Steve Bruce, University of Aberdeen
Steve Bruce has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen since 1991. He was born in Edinburgh in 1954 and schooled at the Queen Victoria School Dunblane, Perthshire. He studied sociology and religious studies at the University of Stirling (MA 1976; PhD 1980) and taught at The Queen’s University, Belfast, from 1978 to 1991. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2005. He has written extensively on the nature of religion in the modern world and on the links between religion and politics. His most recent work, ‘Paisley: religion and politics in Northern Ireland’, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2007 and he is currently preparing a second edition of his Fundamentalism for Polity.
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Laurence R. Iannaccone, Chapman University
Laurence R. Iannaccone is a Professor of Economics at Chapman University. Prior to joining Chapman’s faculty in 2009, he was the Koch Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Before that he was a Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University and spent two years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution as a National Fellow (1989/90) and Visiting Scholar (1996/97). Iannaccone earned his MS in Mathematics and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, and wrote his doctoral thesis on habit formation and religious behavior in 1984. His thesis committee included Nobel Laureates Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler. In more than fifty publications, Iannaccone has applied economic insights to study denominational growth, church attendance, religious giving, conversion, extremism, international trends, and many other aspects of religion and spirituality. His articles have appeared in numerous academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Journal of Sociology, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is currently writing two books on the on the economics of religion.
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Philippe Simonnot, Observatoire des Religions, Paris University, France
Philippe Simonnot is a professor of law and economics at the Universities of Paris X Nanterre and Versailles. He is the author of numerous books in economic history and sociology of religious institutions, including Les Papes, l’Église et l’argent, Histoire économique du christianisme des origines à nos jours. He is writing economic chronics in the French newspapers, including Le Monde and Le Figaro. In 2007, he launched the Observatoire des Religions online, in order to study religion in a scientific – mainly economic – way. He is also the director of the Observatoire de l’Economie Méditerranéenne.
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Roger Finke, PennState University
Roger Finke is professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He studied sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Prior to joining PennState in 2000, he was professor of sociology at the Loyola University of Chicago and at Purdue University in West Lafayette His research projects are looking at cross-national variation in religious regulation, persecution, and violence. He is also interested and involved in studying religious organizations and the diverse religious market in the US. He also serves as the director of the Association of Religion Data Archives.
