Contributor Guidelines
INTER is a digital magazine of ideas and art from a new generation navigating unprecedented religious diversity in America.
Religion is currently at the center of some of our most important public and political conversations. Amidst the tumult are millions of people of different religious and non-religious identities living and working. We want to bring these stories to the fore. We want to challenge stereotypes and give readers a chance to rethink their assumptions about everyone from Atheists to Mormons to Zoroastrians.
We accept and publish stories across a variety of media formats, including personal essays, op-eds, photography, videos, interviews, and more. We primarily feature Millennial and Gen Z voices, but are open to submissions from everyone. INTER is strongly committed to supporting our contributors and their work. We pay contributors for pieces that are published on INTER.
Do you have something you would like to contribute? Please review our themes below and then use our submission form to submit your work. Submissions accepted year-round.
Themes
Interfaith Solutions: We are looking for stories that provoke people to think more deeply about interfaith cooperation as a force for good. Do you have an idea or a story that demonstrates how interfaith cooperation and religious pluralism can improve the world?
Counter Extremism: Religious intolerance and extremism come from all corners of the U.S. and the world. We are looking for work that challenges these ideas and demonstrates how we can encourage all people to think more deeply across lines of difference. Do you have experience witnessing extremist thinking? Do you have a theological or logical argument against any one extremist line of thinking?
Intersections of Identity and Culture: What are current trends, events, and issues (the big political and cultural conversations happening RIGHT NOW) that intersect with your religious or non-religious tradition and values? How do your identities or values frame the way you think about these conversations, and how do they lead you to participate in these conversations in different ways?
Pluralism and Public Life: We are looking for work that illuminates the real ways that religious pluralism, or the lack of it, impacts everyday Americans in their civic and professional lives. How do these things affect you in the workplace and marketplace? On the bus? In the classroom? At the dinner table?
Campus Voices: College and university campuses are laboratories for civil society and models for religious pluralism. Campus is also the place where the highs and lows of religious diversity tend to be felt most acutely. If you are a student or educator, we want to hear your stories of religious identity and diversity, your ideas for how colleges can do better to model pluralism, as well as relevant breaking news from campuses.
Note: Our editorial themes are flexible. While the above themes are a good guide for the kind of work we publish, we want you to send us interesting ideas that are relevant to you personally.
Submit
If you would like to contribute to INTER, please send us a draft or pitch us an idea using this form. Please allow four weeks for a response.
By submitting your work, you are acknowledging that you agree to all of our Terms of Service. All other inquiries can be sent to editor@ifyc.org.
Contributor Expectations
INTER is designed to help contributors succeed. Therefore, we do three things:
- Feature top stories on our website and promote them widely. Contributors are supported by our editorial team and can work with us to envision and develop inspiring pieces across a variety of media.
- Train interfaith leaders to find their voice and their stories, and advance them in the media. (Have a compelling story but don’t quite know how to tell it? Read about our training opportunities.)
- Work with our strongest contributors to help them get their pieces placed in strategic media platforms. The more places stories of diverse religious and non-religious experiences show up, the more people begin to understand their importance in our world.
In turn, we expect contributors to be professional, set aside time to develop and edit their work once accepted, and respond to editors in a timely manner.
Should work you contribute to INTER be published elsewhere or in a collection at some later date, we appreciate a standard acknowledgment. For example, “This essay originally appeared on INTER” with a link to the magazine for digital publications.
INTER is a project of Interfaith Youth Core, a national non-profit organization working to make interfaith cooperation a norm in American life.
INTER is made possible through generous support from the Robert McCormick Foundation and the Stuart Family Foundation.
