Mehdi Khalaji is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy specializing in Shiʿa politics and Iran’s religious establishment. 

Benedikt Roemer is a Walter Benjamin Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Oxford. His research interests include religious diversity in the Middle East, religion and nationalism, diaspora studies, the history and contemporary story of the Iranian Christian community and ethnographic research on religion in Arabic, Persian and […]

In this guide, we offer background, resources, relevant stories and expert sources to help you better cover the religion angle on the current conflict and what it might mean in the wake of the latest war in the Middle East.

Teresa Flores is a Peruvian lawyer and director of the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Latin America (OLIRE), based in the Netherlands.

Candace Lukasik is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her research explores religion and the transnational politics of violence, migration, race, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University

Joseph Winters is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies at Duke University. His research interests lie at the intersection of African-American religious thought, Black literature and critical theory. Winters is author of Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (2016).

Matthew J. Cressler is a scholar, comics creator and teacher whose work focuses on religion, race and justice. He is also chief of staff for the Corporation for Public Interest Technology. He is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017).

Adelle M. Banks is the projects editor and a national reporter for RNS, covering topics including religion and race, the faith of African Americans and partnerships between government and religious groups. An award-winning journalist, Banks joined RNS in 1995. She previously was the religion reporter at the Orlando Sentinel and a reporter at The Providence […]