Mario Beauregard, University of Montreal neuroscientist, has studied when religious feelings are experienced by using sophisticated brain scans to see inside the brains of Carmelite nuns as they recall a spiritual experience.

Michael Persinger, psychology professor at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has conducted experiments with a helmet that pulses bursts of electrical activity to the brain, stimulating what he calls a “God experience.” The experience of God, he says, is definitely produced in the brain.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, is a pioneer in experimental neurology who found that patients who suffer seizures from temporal lobe epilepsy display an unusual obsession with religious matters. Among his research interests is the neural basis of empathy.

Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College, is a co-author of Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (Random House, 2002). Newberg and his colleagues used high-tech imaging techniques to examine the brains of meditating Buddhists and Franciscan […]

Glen H. Stassen is the Lewis Smeades Professor of Christian Ethics at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. He is an expert on religion and social justice and specializes in war, peace and ethics. He wrote Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War.

John G. West Jr. is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. He co-edited the book The Theology of Welfare (University Press of America, 2000).

Pamela K. Brubaker is professor emeritus of religion at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. She wrote the article “Making Women and Children Matter: Feminist Ethics Confronts Welfare Policy” for the Journal of Poverty (1999) and the book Women Don’t Count: The Challenge of Women’s Poverty to Christian Ethics (Scholars Press, 1994). [email protected]

Richard L. Wood is director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He wrote the book Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and contributed the essay “Religion, Faith-Based Organizing, and the Struggle for Justice” for the book Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (Cambridge […]

Royal W.F. Rhodes is professor of religious studies at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. He co-wrote the book Eclipse of Justice: Ethics, Economics, and the Lost Traditions of American Catholicism (Orbis Books, 1992).