The Rev. Randy Wall is senior pastor of New Covenant United Methodist Church in Mount Holly, N.C. He’s also the chairman of United Methodist Rural Advocates, a group that advocates on behalf of rural and small-membership churches within the denomination.

Rabbi Rachael Jackson leads Agudas Israel Congregation in Hendersonville, N.C. Before she was ordained, she worked as an analytical chemist.

Lisa D. Pearce is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies religious and family dynamics and how they affect a child’s transition to adulthood.

Calvin Mercer is a professor of religious studies at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. He studies the religious and social implications of human enhancement.

Anna Jane Joyner serves as campaign coordinator for the Western North Carolina Alliance, which works to protect the state’s natural resources. She’s also co-host of No Place Like Home, a podcast on climate change. Joyner’s father is an evangelical Christian minister and she’s spoken often about what it’s like to reject her family’s environmental beliefs. […]

The Rev. William J. Barber II is pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, N.C., and president of Repairers of the Breach, a national ministry for civil rights and social justice. In 2013, Barber began a campaign on behalf of the poor that instigated “Moral Mondays” — acts of civil disobedience and mindfulness designed to […]

Michael Schulson is a freelance writer who oversees Religion Dispatches‘ science and religion portal, “The Cubit.” He also writes at Undark. He lives in Durham, N.C.

Sujin Pak is an assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C. where she specializes in the Protestant Reformation, women and the Reformation and Jews and the Reformation.

Vincent Conitzer is a professor of computer science, economics and philosophy at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He is currently at work on a project to create “moral AI.”