At this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Church History in Chicago, panelists addressed key issues around preserving religious history. The unique presentation brought together individuals from four different organizations—Loyola University, the Chicago History Museum, the Congregational Library and Archives, and The Mary Baker Eddy Library—to share how their archival work contributes to the full and responsible recording of religious life. We invited them to revisit and re-engage on this topic. This discussion illustrates various interrelationships of the work, including how archival collections serve to care for their communities and to nurture the issues and stories they hold dear.
Access more on this topic:
Dr. Christopher D. Cantwell is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches classes on museums, American religion, and the digital humanities. His forthcoming book The Bible Class Teacher explores the relationship between nostalgia and the origins of American evangelicalism. His public history practice focuses on partnering with religious congregations in transition, to document their histories.
Rebekah Coffman is a historian and preservationist currently serving as curator of religion and community history at the Chicago History Museum, where she leads the Chicago Sacred Initiative. Her interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of religious identity and the built environment, through place-based, community-centered approaches. In 2019 she began the Sacred Shift Project, an ongoing international survey of urban religious buildings that are adapted for ritual reuse by diasporic communities. Examples of her recognized research include New York University’s Gavin Stamp Award in Adaptive Reuse; a commendation by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain; and the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum’s Lindsey Jones Memorial Research award.
Allyson Lazar is Senior Manager of Research and Collections for The Mary Baker Eddy Library. In her role, she has the pleasure of engaging with archivists, records managers, researchers, and collections care specialists—all working to manage and provide access to a rich archival collection. Prior to coming to the Library, she worked in the museum field, where she managed a variety of collections, including religious and sacred art and artifacts from a number of different faith traditions. She is the author of a paper presented at the 2025 American Society for Church History conference entitled, “The role of church archives in distilling fact from fiction in legends at The Mary Baker Eddy Library.”
Dr. Kyle Roberts was appointed the Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives (CLA) in 2022. Prior to coming to the CLA, he was Associate Director of Library & Museum Programming at the American Philosophical Society and Associate Professor of Public History and New Media and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. A scholar of Atlantic World religion, print, and library history, he is the author of Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago, 2016), as well as numerous articles and anthologies. He is also an accomplished public historian and digital humanist.
Jonathon Eder is Manager of Programs and Scholarly Engagement for The Mary Baker Eddy Library, where he has worked since its 2002 opening. He has made scholarly contributions on Christian Science history to journals and book volumes, including his 2021 article “Mary Burt Messer—Christian Science Healer as Sociologist and Scholar,” a chapter in Challenging Bias Against Women Academics in Religion (Chicago: Atla Open Press, 2021); and “Manhood and Mary Baker Eddy: Muscular Christianity and Christian Science,” published in the December 2020 issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture (Cambridge University Press).
Collage images (from left): Image of a gloved hand holding a small, painted Diwali cup, 2002 (Chicago History Museum collections, 2002.124.16). Rebekah Coffman. Used by permission. A Loyola University Chicago student examines documents found in the Mary, Mother of God Parish in Chicago. Christopher D. Cantwell. Used by permission. Pocket-sized edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, c. 1917. Staff photo.
Guest photos used by permission.
