Religion, War, and Revolution | Religion and America at 250 #4

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Panelists:

Kathleen M. Sands was trained in theology but later expanded her research to religion and sexuality, religions in American history/law/public life, and critical religious studies. She is author of Escape From Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology, and editor of God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life. Most recently, Sands wrote  America’s Religious Wars, and she is currently working on Thinking Twice About Religious Freedom: Case Studies on Vaccination, Abortion, Education, and Gender Identity (UVA Press). She is also currently serving on the AAR’s Board of Directors as Secretary.

Seth Perry is Associate Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where he joined the faculty in 2014. He is interested in American religious history, with a particular focus on print culture and religious authority. Perry’s first book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the performative, rhetorical, and material aspects of bible-based authority in early-national America. His article “Paine Detected in Mississippi: Slavery, Print Culture, and the Threat of Deism in the Early Republic” appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly in April 2021. His next book, American Preacher: The Life and Times of the Eccentric Lorenzo Dow, a biography of the early-national period’s most famous itinerant preacher, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in November 2026. Other current projects include work on the little-known revelations of John Taylor, the third prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a project on animals in early American religious history. Perry’s writing has appeared in Early American Studies, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sightings, the LA Review of Books, and Slate.

Philippa Koch is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University, where she also serves as the Graduate Program Director. Her research and teaching center on religion, health, and society in early America and its global context. Her recent publications include a chapter on “Revivals and Revolutions,” in The Routledge History of Evangelical Christianity in America,edited by Ian Van Dyke and Darren Dochuk (Routledge, 2026) and “Records of Relinquishment: Caregiving and Emotion in the Philanthropy Archive,” in The Public Historian (May 2024). Much of her scholarship focuses on questions of health and embodiment in religious communities in the eighteenth century. This was the subject of her first book, The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America (NYU 2021), and continues to shape her research in her next project, which considers how religious communities contributed to natural history and medical knowledge in the era of colonization and empire.