On Religion

Arlene Sánchez Walsh is a professor of religious studies and the author of the award-winning book Latino Pentecostal Identity, which was released by Columbia University Press in 2003, as well as the book Pentecostals in America from Columbia University Press in 2018. She has served as a media expert for outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and On Being with Krista Tippett,...

Rachel Quist specializes in East Asian Buddhist imagery with focuses in pre-modern Japan and China. Her research centers on questions of interaction with imagery, materiality and object agency, and the accessibility of image-based practices. She has written on topics such as Buddhist reliquary design and expressivity, the didactic project underlying the hell tableau at Baodingshan, and the constru...

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate is a writer, editor, public speaker, and college professor. He's interested in how sensuality affects spirituality. His writings all circle around questions of the ways sense perceptions influence ways of being religious, and how religious traditions change our ways of perceiving the world around us. In other words, religion and spirituality are rooted in the body. Along t...

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College where she teaches classes on religion and masculinity, Catholics in the Americas, urban religion, and religions of Latin America. She is an ethnographer and her research focuses on material culture, contemporary Catholicism, and gender and embodiment. She is the author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devo...

Sarah Shaw is a lecturer at the University of Oxford. She has taught and published numerous works on the history and practices of Buddhism, including An Introduction to Buddhist Meditation and The Spirit of Meditation. Today we talked about her book Mindfulness: Where It Comes From And What It Means.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alison Melnick Dyer is Assistant Professor of Asian Religions at Bates College. She is an expert on gender and Tibetan Buddhism. She is currently writing a book about the life of Mingyur Peldrön, an 18th century Buddhist nun and religious leader. Melnick Dyer is especially interested in the ways that privilege influences gender in religious communities. She earned her B.A. at the University of Mic...

Rebecca Epstein-Levi is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She’s an expert on Jewish sexual ethics, and is working on a book project on sex, risk, and rabbinic text.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brett Krutzsch is an expert on LGBTQ politics and religion in the United States and a scholar at NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where he serves as editor of The Revealer. He is the author of the 2019 book Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics from Oxford University Press.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kayla Renée Wheeler is an assistant professor and an expert in contemporary Black Islam in the United States. Dr. Wheeler is writing a book on the history of Black Muslim fashion in the United States. The book is based on five years of research, including interviewing Black Muslim fashion designers and attending fashion shows in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Newark. Dr. Wheeler is also the creator of...

Shreena Gandhi is a multi-faceted cultural historian of religion with expertise in religion, race, the Americas and Hinduism. Trained at Swarthmore, Harvard and the University of Florida, Professor Gandhi currently teaches at Michigan State University, where she starts off the first few weeks of all her classes introducing students to the concept of structural white supremacy and why that is impor...

Vicki Brennan is an anthropologist who studies religion, sound, music, and urban space in Africa and the African Diaspora. She is an Associate Professor of Religion and the Director of African Studies at the University of Vermont. Her research is based on more than fifteen years of field research in southwest Nigeria, primarily in Lagos and Ibadan. She has also conducted research in Nigerian immig...

Dr. Brian Clites is a professor at Case Western Reserve University. He is an expert in clergy sexual abuse, and he has spent the last eight years interviewing Catholic survivors in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Illinois. In his upcoming book, Surviving Soul Murder, Clites explains how survivors have transformed their pain into legal and political reforms, and how the Catholic scandal has change...

Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt is a higher education professional, researcher, and inclusion and diversity specialist based in Philadelphia, PA. She received her PhD in sociology from Fordham University. A sociologist of religion, she is an expert in systemic racism with experience researching and writing about how systemic racism impacts African-American Catholics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...

Emily Crews is a Ph. D. candidate in History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her dissertation project traces the relationship between movement and identity formation in the context of Nigerian immigration to the United States, exploring the ways in which Pentecostalism conditions, and is conditioned by, the attempts of people to make themselves feel “at home” in a foreig...

Danielle Dulsky is a heathen visionary, painter, and word-witch. The author of Woman Most Wild and The Holy Wild. She teaches internationally and has facilitated circles, embodiment trainings, communal spell-work, and seasonal rituals since 2007. She is the founder of The Hag School and believes in the emerging power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning witches, and...

Julia M. Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University. She specializes in early modern European and Atlantic history with an emphasis on gender, family, and childhood. With funding from the American Historical Association, the Newberry Library, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Dr. Gossard wrote her first book, ...

Cristina Rosetti completed her Ph. D. in religious studies at the University of California Riverside. She writes about Mormon fundamentalism.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jordan Denari Duffner is an author and scholar of Muslim-Christian relations, interreligious dialogue, and Islamophobia. Jordan is currently pursuing a PhD in Theological and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. A former Fulbright scholar, she is also an associate of the Bridge Initiative, where she previously worked from 2014 to 2017 as a research fellow. Jordan’s writing on Islam and Cath...

Dalena Storm is a writer and educator. Her undergraduate training at Williams College was in Asian Studies with a Religious Studies Concentration, and her experiences in the study and practice of various religious and spiritual traditions, as well as her travels throughout Asia and Europe, influence much of her writing. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Bennington College, where she participated...

Dr. Kelly J. Baker is the author of the award-winning Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011); The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Bondfire Books, 2013); Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (Blue Crow Books, 2017); the award-winning Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Acade...

Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph. D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churches. Dr. Hutchings is interested in the relationship between religion, media and culture, with particular attention to digital forms of Christianity. His research has included studies of online worship; digital evangelism and formation; online communi...

Deborah Eden Tull is the founder of Mindful Living Revolution. She is a Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, public speaker, author, activist, and sustainability educator. She trained for seven years as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery in Northern California, and she has been traveling to, living in, or teaching about conscious, sustainable communities internationally for the last 25 y...

Robert Schaefer is a professional chef and lifelong Buddhist practitioner. He received the Jukai ceremony at the Korinji Rinzai Monastery in Wisconsin under the direction of Roshi Meido Moore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roshi Grace Schireson is a teacher in the Suzuki Roshi Lineage of Soto Zen, empowered by Sojun Mel Weitsman. She has also practiced in the Rinzai tradition and was encouraged to teach koans by Keido Fukushima Roshi. Grace is the author of Zen Women and co-editor of Zen Bridge. Grace is the head teacher of the Central Valley Zen Foundationi, president of Shogaku Zen Institute, and teaches meditatio...

Chris Murray is a social studies classroom teacher and religious literacy teacher education facilitator in Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices