Peter Gilmour is professor emeritus at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University in Chicago, where he taught a graduate course on Jesus in the movies.

Elijah Siegler is an associate professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, S.C. He contributed “God in the Box: Religion in Contemporary Television Cop Shows” to the book God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2001).

The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., claims to be the largest mosque in the U.S. It is a Shiite mosque, and its congregation is predominantly Arab. Contact Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini.

Marcia Hermansen is director of the Islamic World Studies Program and a professor in the theology department at Loyola University Chicago. She is an expert on Islamic spirituality and Sufism.

The center is an interdisciplinary program in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East and the geo-cultural area in which Islamic civilization prospered, and continues to shape world history.  The center at the University of Arkansas includes professors in a variety of disciplines.

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.