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.

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 […]

Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie is a former Virgin Records rapper, turned evangelist, activist and organizer, who left the music industry in 1994 to become a pastor. He is founder of the Row —  also known as “the Church Without Walls”, or as some of our parishioners like to call it, “the Street Church” — in Los Angeles’ […]

Najuma Smith-Pollard is Assistant Director of Community and Public Engagement with the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture. She is also a pastor, community activist and program lead for the Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement, which is housed at CRCC.

Jamileh Naso is president of the Canadian Yazidi Foundation, a non-profit organization designed to assist Yazidis in need.