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: […]

Alina Kokoschka is a researcher in Islamic studies, specializing in the aesthetics of Islamization, with a focus on the material worlds of Islam and Arabic script in the digital space. She also has interest in the relationship between people and things as well as criticism of representations of Islam and “Islamic art.”

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.

Patricia Cecil is a specialist curator at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work focuses on enhancing insight into the ways faith and religion shaped and were shaped by World War I and its aftermath. 

Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist covering religion in America. He has written about religious life during and in response to the pandemic, including a profile of Clay Clark, the frontman of a prophecy-and-politics roadshow; New Age author Christiane Northrup’s conspiracy makeover; a faith-healing TikToker whose fandom grew during lockdown months; and a Pentecostal church that […]

Paul Christopher Johnson is professor of history at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on religious practices, diaspora religions and the practice of secrecy in the Americas, especially in Brazil and the Caribbean.

Gerry Bowler teaches at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Santa Claus: A Biography and The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, and the co-author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century. He has published works on topics ranging from Renaissance monarchy and Bloody Mary to the Simpsons, the Spice Girls and the history of […]

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 […]