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.
Timothy Wyatt is an independent scholar with an interest in religious history.
Tsuneo Kawakami is Senior Researh Fellow at PHP Institute in Kyoto, Japan. Previously he was a staff writer at Nikkei, Inc. and a junior research fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. After receiving his M.A. in Sociology from the University of Essex in 2001, he completed his Ph. D. on Japanese new religious movements at Lancaster Unversity in 2008. He is currently interested in the religious aspects of Japanese business culture. His recent publication is Bijinesusho to Nihonjin (Business books and the Japanese, 2012, in Japanese).
At the time of writing, Venetia is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Studies in Religion Department at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her thesis explores the interactions between other-than-human identity, spirituality, popular culture, and the Internet. She has published on a number of subcultures, including the Otherkin, the Therianthropy community, mermaid cosplayers, Soulbonders, and Bronies. She lectures on a variety of subjects, from fandom to ancient mythology, the history of monotheism, the ‘world religion’ paradigm, atheism and secularization, new religious movements, and the relationship of religion to new media. Currently, she is the Social Media Editor for the Religious Studies Project – http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/.
KAREN M. JOHNSON-WEINER
Karen M. Johnson-Weiner is a Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Potsdam, where she teaches courses in linguistic anthropology. She holds the PhD in linguistics from McGill University and has been studying culture and language use in Amish communities for over 30 years. A recent Snowden Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, her research has been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and grants from NEH, the Spencer Foundation and the SUNY Potsdam Research and Creative Endeavors Program. She is the author of Train up a Child: Old Order Amish and Mennonite Schools (2007, The Johns Hopkins University Press) and New York Amish. Life in the Plain Communities of the Empire State (2010, Cornell University Press), and co-author, with Dr. Donald B. Kraybill and Dr. Steven Nolt, of The Amish (2013, The Johns Hopkins University Press). She is currently at work on a study of Old Order Amish Women (tentatively titled “Wives, Mothers, and Entrepreneurs: The Lives of Amish Women”).
KATHLEEN E. JENKINS
Kathleen E. Jenkins (Ph.D. Brandeis University, Sociology – BA/MA Religious Studies, Brown University) is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of William and Mary. She has published articles in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , Social Forces, and Teaching Sociology . Her first book, Awesome Families: The Promise of Healing Relationships in the International Churches of Christ (2005) was published by Rutgers University Press. Her second book, Sacred Divorce: Religion, Therapeutic Culture, and Ending Life Partnerships (2014), published by Rutgers as well, is an ethnography of religious individuals’ experience of ending life partnerships in Catholic, Jewish, Black Baptist, Mainline, and Evangelical Protestant traditions. She is the Co-Director of the Pilgrimage Institute at the College of William and Mary and her current ethnographic project explores the experiences of parents and their emerging adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago in northwest Spain.
Eric Pellish is a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University with degrees in Religious Studies and Electrical Engineering. He wrote his honors undergraduate thesis on the intersection of biblical and constitutional hermeneutics, focusing on post World War II American political, cultural, and religious development and transformation. Eric is currently working for Accenture in their Systems Integration Consulting workforce.
Eugene V. Gallagher is the Rosemary Park Professor of Religious Studies at Connecticut College. He is a co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions and associate editor of Teaching Theology and Religion. He is the author of The New Religious Movements Experience in America (2004), co-author, with James D. Tabor, of Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (1995), and co-editor, with W. Michael Ashcraft, of the five volumes of Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in the United States (2006).
Fabiola Lopez Chesnut, originally from Morelia, Mexico, teaches high school Spanish in Richmond and is also a photographer specializing in religious imagery from Latin America. Her photographic work appears in Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2012) and in “Santa Muerte: Mexico’s Devotion to the Saint of Death” (Huffington Post, January 7, 2012).