Keta Masako is a professor in the philosophy-of-religion in the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University. She specializes in German contemporary philosophy, Pure Land Buddhism, and Kyoto School philosophy. She has served as the President of the Japanese Association for Religious Studies since 2014.

Sato Hiroo is a professor in the history of Japanese thought, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University. He specializes in Kamakura Buddhism, the relation between religion and state, and the relation between Buddhism and Shinto.

Sumika Masayoshi is an associate professor at the College of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University. He specializes in the sociology of religion, focusing on secularization, social Darwinism, and nationalism.

Terada Yoshirō is an associate professor of Taisho University. Specializing in the sociology of religion, he has published a monograph on Seicho-no-Ie in Taiwan, Kyū shokuminchi ni okeru Nikkei shin shūkyō no juyō: Taiwan seichō no ie no monogurafu  旧植民地における日系新宗教の受容―台湾生長の家のモノグラフ (Acceptance of a Japanese new religion in a former Japanese colony; Harvestsha, 2009), which won the International Institute for Study of Religions prize for junior researchers.

Jeff Schroeder is an instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. His current research examines the transformation of orthodoxy within the Ōtani denomination of Japanese Shin Buddhism over the course of the twentieth century. He is the author of “Empirical and Esoteric: The Birth of Shin Buddhist Studies as a Modern Academic Discipline,” Japanese Religions 39: 95-118, and “The Insect in the Lion’s Body: Kaneko Daiei and the Question of Authority in Modern Buddhism,” in Modern Buddhism in Japan, Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2014: 194-222.

Terazawa Shigenori is an assistant professor at Hokkaido University. He specializes in the sociology of religion, and has conducted comparative research on contemporary religions in Japan and Taiwan.

Yumi Murayama is a visiting research fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. She received her PhD from the University of St. Andrews with a thesis on the role of the Bible in Imperial Japan. Her current research is on women and religion in modern Japan.