first All-Russian Congress “Russian Theological Journals: New Challenges and Development Prospects” on November 18, 2021. The Congress was attended by editors-in-chiefs, deputy editors-in-chiefs and executive secretaries of such journals as “Voprosy Filosofii”, “Issues of Theology”, “State, Religion, Church in Russia and Worldwide”, “Orientalistica”, “Christian Reading”, “Theological Herald”, “Minbar. Islamic Studies”, and of other periodicals.  At the Congress the President of the Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers Olga Kirillova presented her report “On the tasks of preparing and promoting Russian publications and journals on theology in international scientometric databases”. The participants discussed the current state and prospects for the development of theological journals in Russia.

Sergey Avanesov presented the report “Theological Journal as a space for the formation of multidisciplinary knowledge”, in which it was shown that (1) multidisciplinary scientific knowledge is a field of search for new meanings that open up additional, previously unexplored aspects of culture; (2) multidisciplinary knowledge brings us closer to the true reality in which everything is connected to everything; (3) the multidisciplinary approach makes it possible to discover numerous representations of theological experience in various cultural phenomena; (4) as a result, the place of theology in the field of humanities and in culture as a whole is being clarified. Elizaveta Speshilova made a speech on the topic “Indexing strategy of the theological journal in international scientometric databases”, describing the trajectory of the development of the Journal of Visual Theology and its indexing in such databases as EBSCO, Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, DOAJ and Erich Plus.

Following the results of the Congress, it was proposed to establish the Russian Association of Theological Journals in order to coordinate scientific policy, exchange publishing experience and to develop cooperation in the field of modern humanities.

 

22.11.2021