Douglas Porpora is the author of Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life and chairman of the department of culture and communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He also wrote “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism, and Religious Experience” for the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior in 2006.

John Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He wrote an article about the influence of religion on U.S. foreign policy.

Gregory R. Erlandson is president of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, which is based in Indiana and produced a number of Pope Benedict XVI’s works. Erlandson is co-author of the 2010 book Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal. He also worked in Rome covering the Vatican for Catholic News Service.

Robert Mickens is editor-in-chief at Global Pulse, a Catholic magazine. He has been the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic weekly published in London. He is based in Rome.

Leo Ribuffo is a history professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He has written about the complex relationship between religion and American foreign policy.

The BBC maintains a profile on Pope Benedict XVI.

The New York Times has a Times Topics page on Benedict.

National Geographic Kids information page on Diwali.

Sandro Magister is a Vaticanologist and an Italian journalist whose website, Chiesa, has an English-language archive of Magister’s insider essays on the Vatican, including all the developments of Benedict’s papacy.