Note: Speakers are in alphabetical order, not in the order they will address the group.

Catherine L. Albanese is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of the widely used textbook America: Religions and Religion, now in its third edition, and of numerous other articles and books, including Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Her most recent publications are American Spiritualities: A Reader, Reconsidering Nature Religion, and "American Religious History: A Bibliographical Essay," just published by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and available on-line at http://exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents.htm. In April 2003, Albanese was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to complete her next book, A Republic of Mystics and Metaphysicians: A Cultural History of U.S. Metaphysical Religion. Albanese is a former president of the American Academy of Religion.
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Nathalie Caron is French and the author of Thomas Paine contre l'imposture des pretres (Thomas Paine against the Imposition of the Priests), Paris, L'Harmattan, 1999. She
has been a maitre de conferences (associate professor) in American civilization at Paris 10-Nanterre, department of English and American Studies, since 1997. She is a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure (a school of higher education)and agregee d'anglais (which means that she took and passed the higher teaching certification exam in English). She has written on Thomas Paine's political and religious thought, American Deism, the American Enlightenment, religion and the Internet, new forms of religiosity in the United States and has coedited a number of the RFEA (Revue francaise d'etudes americaines, French Journal of American Studies) on the American Enlightenment, as well as a book called Nouveaux Regards sur l'Amerique: Peuples, Nation, Societe. Perspectives comparatistes, 17e-21e siecles (Revisiting America: Peoples, Nation, Society. A Comparative Perspective, 17th-21th Centuries). She is also interested in the link between 18th-century free thought and contemporary forms of belief.

Linda Ekstrom received her M.F.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996. She has consistently explored in her sculptures and installation spaces issue of memory and identity and a range of problems at the very center of religious traditions in the West, including sacred book which is the anchor of many of her works, and, the ritual dimensions present in art practice. She has also executed a number of memorial spaces which actualize issues around the Holocaust. Ekstrom has taught a range of courses in the Art Department and in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the Department of Religious Studies she and Richard Hecht have developed a course on religion and contemporary art and are currently working on a book-length manuscript, Saved from Matter: The Religious Cultures of Contemporary Art. Ekstrom’s work has been included in both solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Frumkin/Duval Gallery in Los Angeles; Montgomery Museum, Pomona College; Center for the Book, New York; LIMN Gallery and Quotidian Gallery in San Francisco; and in the international exhibition, “Faith” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield Connecticut. Most recently her work was featured in “Sacred Texts” at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and various other publications. Since 1996 Ekstrom has served as Artist in Residence in the Center for the Study of Religious at UCSB and in 2000 was selected to give a Herman P. and Sophia Taubman lecture in Jewish Studies. In 2003 she was a participant in the Notre Dame University Erasmus Institute Faculty Seminar, led by Geoffrey Hartman, Sacred Hermeneutics and Secular Interpretation. From 1998-2001, Ekstrom served on the committee for the Los Angeles Cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels, selecting art for the exterior and interior of the new cathedral designed by Raphael Moneo.
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Melissa Evans has been covering religion and ethics for the Santa Barbara News-Press for six months. Prior to that, she served as the religion and culture writer for the Oakland Tribune news chain, ANG Newspapers, for three years. She earned her bachelor's degree in journalism from San Diego State University, and has worked as a reporter covering everything from sports to religion for the last 10 years.

Kathleen Garces-Foley received her doctorate in religious studies, specializing in religion in America, from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research interests include multiethnic churches, immigrant religious communities, American Catholicism and Asian American religions. She has also published articles on the hospice movement and American death practices and edted the volume, Death and Religion in a Changing World (ME Sharpe, 2005). Currently Dr. Garces-Foley is teaching in the Religious Studies Department at California State University, Northridge and studying the racial and political attitudes of Asian American evangelical pastors under a grant from the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals.

Phillip E. Hammond retired in July, 2002, as the D. Mackenzie Brown Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He was a university professor for 42 years, teaching at Yale, Wisconsin, Arizona, the final 24 tears at UCSB. He remains active, teaching an occasional course, and he is involved in two book projects. His last three books are With Liberty For All, Soka Gakkai In America, and The Dynamics of Religious Organizations. <more info>

Richard Hecht is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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J.Shawn Landres lives in Los Angeles, where he is Director of Research at Synagogue 3000 (S3K) and a Visiting Research Fellow at UCLA's Center for Jewish Studies. He
coordinates the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute, the first action-research center for the study of Jewish congregational life. A popular lecturer both in the United States and abroad, Shawn has taught at UCSB, University of Judaism; Matej Bel University in Banská
Bystrica, Slovak Republic; and the University of Judaism. His latest book, with Oren Baruch Stier of Florida International University, is a collection forthcoming from Indiana University Press entitled Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place. In 2004 he co-edited After The
Passion is Gone: American Religious Consequences (AltaMira Press) with Michael Berenbaum. An occasional contributor to The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, he has published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters as well as essays for the popular press; his most recent article is "The Emerging Spiritual Paradigm" (Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, forthcoming June 2006) and his most recent book chapter is "Jewish Communities in the Americas," in A Handbook of Global Religions (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2007). He also co-edited and contributed to Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion (co-edited by James V. Spickard and Meredith B. McGuire; New York University Press 2002).

Katherine McClymond is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. An alumna of UCSB's Religious Studies PhD program, her research interests are Comparative History of Religions, Hinduism, Judaism, Ritual Theory, and Religion and Literature. In addition to courses in those interests, she regulalry offers courses on the religious dimensions of the Holocaust, biblical studies, women and Religion, and world religions.
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J. Gordon Melton is a leading expert in the study of new religious movements (NRMs). In 1969 he founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion which has pioneered research on North American religious groups and is the author of the Encyclopedia of American Religion (5th edition, 1996). He is the senior editor for the Directory of European Religions. Additionally, he has authored and edited some 25 books on American Religions including the Religious Leaders of America, the Encyclopedia of African American Religions, The Church of Scientology and the award-winning New Age Encyclopedia.
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Wade Clark Roof is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Jan Shipps is professor emeritus of history and religious studies at IUPUI, and research associate at The Polis Center. She is generally regarded as the foremost non-Mormon scholar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Her first book on the subject was Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition published by the University of Illinois Press.

Ines Talamantez is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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