Simren Bhatt served as a Research Assistant for the World Religions and Spirituality Project, 2015.

Stephanie Edelman is a Research Assistant on the World Religions & Spirituality Project. She is co-author of the Family Radio, Church of All Worlds, and Growing in Grace profiles.

Stephanie Urlass worked as a Research Assistant in the World Religions and Spirituality Project in 2012-2013. She is co-author of the Salvation Mountain profile.

Stephen Hunt is Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Applied Social Sciences, the University of the West of England . His academic interest lies in contemporary Christianity with a current specific interest in religion and sexuality, rights issues, revivalistic movements, and the political mobilisation of Christian groupings. His published volumes include A History of the Charismatic Movement in Britain and the United States of America: The Pentecostal Transformation of Christianity (Edwin Mellen, 2009); Religion in Everyday Life (Routledge, 2006); The Life Course : A Sociological Introduction (Palgrave, 2005); The Alpha Enterprise : Evangelism in the Post-Christian Era (Ashgate, 2004); Alternative Religion : A Sociological Introduction (Ashgate, 2003); Religion in the West : A Sociological Perspective (Palgrave, 2001); and the edited volumes Contemporary Christianity and LGBT Sexualities (Ashgate, 2009; (with M. Marinov and M. Serafimova) Sociology and Law . The 50th Anniversary of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) (Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Christian Millenarianism (New York University Press & Hurst Publishing, 2001) and (with M. Hamilton & T. Walter) Charismatic Christianity : Sociological Perspectives (Palgrave, 1997).

Stuart A. Wright is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Dr. Wright teaches courses in religion, social movements, and terrorism. He is a former NIMH Research Fellow (Yale) and Rockefeller Foundation Scholar-in-Residence (Bellagio, Italy). In 2000, Lamar recognized Dr. Wright with a career achievement award as University Scholar. He has authored over fifty publications in scholarly books and journals. He is known internationally for his research on religious and political movements, conflict and violence. He has published five books, including Armageddon in Waco (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Saints under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (with James T. Richardson, New York University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a cross-national study of government raids on new or minority religious communities which will be published by Oxford University Press (coauthored with Susan J. Palmer).

Susan McCaslin, Ph.D. (University of British Columbia, 1984), is an award-winning Canadian poet and Faculty Emerita of Douglas College in Westminster, BC, where she taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-three years. She is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, including her most recent, The Disarmed Heart (The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014). Her Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2012) was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book of the Year) in 2012. Susan has edited two poetry anthologies; published a volume of essays, Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings (2011); and a memoir, Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna Publications, 2014). Her next volume of poetry, Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne , is forthcoming from Quattro Books (Toronto) in the Fall of 2016. Inanna Publications will be bringing out her selected poems in the Fall of 2017. Susan is a full-time poet and writer residing in Fort Langley, British Columbia.

Susan J. Palmer, lives in Montreal, Quebec where she is currently directing a four-year (SSHRC Insight) research project, Children in Sectarian Religiosn and State Control at McGill University’s School of Religious Studies, where she also teaches. She is an Affiliate Professor and Part-time Lecturer at Concordia University and a Co-Chercheuse with the ‎Centre d’expertise et de formation sur les intégrismes religieux et la radicalisation (CEFIR) at the Cégep Édouard-Montpetit in Longueuil, QC.

Palmer’s research in the field of new religious movements has been funded by six federal grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She has published many chapters and articles and eleven books on new religious movements, notably: The New Heretics of France (2011); Aliens Adored: Rael’s New Religion (2004); and (with co-author Stuart Wright) Storming Zion: Government Raids on Religious Communities (2015).

Susan M. Setta, is an associate professor of philosophy and religion and the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion. She received an AB from Wilson College, an MA from Hartford Seminary Foundation, and her PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in American religion and culture.

Professor Setta is currently at work developing a new schematic for understanding charismatic authority in new religious movements with a focus on Christian Science and the Lubavitcher Hassidism and a project in comparative religious ethics centering on end of life issues. She is the author of The Secularizing Impulse in Theological Education, a History of Hartford Seminary . “Women and Healing in North America,” in Rosemary Ruether, Rosemary Keller and Marie Cantlon, eds. Encyclopedia of Women and Religion, 2009. Professor Setta has recently completed a paper for the World Health Organization, “Determining that Death has Occurred: Perspectives from World Religions.” She is a past president of the New England/ Maritimes Region of the American Academy of Religion and a Mary Baker Eddy Library Fellow.

Timothy Beal is the Florence Harkness Professor of Religion at Case Western Reserve University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (in progress) and has published thirteen books, including The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (2011). He has written essays on religion and culture for The Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times, among others.

Timothy Miller is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas.  He studies new religious movements in the United States, with a special focus on groups in the past and present that practice communal living.  Among his books are The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America, The 60s Communes, and the edited volume America’s Alternative Religions.  His Encyclopedic Guide to American Intentional Communities will appear in 2012.