In this edition of ReligionLink, we explore the intersections between religion and space, offering background, relevant stories and expert sources to help you report on religious traditions boldly going where no religions have gone before.

Joshua D. Ambrosius is a professor at the University of Dayton. He regularly teaches courses related to urban housing and faith-based social policy and innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to space exploration.

Roger D. Launius is former chief historian of NASA and most recently associate director for collections and curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. He now runs his own private historical consultancy and has written on religion and space.

Philip Butler is a professor at Iliff School of Theology in Denver. Butler’s work focuses on the intersections of neuroscience, technology, spirituality and Blackness. He engages in critical and constructive analysis on Black posthumanism, artificial intelligence and pluriversal future realities.

Catherine Hezser is a professor of Jewish studies at SOAS in London. Hezser has examined the ways in which ancient Jews and Christians imagined outer space, the heavens and their occupants and space travel, distinguishing between but also linking this world to another, higher sphere.

The Vatican Observatory (Specola Vaticana) is an astronomical research and educational institution supported by the Vatican. Originally based in Rome, the Observatory is now headquartered in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, and at the Mount Graham International Observatory in the Pinaleño Mountains in southeast Arizona. Journalists can contact via the email here or direct questions to individual […]

Jaimie Gunderson is a religious studies professor at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research interests include Christian origins, Christianity in late antiquity, New Testament, Greco-Roman religions, material religion, affect theory and UFOs.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein writes about the mythological assumptions beneath contemporary science and philosophy. She teaches religion and science studies at Wesleyan University and is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.

Cometan, also known as Brandon Reece Taylorian, is an associate lecturer in the Lancaster University Law School and an associate lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, where he teaches on the program Religion, Culture and Society. His research interests include freedom of religion or belief, new religious movements, traditionalist Catholicism and the relationship between […]