Julie Hicks Patrick is an associate professor of psychology at West Virginia University in Morgantown. She is working on a journal article that examines what adults pray and why.

Mary Elizabeth Perry is a certified spiritual director in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who teaches Lectio Divina and meditation as a form of prayer. She can discuss the mainline Protestant concept of meditation. She lives in Mobile, Ala.

Cherry Hill Seminary is the leading provider of education and practical training in leadership, ministry and personal growth in pagan and nature-based spiritualities. Holli S. Emore is the executive director.

Laurence Hull Stookey is a professor of preaching and worship at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. He has written about the language of prayer and praying in public.

Morris Fiorina is co-author, with Jeremy Pope, of Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., where he is an expert in public opinion.

Darrell J. Fasching is a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is co-author of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach and can discuss the different attitudes toward lying and honesty among the world religions.

Douglas Porpora is the author of Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life and chairman of the department of culture and communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He also wrote “Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism, and Religious Experience” for the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior in 2006.

John Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He wrote an article about the influence of religion on U.S. foreign policy.

Gregory R. Erlandson is president of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, which is based in Indiana and produced a number of Pope Benedict XVI’s works. Erlandson is co-author of the 2010 book Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal. He also worked in Rome covering the Vatican for Catholic News Service.