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Faith Angle West will convene 18-20 journalists and six speakers in Seattle, WA, for two days of rich conversation on evolving demographics within American Christianity, religious dimensions of the tech industry and its products, and new explorations of America’s religious landscape within pop culture.
Alissa Wilkinson covers film and culture for Vox. Since 2006, her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Bon Appétit, the Washington Post, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, the Atlantic, Books & Culture, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Paste, Pacific Standard, and others. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, and was a 2017-18 Art of Nonfiction writing fellow with the Sundance Institute. Before joining Vox, she was the chief film critic at Christianity Today.
Alissa is also an associate professor of English and humanities at the King’s College in New York City, where she has taught criticism, cinema studies, and cultural theory since 2009. Her book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women (Broadleaf) was released in June 2022, and she’s currently writing her next book, We Tell Ourselves Stories (Liveright). She is also the co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World (Eerdmans, 2016). Alissa holds an MA in humanities and social thought from New York University and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University.
Bradford Winters has been a writer, producer, and showrunner on multiple television dramas, including “Oz,” “Boss,” “The Americans,” and “Berlin Station.”
Winters is the creator of the screen and comic book project “Americatown,” about the world’s first enclave of American immigrants living and working abroad in a dystopic near future. A hardcover edition of Volume One of the comic was published by Boom! Studios/Archaia tin 2016.
A former contributor to the arts and faith blog Good Letters at Patheos, Winters is also a published poet whose work has appeared in various journals.
Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is “Asian-Latino,” and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley. Romero has published more than 30 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and received the Latina/o Studies book award from the international Latin American Studies Association. His recent book, “Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (2020),” received the InterVarsity Press Readers’ Choice Award for best academic title. Romero is a former Ford Foundation and U.C. President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute’s Sabbatical Grant for Researchers. Robert is also an ordained minister and community organizer.
Ryan Burge is an Assistant Professor of Political Science as well as the Graduate Coordinator at Eastern Illinois University. He teaches in a variety of areas, including American institutions, political behavior, and research methods. His research focuses largely on the interaction of religiosity and political behavior (especially in the American context).
He has published over twenty articles in a number of peer reviewed journals including Politics & Religion, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Review of Religious Research, the Journal of Religious Leadership, Representation, Politics & Gender, Politics, Groups, and Identities, the Journal of Communication and Religion, the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture and the Social Science Computer Review.
He is also the author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, in which he details a comprehensive picture of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. This book explains how this rise happened, who the nones are, and what they mean for the future of American religion. His second book, 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America, was released in March of 2022.
Carolyn Chen is a sociologist and Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative. Her research focuses on religion, spirituality, and work in contemporary America, as well as Asian American religion. Carolyn has published three books: Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton 2022), Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and Sustaining Faith Traditions: Religion, Race and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her writing has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and The Atlantic.
Trae Stephens is a partner at Founders Fund, where he invests across sectors and stages. He is also a Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous systems, and Co-founder of Sol, a next generation wearable e-reader.
Previously, Trae was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space as well as international expansion, helping large organizations solve their hardest data analysis problems. While at Palantir, Trae also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University.
Prior to Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions within the United States Intelligence community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, DC. Trae graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
