Justin Holcomb is a lecturer in the sociology and religion departments at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is author of the essay “Contemporary Funerals: Personalizing Tradition” in  Death and Religion in a Changing World (M.E. Sharpe, 2005).

Regina Sandler-Phillips is a rabbi, chaplain and educator. She is the founder of the Hevra Kadisha (sacred Jewish burial fellowship) at Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has kept the vigil over Jewish dead in hospitals, private homes and funeral parlors, and is an acknowledged authority on Jewish funeral issues.

Charlton McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (Hampton Press, 2003), which examines African-American funeral practices.

Beth Knox runs Crossings, a nonprofit organization that assists families with home funerals. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.

Lucy Bregman is a religion professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. She researches religion and death and has taught a course on death and dying since 1979.

Ray Neun directs two New Hampshire funeral homes. He can discuss changing funeral trends and how the funeral industry has adapted to meet new consumer demands.

The Jewish Funeral Directors of America in Sterling, Va., is an international association of 100 Jewish funeral homes and 170 Jewish funeral directors.

Elizabeth Westrate wrote, produced and directed A Family Undertaking, a documentary about the home funeral movement.  

David Zinner is executive director of Kavod v’Nichum, a nonprofit resource group in the greater Washington, D.C., area that educates and advocates for Chevra Kadisha groups in North America.