Best Paper Award from April's Conference

We had a wonderful conference this year, and all the conference presentations are available online. There were many excellent presentations and papers. We have chosen to extend a best paper award to the top 1/3rd of the papers submitted to the conference, (the top 6 papers), with an invitation for them to have their papers included in a published conference proceedings. Each paper was ranked by three (and in some cases four) reviewers. No reviewer reviewed their own paper.The decision was not just made based upon the quality of the oral conference presentation, but also upon the suitability of each talk for printed publication (the best talks are not always the best papers and visa versa).

This award goes to, in alphabetical order:

Chris Bradford on “Bodies Without End: Embodiment in a Substrate-Independent World” Brad Carmack on “Mormonism Beyond the Gender Binary” James Carroll on “Epiphenomenalism, the Problem with Property Dualism” Marcus Flinders on “Taxation in a Millennial World” Karl Hale on “Worshiping an Extra-Terrestrial Humanoid Deity” Micah Redding on “Transhumanism and the Christian Story”

The authors of these papers will have the opportunity to have their papers published in a "proceedings" if they so choose. This proceedings will be available online, and (perhaps) also in print form. This final proceedings should be considered a peer reviewed publication. The inclusion of their papers in the proceedings is conditional upon their acceptance, and their working with our editors to get the papers up to publishable standards, complete with a uniform format, and with sufficient citations etc. If some authors aren't interested, we will extend an additional invitation to one of the runners up.

Several very excellent papers were not considered for this award or for publication in the proceedings, because the authors have expressed a desire to extend these papers, and publish them in a journal format elsewhere. In some cases these papers were very good, and otherwise might have been chosen. We would like to extend each of these authors a special invitation to consider submitting these papers to be included in the first edition of the new MTA sponsored Journal. Whether they choose our journal to submit their excellent papers to, we wish them all the best in finding an appropriate venue for their excellent work.

Thanks again to all who participated,

James L. Carroll Proceedings Editor