Read an editorial, “Faith-based partnerships” from the Chicago-based Christian Century comparing President Bush’s faith-based initiatives office with President Obama’s.

Russell Tracey McCutcheon is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Franklyn C. Niles is a professor of political science at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark. He wrote the atheism entry for the Encyclopedia of American Religion and Politics.

Jay Geller is an associate professor of modern Jewish culture and religious studies at the divinity school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He has written on atheism and modern Judaism. He is also an expert on Judiams and modernity and the Holocaust on film and in literature.

Norman L. Geisler is a professor of Christian apologetics and co-founder of Southern Evangelical Seminary and Bible College in Matthews, N.C. He has written on secularism and humanism from a Christian point of view.

E. Brooks Holifield is a professor of American church history at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta.

Stephen M. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware and a member of the editorial board of the conservative religious periodical First Things. He writes frequently about the intersection of faith and science, often critiquing the strictly materialist point of view of many atheists.

H. Allen Orr is a biology professor at the University of Rochester in New York. He wrote a Jan. 11, 2007, essay, “A Mission to Convert,” in The New York Review of Books that critiqued recent books on atheism.

Joan Konner is a professor emerita and dean emerita of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and is author of The Atheist’s Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts, which was published in June 2007.