Sylvester A. Johnson is Professor of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech University and the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities. Johnson is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. He has authored two books: African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015 and a winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, and The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God, a 2004 Palgrave MacMillan publication that garnered the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book Award. Johnson also co-edited, with Steven Weitzman, The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11, which the University of California Press published in 2017.