Anthea Butler

Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought
University of Pennsylvania

Anthea Butler is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social thought and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of African American and American religion, Professor Butler’s research and writing spans African American religion and American Religious history, race, politics, Evangelicalism, media, and popular culture.  Butler’s recent book is White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America on Ferris and Ferris/UNC Press. Professor Butler also is a contributor to The 1619 Book: A New Beginning, with a chapter entitled “Church”. Her first book is Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making A Sanctified World, also published by UNC Press.

Professor Butler is the winner of the 2022 Martin Marty Award from the American Academy of Religion. Her grant awards include a Luce/ACLS Fellowship for the Religion, Journalism and International Affairs grant for 2018-2019 academic year to investigate Prosperity gospel and politics in the American and Nigerian context. She was a Presidential fellow at Yale Divinity School for the 2019-2020 academic year. Currently Professor Butler is a co-director of the Henry Luce Foundation funded Crossroads Project for Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures. She has previously served as president of the American Society for Church history and the Society of Pentecostal Studies. Prof. Butler also holds honorary doctorates from Lutheran Theological Seminary and Meadville Lombard Theological School. She was also a member of the recently concluded Mormon-Evangelical Dialogue, which started in 2000.  

Lauren Horn Griffin

Assistant Professor of History, Louisiana State University

Lauren Horn Griffin researches and teaches about religion, technology, media, and nationalism. Her first book, Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England (Brill 2023), showed how confessional debates played a critical role in the development of national identities. Her current project investigates contemporary negotiations of national, post national, religious, and racial identities in Catholic communities online. This project combines insights from science and technology studies, political science, and media studies. Her academic work has appeared in a variety journals and publications including Religion Dispatches, The Journal of History and Cultures, Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab, Uncivil Religion, New Conversations About Religion, and Key Categories in the Study of Religion: Contexts and Critiques, and Encyclopedia of Global Religion. Her current project is a volume entitled Discourses of "Crisis" in the Study of Religion. 

She teaches classes including "Fundamentalism and Nationalism," "History of Religion in the United States," "Religion and AI," "Global Catholicism Today" and "What is Religion? Dr. Griffin has received awards and fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Catholic Historical Association. 

Dr. Bradley Onishi is author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism - And What Comes Next. He is co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast and teaches at the University of San Francisco. He writes often for public outlets, including the New York Times, Huffpost, Politico, NBC News, and others. Onishi holds advanced degrees from Oxford University and L'institut catholique de Paris. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from UCSB. The co-chair of the Secularism and Secularity Unit at the American Academy of Religion, his first book The Sacrality of the Secular: Postmodern Philosophy of Religion appeared in 2018 from Columbia University Press. He is the editor or translator of three other works on philosophy of religion and Christian mysticism.