Daniel M. Farrell is a philosophy professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. In his essay “Life Without God: Some Personal Costs” (included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life), he tells about losing his faith while he was a seminarian, and how coming to terms with that affected other aspects of his […]

Bruce Katz is vice president and director of Metropolitan Policy and holds the Adeline M. and Alfred I. Johnson Chair in Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is also a former chief of staff of HUD.

Dan Barker is a former evangelical preacher turned atheist. He and his wife, Annie Laurie Gaylor, are co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wis. Barker’s books include Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist and Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists (2008).

Dennis Culhane is a professor of social welfare policy at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies homelessness and housing policy.

Xavier de Souza Briggs is an associate professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is editor of The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America.

William C. Apgar is a senior scholar at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a former assistant secretary of housing at HUD. Affordable housing is one of his main areas of interest. He is a founding member of […]

Dean Hamer is a geneticist and director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. He is the author of The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our Genes. His hypothesis, criticized by some other scientists, is that some people inherit a gene that predisposes them toward faith in […]

Ryan T. Cragun is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tampa, where he studies secularization, the nonreligious and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Shaun Donovan is secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD, the nation’s housing agency, is charged with increasing homeownership, particularly among minorities, and creating affordable housing.