Kathryn Harrison is a New York Times bestselling author who has published novels, biographies, memoirs, travel memoirs, and essay collections, the most recent of which is a biography entitled Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured. Harrison reviews books for The New York Times Book Review and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue, O Magazine, and more.

Morgan Atkinson is a documentary filmmaker whose third film on the life of Thomas Merton, The Many Storeys and Last Days of Thomas Merton, will be released later this year and will cover the last year of Merton’s life. Atkinson’s previous films, including Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton, have appeared on PBS nationwide. He […]

Kathleen Deignan is a Catholic nun, theologian, singer, composer and Merton scholar. Many of her compositions are based on the writings of Merton and are recorded by Schola Ministries in Washington, D.C. She has served on the board of directors of the International Thomas Merton Society.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and director of the American Pilgrimage Project. He is an expert on religion in literature, the arts and media. He is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American […]

Stephen Lind is a visiting professor of business administration at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. He is the author of a forthcoming book about religion in the work of Charles M. Schulz.

Alma Lopez is a Los Angeles-based artist whose works frequently feature female Catholic saints as Chicana women with a gender twist. Her “Our Lady,” a rendition of the Virgin of Guadalupe as seminude Chicana boxer, prompted worldwide controversy when it was displayed in New Mexico in 2001. Her most recent show is “Queer Santas: Holy […]

While nearly 1 in four people identify as Muslim across the globe, a Pew Research survey in 2019 found that only six-in-ten U.S. adults know that Ramadan is an Islamic holy month and that Mecca is Islam’s holiest city and a place of pilgrimage for Muslims.  Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Muslim […]