The Rev. Paul Zahl is a former dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a seminary in Ambridge, Pa. He opposes the ordination of sexually active gay clergy. Contact through Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Gregory Hall is president and CEO of Warner Southern College in Lake Wales, Fla.

Joseph A. Pipa, Jr. is president of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, S.C., as well as a professor of historic and systematic theology.

Read a March 13, 2009, essay on faith-based initiatives in Commonweal magazine by Lew Daly, a senior fellow and director of the Fellows Program at Demos, a public-policy organization in New York City. Daly is the author of God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, published in fall 2009.

Read a March 1, 2009, commentary by Mark Silk of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College. The essay, posted at the Spiritual Politics blog, disputes Susan Jacoby’s assertions about Obama’s faith-based initiative.

Read a Feb. 28, 2009, op-ed in The New York Times about Obama’s faith-based initiative by Susan Jacoby. Jacoby is a well-known secularist and champion of the separation of church and state.

Timothy D. Terrell is an associate professor of economics at Wofford College in South Carolina. He is a senior fellow with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Read a March 2, 2009, article about conservative criticism of Obama’s faith-based initiative posted at U.S. News & World Report.

Read an essay about Obama’s faith-based initiative in the February edition of First Things, written by John J. DiIulio Jr., a University of Pennsylvania professor who was the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.