Asonzeh Ukah is a sociologist/historian of religion. He joined the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2013. He taught at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, from 2005 to 2013 . He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, (where he earned his BA; MA & MSc. degrees) and the University of Bayreuth, Germany (where he earned his doctoral & Habilition degrees). In addition to numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and contributions of book chapters, he is the author of A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power: A Study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria (Africa World Press 2008). His research interests include religion and media, sociology of Pentecostalism, and religion and urbanism.

Aura Di Febo is a PhD Candidate in Japanese Studies / School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, The University of Manchester.

Benjamin E. Zeller is Assistant Professor of Religion at Lake Forest College (USA). He researches religious currents that are new or alternative, including new religions, the religious engagement with science, and the quasi-religious relationship people have with food. He is author of Prophets and Protons: New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America (New York University Press), co-editor of Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press), co-editor of The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements and co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.

Bernadette Rigal-Cellard is Professor in North-American Studies at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne where she founded the multidisciplinary Masters Program in Religious Studies in 2005. She is a specialist of North American contemporary religions and of Native literatures.

She has published many studies in France and abroad, notably: Le Mythe et la plume (Monaco : Le Rocher, 2004), and La religion des mormons (Paris : Albin Michel, 2012).

She has edited several volumes on the adaptation of religions to other cultures, and on the impact of Christian missions: Les mutations transatlantiques des religions (& C. Lerat. Pessac : PUB, 2000); Sectes, Églises, mystiques : échanges, conquêtes, métamorphoses (dir. Bordeaux : Pleine Page, 2004); Missions Extrêmes en Amérique du Nord : des jésuites à Raël (Pleine Page, 2005); Religions et mondialisation : exils, expansions, résistances (PUB, 2009); Prophéties et utopies religieuses au Canada. Pessac : PUB, 2011. 309 p. She is preparing a book on the history of the Tekakwitha Conference and the inculturation of Catholicism in North American Native communities.

Birgit Staemmler studied Japanese and Anthropology in London (SOAS), Heidelberg and Tübingen. She completed her PhD in 2002 with a thesis about “Chinkon kishin: Mediated Spirit Possession in Japanese New Religions,” whch was (published in 2009 by LIT Verlag. She is currently in Tübingen working on a research project about Japanese religions and individual religious specialists and the Internet. She co-edited with Erica Baffelli and Ian Reader Japanese Religions on the Internet: Innovation, Representation and Authority (Routledge, 2011) and co-edited with with Ulrich Dehn Establishing the Revolutionary: An Introduction to New Religions in Japan” (LIT Verlag, 2011).

Caitlin St. Clair served as a Research Assistant for the World Religions and Spirituality Project, 2012-2014. Sheisco-authorof a number of WRSP profiles: Our Lady of Good Hope; Mother Meera; Bikram Yoga; Peyote Way Church of God; Christ the Redeemer.

Catherine Wessinger is Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S.J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University New Orleans. She has served as co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions since 2000. She is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (2011). Her oral history project with surviving Branch Davidians has produced three Branch Davidian autobiographies: Bonnie Haldeman, Memories of the Branch Davidians: The Autobiography of David Koresh’s Mother, ed. Catherine Wessinger (2007); Sheila Martin, When They Were Mine: Memoirs of a Branch Davidian Wife and Mother, ed. Catherine Wessinger; and Clive Doyle with Catherine Wessinger and Matthew D. Wittmer, A Journey to Waco: Autobiography of a Branch Davidian (2012). She is co-director of the Women in the World’s Religions and Spirituality Project, and she is editor of the Women in Religions series with New York University Press.

I am a senior lecturer in Theology & Religious Studies at York St John University; I have worked there as Head of Department and Head of both B.A. and M.A. programmes, but I am now semi-retired and concentrate on teaching and writing. I am married to Natalie.

I gained a PhD at the University of Leeds in 1991, on the apparitions of Mary in modern European Roman Catholicism. Since then I have written several journal articles on the European apparitions of Mary, culminating in a monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2016: Our Lady of the Nations: Apparitions of Mary in 20th-Century Catholic Europe. This is a detailed, scholarly overview which discusses apparitions in general and how they are interpreted in Catholicism. The role of women and children as visionaries is considered, given that they have comprised the greater majority of famous visionaries in the modern period. While the book covers cases that are well known and approved by the Church, and others that are well known but not approved, many more obscure cases are also discussed, such as those in Belgian Flanders or Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or in France, Italy or Germany after the Second World War. Therefore the book will inform even the most well-read student of apparitions. Resources include academic studies of particular apparitions, some Catholic theological and devotional literature, and occasionally travel writing where it sheds light on apparitions in their original context. There is also coverage of material in French which is not known to the English-speaking reader.

My interest in Mary has led me to be a founder member of a society which promotes the academic study of Mary in a variety of disciplines and organises the gathering of scholars and students. This is the Centre of Marian Studies in the United Kingdom, which was formally instituted as a charitable association in 1996. I am the chair of trustees. Working with Sarah Jane Boss, the director, I contributed to her edited volume, Mary: the Complete Resource (Continuum, 2007), and edited my own, based on a conference run by the Centre in York: Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Continuum, 2008). I have now edited a new Oxford Handbook of Mary (Oxford, 2019) which includes many established specialists on various aspects of the cult of Mary throughout history. Whilst being a scholar of Catholic popular religion in my professional life, I am also passionate about Marian shrines as a personal interest, visiting them across Europe and helping to maintain my local shrine, a 15th century rock chapel in Knaresborough, Yorkshire.

I was asked in the mid-1990s to edit a new volume of Henry Bettenson’s collection, Documents of the Christian Church, familiar to many undergraduates. He died in 1979 and the first two editions were published before Vatican II, the advent of liberation theology and feminist theology, and many of the new issues that have presented a challenge to churches in the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, a new edition was needed. Oxford University Press published my third edition in 1999 and my fourth edition in 2011. The selection of a limited number of documents amongst so many potential inclusions is not easy, and the result will never please everyone. However, after first having added a section on the documents of Vatican II, I decided that the churches’ response to the social issues of contemporary life, such as poverty, race, gender, sexuality, the environment, disability, interfaith relations and new technologies merited a good proportion of the space available.

CHRISTAL WHELAN

Christal Whelan, Ph.D. — anthropologigist, author, filmmaker — specialises in Japanese religion and culture. She is author of The Beginning of Heaven and Earth: The Sacred Book of Japan’s Hidden Christians (University of Hawaii Press, 1996), director/producer of the film Otaiya: Japan’s Hidden Christians (DER, 1997). As a Fulbright recipient, Whelan researched Japanese new religious movements for her Ph.D. dissertation while affiliated with the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. She was also a research fellow at the Institute on Culture Religion and World Affairs at Boston University for the duration of her doctoral studies. Her recent collection of essays Kansai Cool: A Journey into The Cultural Heartland of Japan (Tuttle, 2014) reflects her work as a columnist for the Yomiuri newspaper, and her many years living in Japan and steeped in its traditions. She is currently in her home state of Hawaii working on the book Native Features: Indigenous Cinema Worldwide (Bloomsbury, 2016), a study of the trends and issues in fictional filmmaking among indigenous populations worldwide and some of the key personalities involved.

Clark Chilson, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh. His recent publications include  Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists and Contradictions of Concealment  (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) and “Cultivating Charisma: Ikeda Daisaku’s Self Presentation and Transformational Leadership”  Journal of Global Buddhism  15 (2014): 65-78. His current research is on Naikan and religious-inspired treatments for mental illness in Japan, both historical and current.