Michael Bernard Beckwith is minister of the 8,000-member Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, Calif. He is one of the spiritual leaders featured in The Secret, and the Agape Center is part of the New Thought tradition.

Dell deChant is an instructor and associate chairman of the religious studies department at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He has written numerous entries on New Thought and New Age movements for various encyclopedias of religion.

Lori B. Andrews is a law professor, director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology, and associate vice president of the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Andrews has served as an adviser on genetic and reproductive technology to Congress, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, […]

Douglas R. Groothuis is a philosophy professor at Denver Seminary and an expert in Christian apologetics, the defense of Christian ideas and faith. He wrote Unmasking the New Age (InterVarsity Press, 1986) and Confronting the New Age (InterVarsity Press, 1988) and contributed to The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2000). He can […]

Carl A. Raschke is professor of religious studies at the University of Denver. He is particularly interested in postmodernism, popular culture and religion. He wrote The Interruption of Eternity (Nelson-Hall, 1980), a reference on the origins of the New Age movement. He is co-founder and senior editor of The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

Blaine Mays is president of the International New Thought Alliance, which holds, among other things, that mental states are manifested in daily experience. He can describe the New Thought movement and discuss whether the blockbuster success of The Secret has created demand for New Thought churches and spiritual centers.

Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies, American studies and  history and divinity at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. She has written about the religious content of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire and is knowledgeable about American religion and materialism, especially Christian kitsch.

J. Gordon Melton is a distinguished professor of American religious history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Formerly, he directed the Institute for the Study of American Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written about New Religious Movements and about Christian Science and is an expert on American-born religions. He co-wrote Perspectives on […]

Carol MacPherson Kauffman is assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard University Medical School. She founded Positive Psychology Coaches, which helps clients by focusing on their strengths rather than their weaknesses and stresses research-based measurement and exercises. Kauffman is an adherent of the new field of positive psychology and the scientific study of happiness.