Willi Braun is the paragon of a true religious studies scholar. Beginning his career in the 1990s, Braun studied at the Centre for the Study of Religion at University of Toronto. There, Braun maintained a fidelity to a particular methodological ethos: that religion should be studied as a fundamentally human phenomenon, and that scholars should examine how the "data" of religions (texts, artifacts, rituals, etc.) reveal the interests, concerns, and values of the humans who imbue that same data with something divine or transcendent.

Braun's contributions to the field have been both substantive and diverse - whether as a catalyst in discipline-changing initiatives such as the North American Society for the Study of Religion and the journal Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, or his work on antiquity and early Christianities, or his role as a pedagogue, as he tirelessly endeavoured to foster the next generation of thinkers.

The contributions to this volume focus on exploring, probing, and theorizing ancient religious data as reflections of human interests and activities, in a manner that aspires to Braun's own methodological rigour.