Hugh B. Urban is a professor of religious studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is interested in the role of secrecy in religion, particularly in relation to questions of knowledge and power. His two main areas of research are religions of South Asia and new religions in the United States. He is the author of seven books, including Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (2003) and The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (2011).

Ian Reader is Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University, England. Previously he has been Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, and has held academic positions in Japan, Scotland, Hawaii and Denmark. He is the author of several books on issues related to religion in Japan, to pilgrimage, and to the Aum Shinrikyō Affair. Recent publications include Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) and a co-edited edition of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (2012) with Erica Baffelli on the impact and aftermath of the Aum Affair in Japan and beyond.

Isabelle Kinnard Richman received her PhD in Church History from the University of Chicago Divinity School in medieval church history. She earlier received her JD from the DePaul College of Law and her BA from the University of Chicago. She has taught religious studies at Northwestern University, the College of William and Mary, and currently, at Virginia Commonwealth University. For seven years she served as Vice Pres. at the First Freedom Center, in Richmond, Virginia where her combined background in law and religion led her to specialize in religious freedom, American constitutional law, and human rights. She contributed a chapter to a collected volume about asceticism in Christianity and Buddhism, where she wrote about martyrs in late antiquity.  She is currently working on a biography of Sojourner Truth for Routledge Press.

J. Eugene Clay  studied Russian history at the University of Chicago, where he earned his BA, MA, and PhD degrees. He serves as associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University, where he writes and lectures about religious movements in Russia and Eurasia, the relationship between religion and nationalism, and the encounters of the world religions. His work has appeared in many scholarly journals, including  Church History, Russian History,  and the  Cahiers du monde russe. He is currently completing a monograph about Russian Spiritual Christianity, whose adepts rejected the hierarchy, sacraments, fasts, and icons of the state church to embrace a spiritual interpretation of the Bible and of Christian tradition.

Dr. Jan A. Ali is a Sociologist of Religion (Islam). He is a Senior Lecturer in Islam and Modernity in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and simultaneously holds a title as the Community and Research Analyst in the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at the University of Western Sydney. His main sociological focus is on the study of existential Islam. In recent years Jan has been invited by a number of non-government organizations and government agencies in various capital cities and overseas to deliver Public Lectures on Islamic Revivalism, Shar’iah, Terrorism, and various other important topics on Islam.

Jan is the author of Islamic Revivalism Encounters the Modern World: A Study of the Tablīgh Jamā‘at (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2012).

Currently Jan is researching the Importance of Shari‘ah in Australia using data based on questionnaire survey and collaborating with Professor Kevin Dunn, Professor Peter Hopkins, and Associate Professor Adam Possamai researching Muslims on Campus: University Life for Muslim Students in Australia.

Telephone: +61 2 9772 6126
Mobile : +61 401 689 088
Email: Jan.Ali@uws.edu.au

Janet Kahl is an independent scholar from Sydney. She has degrees in Studies in Religion and Museum Studies from the University of Sydney and has published on recent trends in the study of pilgrimage and tourism, the miracle image of the Virgin Mary at Yankalilla, South Australia, recent developments in the academic study of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the globalization of Marian apparitions and veneration.

Jeffery D. Long is Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College, where he has taught since completing his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago in the year 2000. He is the author of three books–A Vision for Hinduism: Beyond Hindu Nationalism, Jainism: An Introduction, and The Historical Dictionary of Hinduism–as well as the forthcoming Indian Philosophy: An Introduction and Indian Philosophy: The Essential Readings. He has also published articles in a wide variety of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Vaishnava Studies, the Journal of Process Studies, the International Journal of Hindu Studies, and Prabuddha Bharata (the journal of the Ramakrishna Order in India). He has presented in such venues as the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Mr. Hadden was a Professor of Sociology who began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1972. Mr. Hadden earned his PhD in 1963 at the University of Wisconsin, where he was trained as a demographer and human ecologist.

During a post-doctoral year at Wisconsin, Mr. Hadden was invited to participate in a study of campus clergy funded by the Danforth Foundation. This study provided the opportunity to investigate the involvement of clergy in the Civil Rights Movement. For three years he interviewed clergy on the frontlines of the movement, and from this research came his first book on religion entitled The Gathering Storm in the Churches (1969). This book dealt principally with the conflict that was generated within mainline Protestant churches as a result of clergy participation in social action projects.

What was intended as a brief career diversion soon became Mr. Hadden’s primary research interest. He published eleven volumes and numerous articles and essays on religion. Mr. Hadden approached the study of religion from the perspective of social movements theory and characterized his primary interest as the comparative study of religion and politics. He was probably best known for his studies of religious broadcasters and the emergence of the Christian Right in America during the 1980s. In more recent years, he focused his interest on new religious movements. With David Bromley (Professor of Sociology at VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity) he edited a two-volume work entitled Handbook of Cults and Sects in America.

In 1995, Mr. Hadden was appointed a Teaching Technology Fellow at the University of Virginia. This program offered him an opportunity to learn how modern communications technologies might be employed in the classroom. He characterized himself as a “technophobe” when he began the program. In 1996, he began work on a religious movements web site in conjunction with a course in New Religious Movements that he taught at the University of Virginia for nearly twenty years. The site, developed with his students, now contains over 150 profiles of religious movements. Mr. Hadden’s Home Page also includes information on other courses he taught and is the temporary home of the Archives of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association.

In 1998, Mr. Hadden began construction of two additional websites on Religious Freedom and Religious Broadcasting, characterizing himself as a “recovering technophobe.” In an article for the American Sociological Association’s Teaching Resources Center, he described his quest to overcome his fear of technology.

Mr. Hadden received his BA and MA degrees in Psychology (1959) and Sociology (1960) from the University of Kansas. Before moving to the University of Virginia, Mr. Hadden taught at PurdueUniversity, CaseWestern ReserveUniversity, and Tulane.

Jeffrey T. Kenney is Walter E. Bundy Professor of Religious Studies at DePauw University. He received his Ph.D. in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specialized in Islamic sectarianism, modern Islamist movements, and history of religions. His research focuses on modern Islam in Egypt and the greater Middle East, with particular interest in Islamism, religion-state relations, and the ways Islam is being functionalized to address changing values. He recently coedited, along with Ebrahim Moosa, Islam in the Modern World (Routledge 2014). His research on the Kharijites, the first sectarian movement in Islamic history, resulted in several publications on the discursive reinvention of the sect in modern Egypt, including Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt (Oxford 2006). He is currently working on material gathered during a Fulbright research award to study the teaching of comparative religion in Malaysia (2012-2013).