Interreligious Studies Media

Interreligious Studies Media provides spaces for the distribution of critical, constructive, and cutting-edge scholarship and pedagogies related to the field of interreligious/interfaith studies and its adjacent disciplines. These spaces include the Journal of Interreligious Studies, Interreligious Studies Press, webinars, and other digital and print learning materials.

Members of the ISM Board of Directors

Or Rose, President

Heather Miller Rubens, Vice President

Lucinda Mosher, Secretary

Soren Hessler, Treasurer

Peng Yin, Member

  • Rabbi Or N. Rose is the founding Director of the Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership of Hebrew College, and a senior consultant for Interfaith America. Before launching the Miller Center, he served as a founding faculty member and Associate Dean for Informal Education of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, where he continues to teach. Rabbi Rose is Publisher Emeritus of the Journal of Interreligious Studies, as well as co-editor of the award-winning anthologies, My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation and With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps & Mistakes (Orbis). In 2020 he co-edited the volume Rabbi Zalman Schachter: Essential Teachings (also by Orbis), and in 2025 he published My Legs Were Praying: A Biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel (Monkfish), written for teen and young adult readers. Rabbi Rose is currently completing a multifaith commentary on the Psalms entitled The Book of Psalms Here & Now.

  • Vice President , Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies

    Heather Miller Rubens, Ph.D. is the Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. She is responsible for advancing the organization’s vision to build an interreligious society in which dialogue replaces division, friendship overcomes fear, and education eradicates ignorance.

    Heather is an experienced teacher, public speaker, facilitator, and scholar-practitioner of interreligious learning and dialogue. She develops educational initiatives that foster interreligious learning and conversation for the public in the Baltimore-Washington corridor and online. In her research and writing Heather creatively focuses on the theoretical, theological, ethical, and political implications of affirming religious diversity and building an interreligious society. She is currently working on a book entitled In Good Faith: An Argument for the Interreligious Society.

    Heather is a member of the Committee on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is an invited member of the Christian Scholars Group and she has also served in leadership positions with the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations and the Catholic Theological Society of America. She holds degrees from Georgetown University (B.A.), the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (G.Dip.), and the University of Chicago (A.M. and Ph.D.).

    She has taught at Lewis University, DePaul University, and St. Mary’s Seminary, and she served as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary.

  • Treasurer, Emory University Candler School of Theology

    Rev. Dr. Soren Hessler joined the Candler faculty in 2024 as assistant professor in the practice of leadership and administration. Hessler was formerly director of recruitment and admissions and adjunct assistant professor of the practice of church leadership at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. In addition to these roles, he was an instructor of Christian and interreligious studies at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, and a faculty mentor in the doctor of ministry program at Drew University Theological School.

    Hessler holds multiple advanced degrees from Boston University (BU), including a PhD in practical theology with a concentration in leadership and administration and a master of divinity from the BU School of Theology, a master of education in policy, planning, and administration from the BU School of Education, and a bachelor and master of arts in church administration from the University Professors Program at BU. He is an ordained elder in full connection in the West Ohio Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church.

  • Secretary, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace

    Lucinda Allen Mosher, Th.D., is Professor of Interreligious Studies, director of the Master of Arts in Interreligious Studies program, senior scholar for Continuing and Professional Education, and an affiliate of the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. She teaches courses on religious diversity, interreligious concerns, ethics, and spiritual caregiving. She is also the senior editor of the Journal of Interreligious Studies and the rapporteur of the Building Bridges Seminar (an annual dialogue of Christian and Muslim scholars under the stewardship of Georgetown University). Dr Mosher is vice-president/president-elect of the Association of Interreligious/Interfaith Studies, chair of the Religion and the Arts book award jury for the American Academy of Religion, and secretary of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations. She is the author of six books, including Personhood, Illness, and Death in America’s Multifaith Neighborhoods: A Practical Guide (2018) and Toward Our Mutual Flourishing: the Episcopal Church, Interreligious Relations, and Theologies of Religious Manyness (2012). She is the solo or co-editor of ten volumes in the Building Bridges Seminar series from Georgetown University Press, including Naming God: Christian and Muslim Perspectives (2023)—plus The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies (2022); the award-winning Hindu Approaches to Spiritual Care: Chaplaincy in Theory and Practice (2020); and With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes (2023)—plus guest editor of thematic issues for four peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Mosher’s publications also include numerous book chapters and many journal articles on multifaith matters, plus a contribution to Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibligraphical History (University of Birmingham).

    Dr Mosher lives in northeast Florida, where she serves an Episcopal parish as its organist and choir director. She and her husband have four children and nine grandchildren.

  • Member, Boston University School of Theology

    Peng Yin is a scholar of comparative ethics, Chinese Christianity, and religion and sexuality. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics. The volume explores the intelligibility of moral language across religious traditions and rethinks Christian teaching on human nature, sacrament, and eschatology. Yin’s research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yale’s Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.

    A recipient of Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches “Comparative Religious Ethics,” “Social Justice,” “Mysticism and Ethical Formation,” “Christian Ethics,” “Queer Theology,” and “Sexual Ethics” at STH, as well as “Gender & Sexuality: An Interdisciplinary Introduction” at the College of Arts and Sciences. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and as an Affiliated Faculty in Department of Classical Studies and Center for the Study of Asia.

Axel Marc Oaks Takacs, Editor-in-Chief

Staff

Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Copy-Editor and Journal editor

Sze-Long Aaron Wong, Design and Production Editor

  • Editor-in-Chief

    Axel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology and Interreligious Studies at Seton Hall University, affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies program, and the Director of the Lewinson Center for the Study of Labor, Inequality, and Social Justice. He is a Catholic comparative theologian, interreligious studies scholar, and scholar of Islamic intellectual traditions. In the Islamic traditions, his focus is on classical and post-classical Sufi-Philosophical traditions in Arabic and Persian, such as the School of Ibn ʿArabī and the madhhab-i ʿishq (School of Passionate Love), especially Persian poetry and their commentarial traditions. Subjects of interest include poetics, the imagination, the social imaginary, theological aesthetics, theo-poetics, and the thought of Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Visit his academic website to learn more and explore his scholarship.

  • Copy-Editor and Journal editor

    Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum is feminist scholar of religion who specializes in biblical studies, ancient Christianties and late antiquity. She holds expertise in intersectional approaches to premodern texts, Second Temple Judaism, extra/canonical gospels, asceticism, digital humanities, and philology. She is also an expert in Coptic language and literature. She additionally does editing and copy-editing for JIRS.

  • Design and Production Editor

    Sze-Long Aaron Wong is pursuing a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies at Boston University School of Theology under Dr. Karen Westerfield Tucker. His research interests include East Syrian Christian liturgical practices in medieval China, 19th-century German missions in Guangdong, and contemporary worship theologies of Chinese immigrant communities in North America. Before joining Boston University, he studied at Yale Divinity School where he received a Master of Arts in Religion and a certificate from the Institute of Sacred Music. His master’s project was an annotated English translation of the autobiography of his forefather Wong Yuen-sum (1817-1914), who was an active itinerant preacher and church planter in Guangdong. Sze-Long received musical training at the Peabody Conservatory of Music (B.M.) and The Juilliard School (M.M.) and has worked for over twenty years in the performing arts and education sectors in New York and Toronto. He is a member of the Hong Kong Anglican Church (Sheng Kung Hui) and has served in Anglican and evangelical churches in Canada as a worship leader, musician, and conductor. He additionally is the design and Production contractor for JIRS

  • Research Fellow

    Mark Spinnenweber is a PhD student in the Department of Theology at Boston College, studying Christian-Muslim comparative theology and interreligious dialogue, as well as modern Roman Catholic theology. He is a Research Fellow at ISM for the academic year 2025-26.

  • Intern

    Aubrey Chavez is the Journal and the Media start-ups intern from Emory University, Candler School of Theology. She is currently studying to receive her MDiv. Her current internship completes her Contextual Education requirement. She hopes to continue her education with Doctoral work in New Testament Studies in the future. She has a BA in Biblical Text from Lubbock Christian University

Mark Spinnenweber, Research Fellow

Bylaws and Conflict of Interest statement

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