Mark Oppenheimer has been covering American religion for 25 years. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale, and has taught at Stanford, Wesleyan, Wellesley, NYU, Boston College, and Yale, where he was the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote the “Beliefs” column for The New York Times, and has written for publications including The New Yorker, GQ, and Slate. He created Unorthodox, and more recently hosted an eight-part podcast called Gatecrashers. He is the author of five books, including The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia and Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.