Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, who grew up in India, is a religion professor at Emory University in Atlanta whose specialties include Muslim and Hindu popular traditions.

Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, is the son of Indian immigrants. He grew up Hindu but converted to Catholicism. Contact via Mike Reed, director of communications.

The National Catholic Reporter has a June 22, 2009, podcast and summary of a story, “Jesuit sees convergence of U.S., Vatican policies,” featuring an interview with the Rev. Thomas Reese about relations between the Vatican and the Obama administration.

Read a June 22, 2009, National Catholic Reporter story, “Progressive Catholics at home in Obama administration.”

Read a June 22, 2009, analysis of the encyclical’s themes, “Economic encyclical expands on church’s ‘best kept secret’,” by National Catholic Reporter columnist John L. Allen Jr.

Namsoon Kang, associate professor of world Christianity and religions at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, researches Asian and Korean feminist theology.

Read a June 24, 2009, blog post at the Web site of the Jesuit magazine America, “Obama going to the Vatican,” by Michael Sean Winters.

Sze-Kar Wan, who is an Episcopal priest, is a professor of New Testament at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. His research includes neo-Confucianism.

John J. Thatamanil, who emigrated from India to the United States as a child, is assistant professor of theology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. He teaches courses on Hindu-Christian dialogue and Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and wrote The Immanent Divine: God, Creation and the Human Predicament — An East-West Conversation.