The Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III is the priest-in-charge at Trinity Church in Boston, an Episcopal church. He was the ninth dean of the Washington National Cathedral, and he preached from the cathedral’s pulpit about global warming and the need for Christians to act. Email him through the contact form on Trinity Church’s website.

Shira Gabriel is an assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, N.Y., who has conducted three studies on celebrity worship, one of which focused on how it boosts the worshipper’s self-esteem.

Read a July 1, 2004, article by Carlin Flora about celebrity worship syndrome. It’s posted on the Psychology Today Web site.

Read a July 12, 2009, essay at ReligionDispatches.org about the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death by Pauline Hope Cheong, an associate professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Read a June 29, 2009, post at the First Things blog by Richard Scott Nokes, who argues that the singer is “a martyr to our culture’s true god: Celebrity.”

Read a June 26, 2009, Beliefnet column remembering Michael Jackson by Deepak Chopra.

Read a June 26, 2009, commentary on Michael Jackson’s death at The Huffington Post by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the popular writer and a friend of Jackson’s.

Read a June 25, 2009, column at ReligionDispatches.org about the passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett by Anthea Butler, a historian of American and African-American religion who specializes in popular culture. In the piece, she describes Jackson as “a pop theologian.”

August 1996, Our Planet article by Fazlun Khalid about the Islamic approach to environmentalism. Khalid directs the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences.