Dr Angela Puca is an academic and a university lecturer who has taught at several universities worldwide and has been based at Leeds Trinity University since 2016.

She holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in philosophy. In 2021, The University of Leeds awarded her a PhD in Religious Studies on Italian Witchcraft and Shamanism, published by Brill. Her research focuses on magic, witchcraft, Paganism, esotericism, shamanism, and related currents.

Author of several peer-reviewed publications and co-editor of the forthcoming ‘Pagan Religions in five Minutes’ for Equinox, she hopes to bridge the gap between academia and the communities of magic practitioners by delivering related scholarly content on her YouTube Channel and other social media platforms. CONNECT & SUPPORT💖

BECOME MY PATRON! 🎩 https://www.patreon.com/angelapuca

SUPPORT ON KO-FI ☕️https://ko-fi.com/drangelapuca

ONE-OFF DONATIONS 💰 https://paypal.me/angelasymposium

JOIN MEMBERSHIPS 👥 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPSbip_LX2AxbGeAQfLp-Ig/join

YOUTUBE CHANNEL 📹 https://www.youtube.com/@drangelapuca/featured

MY MERCH 👕 https://drangelapuca.creator-spring.com/

Shaonta’ Allen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College. She also holds affiliations with the African and African American Studies Department and the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality. She received her B.A in Sociology from the University of Washington, her M.A. in Sociology and a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Middle Tennessee State University, and her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cincinnati. Her scholarship draws on Race, Religion, Social Movements, and Intersectionality literatures to explore how identity markers like religion inform Black political ideology construction. Shaonta’s current book project examines the experiences of Black Christian Millennials during Black Lives Matter. Her research has been published in Sociology Compass, Humanity & Society, and Religions.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Visit Dr. Shaonta' Allen: https://linktr.ee/ShaontaTheSociologist

Binu 'Ben' Varghese is a PhD student in religion and society at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research focuses on intersections of race, politics, and religion among Indian diasporas in transnational contexts. He draws his theoretical formulations from the colonial history of Dutch slavery in India and alternative readings of Indian American history and memories. In addition to his research project, Binu is also interested in religion and capitalism, and religious nationalisms in India and America. He is currently serving as the editorial assistant of the Journal of World Christianity. His upcoming research essay is titled “Liminality as Decoloniality: Decolonizing Indian American Christianity,” which will be published in The Routledge Handbook of Politics and Religion in Contemporary America. We also discuss “Indian Flag at the Capitol Insurrection and ANti blackness among Indian Christians” from the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

SueJeanne Koh is the Graduate Futures Program Director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She develops programming for humanities doctoral students focusing on professional development and diverse career pathways. She is also the Director of Adult Education and Resident Theologian for St. Mark and New Hope Presbyterian Churches (PC(USA)). In this capacity, she creates opportunities for both churches to collaborate on racial justice and other pressing social issues. She has written articles and book chapters on settler colonialism and theology, Asian American theology, as well as co-written a piece on contingent labor with Franklin Tanner Capps (JAAR). With Capps, she is currently working on a book project on Christian nationalism, informed by blood discourses and legal proceedings significant for Asian American racial formation.

Visit Suejeanne Koh: https://x.com/suejeannekoh

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Farha Ternikar (Ph.D., Sociology, M.A. Religious Studies) is the director of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. Her current manuscript “Faith and Food Networks: Muslim women’s acts of resistance and resilience in the American Diaspora” examines how in addition to race and gender, global Islamophobia continues to play an important role in how we can understand the role of food for Muslim communities both in the United States and India. She teaches courses in feminist theory, and race, gender and pop culture. She is the author of Intersectionality and the Muslim South Asian Middle Class: Beyond Hijab and Halal (2021), and several articles including “Beyond Hijab and Modest Fashion”, “Feeding the Muslim South Asian American Family”, and “Hijab and the Abrahamic Traditions”. Her piece “Muslim American Women,” co-authored with Inaash Islam, was recently published in Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.

Links: 

Book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793649393/Intersectionality-in-the-Muslim-South-Asian-American-Middle-Class-Lifestyle-Consumption-beyond-Halal-and-Hijab

Article: https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/gatherings/vol1/iss1/9/

Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Robert Monson is a writer, musician, and scholar that looks closely at Black and womanist theologies as well as Black disability theology. His work engages Black religious identities, Christian nationalism, disability, and more. He is currently a PhD student and is a host for two podcasts: Black Coffee and Theology and Three Black Men: Theology, Culture, and the World Around Us.

Visit Robert Monson online:

https://www.threads.net/@robert_the_contemplative

https://musingsfromabrokenheart.substack.com/

Visit Sacred Writes online: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, land-based ethics, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Visit Natalie Avalos: https://natalieavalos.wordpress.com

Emma Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Islam subfield of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. They are also pursuing a graduate certificate from the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Their work focuses on Islam in South Asia along with Islam, Gender, and Sexuality. Their research draws on anthropological fieldwork and social media archives to examine how queer activists in Northern India navigate religion and secularism, especially situated within the context of rising Hindu nationalism. In addition to the dissertation project, Emma’s interests include secularism studies, religious racialization and identity, queer and trans studies in religion, and religious nationalisms.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies, Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities , and former Director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion in 2013 from Vanderbilt University. His research explores the intersections between Black religion, popular culture, the arts, and activism. His work has been published in Black Theology: An International Journal, the Journal of Africana Religions, the Black Scholar, and the recent volume, Moved By the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives. His most recent research focuses on the relationships between religion and discourses of afro-pessimism, afro-futurism, “Black optimism,” and notions of “Black joy” as resistance.

Moved By the Spirit: Religion and the Movement for Black Lives

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793647771/Moved-by-the-Spirit-Religion-and-the-Movement-for-Black-Lives

Visit Sacred Writes:

https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2024

Phoebe Farag Mikhail is a Coptic Orthodox Christian and the author of Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church (Paraclete Press). She holds an M.A. in International Education and is a lifelong learner of theology, currently taking courses at Pope Shenouda III Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary in New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Plough, Christianity Today, and other publications.

Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2023

Visit Phoebe Farag MIkhail: https://beingincommunity.com/