Christopher Leevy Johnson is a funeral director and was an African-American studies professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. He researches the role of African-American funeral directors in the black church, politics and community affairs.

Sarah York is author of Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death (Jossey-Bass, 2000). She conducts workshops based on her book and is a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives near Asheville, N.C.

Karla Holloway is a professor of English at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Duke University Press, 2002), in which she examines African-American burial and embalming rituals, funeral services and the undertaking industry.

Justin Holcomb is a lecturer in the sociology and religion departments at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is author of the essay “Contemporary Funerals: Personalizing Tradition” in  Death and Religion in a Changing World (M.E. Sharpe, 2005).

Regina Sandler-Phillips is a rabbi, chaplain and educator. She is the founder of the Hevra Kadisha (sacred Jewish burial fellowship) at Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has kept the vigil over Jewish dead in hospitals, private homes and funeral parlors, and is an acknowledged authority on Jewish funeral issues.

Charlton McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (Hampton Press, 2003), which examines African-American funeral practices.

Beth Knox runs Crossings, a nonprofit organization that assists families with home funerals. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.

Lucy Bregman is a religion professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. She researches religion and death and has taught a course on death and dying since 1979.

Ray Neun directs two New Hampshire funeral homes. He can discuss changing funeral trends and how the funeral industry has adapted to meet new consumer demands.