Contributors

is Director of Latino Studies and Associate Professor of American Culture and Latinx Studies at the University of Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in Chicana/o Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara (2015) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University (2011). His research investigates the relationship between state violence, imagination, religiosity, and spirituality along the US-Mexico border region during the twentieth century. His work studies the evolution and the politics of surveillance and control around Latino religiosity. His award-winning book Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions (Oxford University Press, 2022) follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the US and the evolution of their meaning. It explores how Latinx battles for survival are performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary and how the socio-political realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame their popular religious expressions. It also tracks the emergence of inter-religious states and transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith. His book received the 2023 Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the 2023 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize by the American Society of Church and Religion History. His other areas of interest include Chicana/o Mexican American aesthetics, design and urban planning, Chicana feminist and decolonial methodologies, and the power of empathy and forgiveness to formulate new racial, gender, sensual discourses, as well as the power of empathy. His new research project, titled God 5.0, looks at the intersection of faith, religiosity, theology and power online. You can find more about his research and teaching at www.barriology.com.

is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He offers courses such as Religion & Global Justice, Islam and the Black Global South, Muhammad & the Qur'an, as well as Sufism. His scholarship centers on Muslim life and networks in the Black Atlantic and is primarily interested in religious empowerment. Carter's book, The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (The University of North Carolina Press, 2026), is a multisite ethnography of a transatlantic spiritual network of African-American and West African Muslims in South Carolina and Senegal.

is an award-winning scholar, journalist, and feature writer whose work traces the unexpected intersections of religion, migration, and global culture. He is especially drawn to the everyday, lived textures of belief and how faith travels, adapts, and takes root in unlikely places. Along the way, he’s reported from a Puerto Rican Muslim ninja’s house in Staten Island and Oman’s frankincense farms and mountainside shrines, rode e-scooters through Berlin with missionaries from Eastern Europe and followed the migrant trail with Muslims through Mexico, scaled the sides of Brutalist buildings in Casablanca, Morocco, and abandoned castles outside Tbilisi, Georgia. His writing moves between the street-level and the structural, connecting intimate human stories to the broader forces reshaping religion in a global age. He is a postdoctoral researcher pursuing Habilitation with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth, an Affiliate Researcher with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and Editor of ReligionLink, a nonpartisan, monthly newsletter with source guides and story ideas for journalists reporting on religion. His work has appeared or been featured in Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, BBC Radio 4, chrismon, NPR, Religion News Service, The Times of India, The Guardian, Christianity Today, The Houston Chronicle, and other publications across the globe.

is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Religious Studies. Her monograph in progress, Dreams of a Muslim World: The Racial Geographies of Twentieth-Century Muslim Americans, traces early twentieth-century Muslim movements that emerged at the intersection of two migrations, one to the United States and one within it. By imagining a utopic Muslim world, these movements aspired to a universal Islamic identity which they believed would resolve racial inequity. Her most recent article, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, is entitled “Moors, Moslems, and Maps: The Self-Naming of Twentieth-Century Muslim Americans.”

is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She is also chair of the Religious Studies Department. Her most recent book, the award-winning Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), looks at how the figure of the “heathen” in need of salvation underlies American conceptions of race. Her previous book, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014), asks how widespread belief in hell influenced Americans’ perceptions of themselves and the rest of the world in the first century of nationhood. She is also co-editor (with Paul Harvey) of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (Oxford University Press, 2018).

is Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities, Professor of History, and Affiliate Faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a scholar of US religious history and Native American religions. Graber is the author of The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West . Her forthcoming book, Ghost Dancing Across Native North America (New York University Press, 2027), has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

is a full-time Adjunct faculty member in the Ethnic Studies department at Sacramento City College, where she teaches general Ethnic Studies, the department’s first Pacific Islander Studies-focused course, and Introduction to World Religions. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Religious Studies from Stanford University and her B.A. in Religious Studies and Ancient History from the University of California, Riverside, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Her academic journey follows a non-traditional path; after dropping out of community college, she worked for seven years as a residential electrician before returning to school on academic probation and eventually transferring to UC Riverside, where she discovered her passion for academia. Her research introduces Angafakafonua, a Tongan epistemological framework, to explore Tongan collective identity in the United States, examining how religious threads from 19th-century Methodism, Mormonism, and Tongan Crip gangs inform Tongan religio-racial identity. Her publications include: “Tongan Crip Gang: A Tongan American Identity,” Art/Research International 8, no. 2 (2024): 457–70; “Oceania: Revisualizing the Pacific in American Religious History,” in “Retelling U.S. Religious History: A Roundtable Retrospective,” American Religion journal website; and, with Finausina Teisa Paea Tovo, “Mana as Sacred Space: A Talanoa of Tongan American College Students in a Pacific Studies Learning Community Classroom,” in Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, eds Nadia Y. Kim and Pawan Dhingra (New York University Press, 2023).

is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She writes about religion and the body with a particular interest in gender, sexuality, race, and disability. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Susannah Heschel, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton University Press, 2025). She is also the editor of Judaism in 5 Minutes (Equinox, 2025) and, with Andrea Dara Cooper, co-editor of Jewish Women Thinkers (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.

is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in religion, ethics, and global social issues. She is senior ethics and religion editor and director of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative at The Conversation US and was previously a visiting researcher at the National University of Malaysia (UKM), studying misinformation and media ecosystems. Her reporting has explored social justice, public health, and religion, including investigations into India’s health sector and coverage of the emerging AIDS epidemic. She is the author of Positive Lives: The Story of Ashok and Others (Penguin Global, 2003) and “Fighting Bonded Labor in Rural India: Village Activist Gyarsi Bai Tackles an Entrenched System of Coercion” (October 13, 2015), a case study on grassroots leadership centered on Gyarsi Bai, taught at Harvard Kennedy School. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she also writes the Substack Walking with the Sacred.

is a historian, novelist, and the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where he also directs the Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History.

is Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently serves as the Director of Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. She has also published a book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023), which appeared on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023,” where it was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.” God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. She also serves as a series editor for the North American Religion series at NYU Press.

is a ghostwriter and independent scholar. He is the editor-in-chief of “239 Days in America,” an online narrative history that contextualizes ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s journey across America in 1912 within the broader debates of the Progressive Era. He is currently writing A Sphere of Her Own: The Life and Battles of Sarah J. Farmer, a biography of the mystic, reformer, and tireless organizer who built her summer colony at Green Acre into a crossroads of American religious life. Jonathan lives near Toronto, Canada.

is an associate professor of religious studies in the Department of Classics & Religious Studies of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the state’s flagship university. Mueller’s first book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina Press), chronicles race in the history of Mormonism. Mueller’s second book, Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West (Basic Books) is now out.

received his PhD in history from Cambridge University and currently teaches at Sam Houston State University. He is the author or editor of five books, including Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier, which won the Mormon History Association’s Best Book Award, and American Zion: A New History of Mormonism, which won the American Society of Church History’s Philip Schaff Prize for Best Book in the History of Christianity.

is an award-winning documentary storyteller interested in the complex lives and cultures of religious communities. Through photography, writing, and multimedia, she has spent nearly two decades chronicling how belief and practice intertwine with contemporary life among Pentecostal serpent-handlers, incarcerated Pagans, Ethiopian Orthodox practitioners, the Amish, and others. Lauren is the author of Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation (Duke University Press, 2017), published with support from the Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. She was also the inaugural artist in residence for Saint Louis University’s Lived Religion in the Digital Age initiative and a multimedia producer for the American Religious Sounds Project. Lauren’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Revealer, among others. She received her BS in journalism from Northwestern University and her MA in photography from Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication. Website: laurenpondphoto.com.

is the C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor Emeritus of Religion at Boston University. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Religion Matters: An Introduction to the World’s Religions (W.W. Norton, 2020), God Is Not One (HarperOne, 2010), and the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy (HarperOne, 2007). Prothero has commented on religion and politics on hundreds of National Public Radio programs, and on television on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PBS, and all the major networks. He was also a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Boston Globe, Politico, and CNN’s “Belief Blog.” Prothero was the chief academic adviser for the critically acclaimed six-hour WGBH-TV series, “God in America.”

is Professor of Jewish studies, religion, and history and chair of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (NYU Press, 2017), which won the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies, and The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton University Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the same award. She currently serves as Vice President of the Southern Jewish Historical Society.

is Associate Professor of Modern Protestant Theology at Fordham University, with affiliate appointments in Comparative Literature and American Studies. Most of her research projects explore how religious subjects appeal to and understand beauty, art, and embodied experience as a salve against the ills of modernity—whether those are understood as scientific rationalism, the iron cage of bureaucratic life, or the devastations of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. She is currently writing a spiritual and cultural biography of the literary work of American author Shirley Jackson for the Iconologies series with the University of Chicago Press. Since 2024 she has been a Scholar in Residence with the Social and Moral Cognition Lab at Columbia University, where she is working on a project that explores the links between Christian theology, moral decision making, and climate action. She is the author of Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Editor, together with Sarah Covington, of Protestant Art and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2020). She writes a monthly Screentime column on film, television, and other screened art for The Christian Century.

Convinced that religion has less to do with beliefs than with bodies, Professor Rodríguez-Plate queries the ways people connect with physical objects through sense perception: the things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch are what give us our spiritual dimension. Alongside their work as a professor at Hamilton College, Rodríguez-Plate is a writer and an editor, presenting research at museums, cultural centers, and universities across Asia, Europe, and North America. They’ve authored or edited 15 books, and their essays have appeared in Newsweek, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Century, The Islamic Monthly, and Huffington Post. Rodríguez-Plate is Executive Director of APRIL, edits the journal CrossCurrents, and lives in Central New York with their partner, two kids, and two black mutts.

teaches classes on religions of China and Japan, American religious history, Asian religions in America, new religious movements, Asian Religions in America, and many others. He is the editor of Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Baylor University Press, 2016), the author of New Religious Movements (Pearson, 2006), and co-author of the award-winning Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He is also the co-creator and co-organizer of Spirited Brunch 101, The Food Section, and the co-developer and co-producer of Happyland, a new musical about Jewish life in nineteenth century Charleston. He has served on the board of the Charleston Interreligious Council for many years.

is Assistant Professor of Interreligious Histories at Union Theological Seminary and author of multiple books, including the national bestseller, The Light We Give (Penguin Random House, 2022). He is Senior Advisor for the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program, where he previously served as Executive Director. Simran hosts the Wisdom & Practice podcast produced by PRX and hosts Undivided, a new docuseries on religion and race in American history.

is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. A scholar of African American religious history, her books include New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York University Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (University of California Press, 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1997). Her latest book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake, was published by New York University Press in April 2025. She currently directs The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures, which is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate of the department of African and African American Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. She is author of the multiple award-winning The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Dr. Wells-Oghoghomeh is currently at work on her second monograph tentatively titled American Fetish: Witchcraft and the Invention of Black Women in the Era of Slavery and two edited collections. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Forum for Theological Education, and Mellon Foundation, among others.

is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (2026) and Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; both are by Grove Press. A former managing editor of the twenty-five-year-old literary magazine Killing the Buddha, Brook's work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.

is currently the Alton Brooks Professor of Religion and the Director of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California. His monographs include American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2020), the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Religion Award and an LA Times bestseller, and The Other Side of Zen (Princeton University Press, 2009). He is also the editor of seven volumes on race and American belonging or Buddhist studies, including Hapa Japan, Issei Buddhism in the Americas, American Buddhism, and Buddhism and Ecology. His most recent project is the building of the Irei Names Monument, a memorial to honor those of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated in America’s internment and concentration camps during WWII.