Sarah Luginbill is a visiting assistant professor in history and the humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio. Luginbill is interested in the intersection of museums and objects, especially religious or spiritual items. She currently researches portable Mass kits used by Catholic chaplains in the U.S. military during World Wars I and II.

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.

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.

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.

Matthew Hayes is the librarian for Japanese studies and Asian American studies at Duke University. He is co-creator of the website “Collecting Religion.”

James S. Bielo is associate professor in the department of religious studies at Northwestern University. He specializes in the anthropological study of religion, Christianity, American religion and the study of material religion.

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 […]