David J. Wolpe is senior rabbi of Temple Sinai, a Conservative congregation in Los Angeles. A well-known speaker and writer, he has written several books, among them The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God (Henry Holt & Co., 1990) and (with Mitch Albom) Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times (Riverhead Trade, 2000).

Raphael Grunfeld is a New York attorney and Jewish scholar who can explain Jewish philosophy and religious thought regarding suffering.

Jerry Walls, philosophy of religion professor at Houston Baptist University, has written about making sense of evil and Christian conceptions of God. He is co-editor of The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (Open Court Press) and co-author of C.S. Lewis & Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century From the Most Influential Apologists (InterVarsity Press, 1998).

The Institute for Practical Ethics & Public Life provides an intellectual home for professors and students from across the University of Virginia who wish to purse interdisciplinary scholarship, research and teaching on the complex ethical issues that underlie contemporary professional, organizational and public life. The Institute is directed by James F. Childress.

Sharon D. Welch is provost and professor of religion and society at Chicago’s Meadville Lombard Theological School, which educates students in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Humanist Studies.

Betsy Steele Halstead is a visual arts specialist at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics, based at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., works to integrate the Christian faith and politics. Contact research fellow Corwin E. Smidt.

James Tappenden is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His essay “An Atheist’s Fundamentalism” is included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (2007).

William Dyrness is professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Among his books are Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism, which he co-authored with Jonathan A. Anderson, and Visual Faith: Art, Theology and Worship in Dialogue.