The Islamic Center of Mississippi is located in Starkville and serves a diverse groups of residents.

Karim was an assistant professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies at Spelman College in Atlanta. She was reared in an African-American Muslim community. Her expertise is on race, gender and Islam; younger Muslims in the U.S.; and connections and tensions among African-American Muslims and immigrant Muslims in the U.S.

Read the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ 29-city survey on hunger and homelessness in 2011.

Read a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, which found that 14.9 percent of the nation’s households did not have enough food for at least some time in 2011.

See a Feb. 4, 2012, New York Times story about the increasing number of people living alone.

Mark Goodacre is a theology professor at the Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he maintains a web directory of internet resources on the New Testament called the New Testament Gateway.

Joyce Antler is a professor of American Jewish history and culture at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. She has written about images of Jewish women on television and in popular culture.

Theresa M. Sanders is an associate professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and author of Celluloid Saints: Images of Sanctity in Film (Mercer University Press, 2002).

John E. Seery is a professor of politics at Pomona College in California. He is an expert on abortion politics and wrote the article “Moral Perfectionism and Abortion Politics” for the journal Polity (2001).