Religious Studies Review (RSR) is a quarterly review of publications across the entire field of religion and related disciplines. RSR is the only publication that provides major review essays and short reviews for over 1,000 titles in religion annually. The editorial staff is composed of professors from all over the world.

Mark MacWilliams, Executive Editor - Major Reviews (Until January 2025)
St. Lawrence University
Nathanael Homewood, Executive Editor - Major Reviews (Starting Janary 2025)
University of Minnesota
Spencer Dew, Short Reviews Editor
The Ohio State University
Anthony B. Pinn, Managing Editor
Rice University
Holly Walrath, RSR Coordinator
Rice University

Comparative Studies/Methodology and Theory

Brian Collins, Ohio University

Brian Collins, Ohio University

Alexander van der Haven, University of Bergen

Alexander van der Haven (Ph.D. History of Religions, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2009) is Professor in the Study of Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. His areas of interest are early modern religious history with a focus on Jewish-Christian relations, religious minorities, and method and theory in the study of religion. He is one of the editors of DeGruyter’s Religious Minorities Online.

Psychology of Religion

Jonathan Jong, University of Oxford, Bristol Medical School

Jonathan Jong's research focuses on the psychological causes, consequences, and correlates of religion and spirituality. His most recent book is Experimenting with Religion (OUP, 2023), and he is the Editor of the Cambridge University Press series Elements in Psychology of Religion. He is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Bristol Medical School.

Gender and Sexuality Studies

Religion and Science
Lisa Stenmark, San Jose State University

Theology

Christopher Stephenson, Lee University

Christopher Stephenson, Lee University

Matthew Friedman, Subeditor, Missiology, Mission and Evangelism, Asbury Theological Seminary

Matthew Friedman, Subeditor, Missiology, Mission and Evangelism, Asbury Theological Seminary

Daniel Castelo, William Kellon Quick Professor of Theology and Methodist Studies, Duke University

Daniel Castelo, PhD, is the William Kellon Quick Professor of Theology and Methodist Studies. His areas of expertise include Christian theology, Wesleyan and Pentecostal spirituality, and Latinx theology.

Philosophy of Religion
Charles Taliaferro, St. Olaf College
Alexander Cavender, St. Olaf College

Ethics
James P. Bailey, Duquesne University

Religion and Law

Jeffrey Wheatley, Iowa State University

Jeffrey Wheatley is a teacher and researcher who studies religion, culture, and politics with a historical focus on the United States. His current project is on religious fanaticism as an object of secular policing.

Leslie Ribovich, Trinity College

Leslie Ribovich is a scholar and teacher of religion, race, and education in the United States. She is Director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Public Policy & Law at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Her book Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools was published by NYU Press in 2024.

Pedagogy
Ken Derry, University of Toronto

Emily Gravett, James Madison University

Emily O. Gravett is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religion and an assistant director in the Center for Faculty Innovation at James Madison University. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. She publishes widely on teaching, including frequent contributions to the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion blog.

Digital Materials and Media

Religion, Arts and Culture

Kristen Tobey, John Carroll University

Kristen Tobey, John Carroll University

Jeremy Biles, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Jeremy Biles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses on religion, philosophy, and art. He is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form; co-editor of Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion; and co-author of The Abyss, or Life Is Simple.

Donato Loia, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Donato Loia is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2023, he received a PhD in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin. For his academic and curatorial work, he has received awards from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). His essays have appeared in Religion and the Arts, New Blackfriars, Visual Studies, and Mise-en-Scène: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration, among other places. He has also written for Genealogies of Modernity and The Brooklyn Rail. His first book, 1095 Short Sentences, was published by B-Side Editions. He lives in Chicago.

Christina Pasqua, University of Toronto

Christina Pasqua is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and in the Book History and Print Culture Collaborative Program. She researches and teaches the study of visual Christianities in the Americas. Her current project focuses on the role of creativity and craft in how comic book artists read, interpret, and illustrate biblical stories within the context of their own lives. She also writes about autobiography, Catholic horror, and depictions of gendered bodies in popular culture. Her film criticism on these topics is published in The Revealer.

Ancient Near East
Tyler Mayfield, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Greece, Rome, Greco-Roman Period

Jenny Strauss Clay, University of Virginia

Jenny Strauss Clay is William R. Kenan Professor of Classics Emerita at the University of Virginia. Her publications have focused on early Greek literature and what she calls the theology of Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns.

Christian Origins

John Goodrich, Moody Bible Institute

John Goodrich, Moody Bible Institute

Patrick Gray, Rhodes College

Patrick Gray (Ph.D., Emory University) is Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. He received his Ph.D. in religion from Emory University. His research focuses on the Greco-Roman context of early Christianity and the history of biblical interpretation. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament (2021).

Stan Harstine, Subeditor, Johannine Literature, Friends University

Stan Harstine, Subeditor, Johannine Literature, Friends University

James Prothro, Subeditor, Augustine Institute

James Prothro, Subeditor, Augustine Institute

Daniel M. Gurtner, Subeditor, Gospel of Matthew, St. Mary's University, Twickenham

Daniel M. Gurtner, Subeditor, Gospel of Matthew, St. Mary's University, Twickenham

History of Christianity: Early

Ben C. Blackwell, Vice Principal and Professor of Early Christianity WTC Theology

Ben C. Blackwell, Vice Principal and Professor of Early Christianity WTC Theology

Laura Dingeldein, University of Illinois at Chicago

Laura Dingeldein is a historian of ancient Mediterranean religion, with expertise in the beginnings of Christianity. Her recent work has focused in particular on early Christians' use of philosophical concepts. She teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is a clinical assistant professor in the Religious Studies Program.

Sarah F. Porter, Gonzaga University

Sarah F. Porter is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA). She focuses on late antique Christianity, material culture, and affect.

Shawn J. Wilhite, California Baptist University

Shawn J. Wilhite, California Baptist University

History of Christianity: Modern/Global

Deanna Ferree Womack, Emory University Candler School of Theology

Deanna Ferree Womack (Ph.D. Princeton Theological Seminary) is Associate Professor of History of Religions and Interfaith Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. Her work focuses on Middle Eastern Christianity, Protestant missions, and Christian-Muslim relations, with particular attention to gender. Womack is the author of Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Neighbors: Christians and Muslims Building Community (Westminster John Knox, 2020). She is the co-editor with Raimundo Barreto of Alterity and the Evasion of Justice: Explorations of the “Other” in World Christianity (Fortress Press, 2023) and the co-editor with Phillip Forness of the Edinburgh Studies in Middle Eastern Christianity series. Womack is the current chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Middle Eastern Christianity Unit. Her research has been funded by the Louisville Institute, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the American Academy of Religion, and the David M. Stowe Research Fellowship at Yale University Divinity School.

Leanne Williams Green, University of Sydney

Leanne Williams Green is an incoming Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney and was formerly a Research Fellow (JRF) at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her research and publications are focused on global Christianities, the ethnographic study of religion, African experiences, religious ethics, and the relation between theology and anthropology. Her first book is based on long term ethnographic fieldwork with Baptist Christians in Zimbabwe.

Eric Hoenes del Pinal, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Eric Hoenes del Pinal is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith (University of Arizona Press, 2022) and co-editor of Mediating Catholicism: Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries (with Marc Roscoe Loustau and Kristin Norget, Bloomsbury 2022). He is currently working on a project examining Q'eqchi'-Maya Catholics' responses to climate change.

Dr Ala Alhourani, University of Cape Town

Dr Ala Alhourani is a senior lecturer in the Department for Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town. His PhD research is on the aesthetics of Islam and Muslim performances of citizenship, conviviality, and differences in South Africa’s post-apartheid secular state. His post-doctorate research explores how the aesthetic of religion shapes everyday ethics in public life. His research foregrounds aesthetic experiences of religion as embodied ethics, knowledge, power, and traditions. His research interests are Islam in Africa, Sufism, ethics, art and aesthetics, anthropology of religion, and secularisation.

Jewish Thought

Alexander Green, University of Florida

Alexander Green is an Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He taught previously at SUNY, University at Buffalo in the Department of Jewish Thought. His research is on medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy, ethics and the history of biblical interpretation. He is the author of two books: The Virtue Ethics of Levi Gersonides (Palgrave, 2016) and Power and Progress: Joseph Ibn Kaspi and the Meaning of History (SUNY Press, 2019). He also co-edited Jewish Virtue Ethics with Geoffrey Claussen and Alan Mittleman (SUNY Press, 2023).

Judaism: Hellenistic through Late Antiquity
Jason Maston, Houston Christian University

Dr. Yitz Landes, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Dr. Yitz Landes (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His research focuses on the premodern transmission of Jewish knowledge, primarily vis-à-vis the history of rabbinic education and the history of the Jewish book. Additionally, Dr. Landes works on the development of Jewish ritual and liturgy, topics he addressed in his first monograph, Studies in the Development of Birkat ha-Avodah (The Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies, 2018). Dr. Landes received a BA in Talmud and Halakhah and Comparative Religion and an MA in Talmud and Halakhah and Late Antique Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as an AM and PhD in Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity from Princeton University. At JTS, Dr. Landes teaches courses on classical and post-classical rabbinic texts, on Jewish Liturgy, on ancient Jewish History, and on Hebrew manuscript cultures. In addition, he teaches a semester of the Jewish Canon curriculum for undergraduate freshmen. Dr. Landes’s current book project, based on his Princeton dissertation, traces the reception and transmission history of the Mishnah, the central work of the rabbinic canon, from its inception in late second-century Galilee until the publication of Maimonides commentary to the Mishnah in the 12th century. By uncovering the various ways in which people studied, memorized, copied, and cared for the Mishnah, Dr. Landes maps the spread of Rabbinic Judaism by providing a detailed picture of the history of rabbinic literacy and identity, taking into account the diversity of the various premodern Jewish communities located throughout the Mediterranean world. Dr. Landes also researches the textual criticism of various ancient and medieval Jewish works, and is co-editing a critical edition and translation of The Epistle of Pirqoi ben Baboi, a polemical letter from the turn of the 9th century that is crucial for understanding the spread of rabbinic practice and the reception of the Babylonian Talmud.

Judaism: Medieval/Early Modern Jewish Studies
Deborah Kaye, University of Arizona

Judaism: Modern
Jonathan Zisook, University of Pittsburgh

Islam

Hamed Fayazi, University of Religions and Denominations

Hamed Fayazi, University of Religions and Denominations

Walaa Quisay, Graduate of Oxford University

Walaa Quisay, Graduate of Oxford University

Esra Tunc, San Diego State University

Esra Tunc is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at San Diego State University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a scholar of religion and capitalism, her work interrogates contemporary Islamic and ethical financial technologies, while exploring relationalities based on care and liberatory solidarity.

Sophia Arjana, Western Kentucky University

Sophia Rose Arjana is associate professor of Religious Studies in the Potter College of Arts and Letters at Western Kentucky University. Her most recent book is Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace (2020). Her current project explores contemporary Islamic practice in Indonesia through the lens of material religion, gender, and memory.

Africa

Francis Ethelbert Kwabena Benyah, University of Copenhagen

Francis Ethelbert Kwabena Benyah is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of African Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he also holds an associate position at the Centre for Privacy Studies. His research primarily centres on the Pentecostal manifestation of African Christianity in Ghana and its intersections with various dimensions of public life, including media, politics, health, and human rights. In addition, Benyah actively participates in Åbo Akademi University’s Centre of Excellence, multinational project called Religion and Social Exclusion (RelEx). This project investigates how socially excluded groups, such as sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, and prisoners, relate and engage with religion across different cultural contexts in Finland, Ghana, India, and Peru. Benyah’s other research interests encompass religion, cultural heritage, memory, and privacy studies. He particularly emphasizes the significance of traditional ritual performances at former slave castles in Ghana, shedding light on the intricate connections between religion, memory, and the complex issues of identity and concealed histories associated with the Atlantic slave trade.

Mariam Goshadze, Leipzig University

Mariam Goshadze is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Leipzig University, Germany. Her work focuses on traditional religions, Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity, religion and culture, religious sound, and secularity in the context of West Africa.

Oceania

Rosemary Hancock, University of Notre Dame

Rosemary Hancock is Senior Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, Australia and Convener of their Religion, Culture, and Society Research Focus Area. Her research examines the entanglements of religion and grassroots politics with a particular expertise on environmentalism, and community organising.

Anna Halafoff, Deakin University

Dr. Anna Halafoff is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Deakin University and the coordinator of the Spirituality and Wellbeing (SWell) Research Network. She is the author of The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and Cosmopolitan Solutions (Springer, 2013), co-author of Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity (with Singleton, Rasmussen and Bouma, Bloomsbury, 2021) and co-editor of Religious Diversity in Australia: Living Well with Difference (with Ezzy, Banham and Barton, Bloomsbury, 2024).

The Americas

Michael Amoruso, Occidental College

Michael Amoruso is Assistant Professor of Religion in the Americas at Occidental College. His research focuses on religion, race, and urbanism in the United States and Brazil.

Carol B. Duncan, Wilfrid Laurier University

Carol B. Duncan is a tenured professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. A sociologist by training, she holds a PhD in sociology from York University. Her areas of research interest include Caribbean religions in transnational and diasporic contexts, religion and culture of the African Diaspora and religion and popular culture. She held a fellowship in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and served as a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. She served as an academic consultant and appeared in the award-winning documentary Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, Professor Duncan is the author of This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto , co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction and contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions. She is co-editor of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions and The Black Church Studies Reader. She is working on a co-authored introduction to the study of black religion and popular culture.

New and Alternative Religious Movements
Lukas Pokorny, University of Vienna

Lukas K. Pokorny, University of Vienna

Lukas K. Pokorny is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. Large parts of his current research focus on millenarianism and esotericism (specifically the reception history of East Asia), new religious movements, as well as new, alternative, and Asian diasporic religions in Austria.

South Asia
Steven E. Linquist, Southern Methodist University, Associate Professor and Director of Asian Studies
Gardner Harris, Hampden-Sydney College

East Asia

Lukas K. Pokorny, University of Vienna

Lukas K. Pokorny is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. Large parts of his current research focus on millenarianism and esotericism (specifically the reception history of East Asia), new religious movements, as well as new, alternative, and Asian diasporic religions in Austria.

Buddhism

Justin McDaniel, University of Pennsylvania

Justin McDaniel, University of Pennsylvania

Matthew Steven Mitchell, High Point University

Matthew Steven Mitchell is a visiting assistant professor of Religion at High Point University in North Carolina. His research is on early modern Japanese Buddhism.

April D. Hughes, Boston University

April D. Hughes is an associate professor of Religion at Boston University. Her research centers on medieval Chinese Buddhism.

Blayne Harcey, Virginia Commonwealth University

Blayne Harcey is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research is on pilgrimage and transnational flows of Theravada Buddhism between South and Southeast Asia.

Inner Asia

Rory Lindsay, University of California, Santa Barbara

Rory Lindsay, University of California, Santa Barbara

Daigengna Duoer, Boston University

Daigengna Duoer is a historian specializing in religion in modern East and Inner Asia, with a particular focus on transnational Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism in the twentieth century. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University

General inquiries about the journal can be made by contacting us at rsr@rice.edu. If you are interested in writing reviews for RSR, we encourage you to contact the area editor(s) of the sections in which you are interested. Please include a CV and possible titles you are interested in reviewing (see our list of books available for review). Please note, we prefer to review titles published in the last three years.

We accept books related to religion in our areas of focus for review. Please send all books for review to the RSR Editorial Office:
Religious Studies Review - MS 156
Rice University
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, TX 77251-1892
(713) 348-5721