Dr Chris Cotter is Research Fellow in Religious Studies at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, working on a three-year project on 'unbelief' in Northern Ireland and Scotland. He is currently writing a monograph with Bloomsbury, titled The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification, and Locality. He is co-editor of Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular (Ashgate, 2013), After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016), and New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates (Springer, 2017), and is Co-Director at the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network.
Dr. Jesse M. Smith is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. An interpretive sociologist and social psychologist, his research interests are focused primarily on the relationship of secularity and nonreligion to identity, the self, social deviance, and collective action. He has published over twenty research articles, book chapters, book reviews, and other papers in journals including Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Quarterly, Secularism and Nonreligion, Qualitative Sociology, and Journal of Religion and Health. He is a Research Affiliate with the Non-religion and Secularity Research Network, and Research Associate with the Atheist Research Collaborative.
Jonathan Jong is the Research Co-ordinator for the Ritual, Community, and Conflict Project at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the effects of ritual participation on social behaviour, the relationship between fear of death and religious belief, the role of agency detection and anthropomorphism in religious belief, measurement problems and techniques in psychology of religion, and the philosophical relationship between methodological naturalism and theism.
