Wakar Uddin is director general of the Arakan Rohingya Union, an umbrella organization of Rohingya advocacy groups worldwide. He is also a professor of plant pathology and microbiology at Penn State University.

Neil Ormerod is a professor of theology at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is director of its Centre for Catholic Thought and Practice. Anticipating Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical, he called it “a landmark in Catholic social teaching.”

Bill Patenaude is a special lecturer of theology at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is the chief author of Catholic Ecology, where he has speculated about what Pope Francis’ encyclical might contain. Contact via Chrissy Centazzo.

Riccardo Cascioli is the author of Lies of the Environmentalists and has criticized Pope Francis’ involvement in climate change, which Cascioli sees as a wedge into changing Catholic doctrine about the sanctity of life. He is also the editor of La nuova Bussola Quotidiana, an Italian Catholic news and opinion site.

Marc Morano is executive director of ClimateDepot.com and communications director at Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a conservative think tank in Washington that is skeptical of man-made climate change. He has been critical of Pope Francis’ involvement in climate change issues and his reliance on United Nations climate change data.

Lisa A. Keister is a professor of sociology at Duke University in Durham, N.C. She has written several books examining the link between religion and poverty as well as prosperity.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo is a lecturer in the department of religion and ancient civilizations at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research interests include women in Buddhism, death and identity, Buddhist feminist ethics, Buddhism and bioethics, Buddhist social ethics and Buddhist transnationalism.

Mucahit Bilici is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of Finding Mecca in America and a columnist for Taraf, a daily publication in Turkish.

Mary Evelyn Tucker is a senior lecturer and research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Divinity School and department of religious studies. She also directs the Forum on Religion and Ecology with her husband, John Grim.