Jerry Walls, philosophy of religion professor at Houston Baptist University, has written about making sense of evil and Christian conceptions of God. He is co-editor of The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (Open Court Press) and co-author of C.S. Lewis & Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century From the Most Influential Apologists (InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Betsy Steele Halstead is a visual arts specialist at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

William Dyrness is professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Among his books are Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism, which he co-authored with Jonathan A. Anderson, and Visual Faith: Art, Theology and Worship in Dialogue.

Luke Smetters is a candle carver who has led workshops at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, Ill., where he is also a student. Contact him at Bethany Lutheran Church in Ishpeming, Mich., where he is the vicar.

Martin Marklin is a liturgical artist in Contoocook, N.H., who makes paschal candles.

Michael Lackey is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Morris. His research interests include God and religion in literature, and atheism, and he is the author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Sociocultural Dynamics of Faith (2007).

Jennifer Michael Hecht teaches at the New School University in New York City. She is the author of Doubt: A History and The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism and Anthropology in France.

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).

Todd Stiefel is a secular humanist, atheist and full-time freethought activist whose mission is “to gain respect for freethinkers and ensure the complete separation of church and state.” He is founder and president of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, based in Raleigh, N.C., and a trustee of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Stiefel also serves on […]