This edition of ReligionLink is dedicated to stories that could possibly top the lists in 2025, providing background, resources and expert sources for you to turn to in the year ahead.

Liz Bucar’s research and writing covers a wide range of topics — from sexual reassignment surgery to the politics of religious clothing — but generally focuses on how a deeper understanding of religious difference can change our sense of what is right and good. She is the author of four books, including Stealing My Religion: […]

Cindy S. Lee is a Taiwanese-American spiritual director and aspiring mystic. She leads retreats in the areas of Christian mysticism and BIPOC centered spirituality. She also mentors and trains spiritual directors, and is particularly interested in supporting BIPOC spiritual directors.

Gwendolyn Gillson researches at the intersection of anthropology of religion, East Asian studies and gender studies. Her work at Illinois College broadly examines how women craft their experiences of Buddhism to deal with the loneliness endemic to the dissolution of traditional Japanese social structures brought about by urbanization and globalization.

Noam Sienna is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He is a scholar of Jewish culture and history, a Jewish educator and a Hebrew calligrapher and book artist. His academic work has focused on Jewish communities in the Islamic world, from the Middle Ages to the present, including their domestic practices.

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is associate 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.

Emily D. Crews is the executive director of the Marty Center at the University of Chicago. Crews is a scholar of Christianities in Africa and the United States. Her scholarly research explores the ways that people’s religious lives are connected to their ideas about gender, race and the body. She is especially interested in how […]

Chunrye Kim is an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, specializing in studying various aspects of violence within intimate relationships, such as intimate partner violence, stalking and violence against women. She also examines other angles related to these issues, including community-based intervention policies and religion.

Amy Adamczyk is professor of sociology at John Jay College in New York City. Her research includes religion, deviance and crime, sociological theory, sexuality and health.