Beverly Roberts Gaventa is Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary. She wrote Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1999) and co-edited Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).

Cheri Fuller is a Christian speaker and author whose son, Lt. Chris Fuller, was a Navy doctor who was deployed to Iraq. She encourages people to organize prayer groups in their homes or churches to lift up service members and their families, and she launched a website for military families that provides spiritual and other resources. Contact Cheri via […]

Scott Hahn chair of Biblical Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, and the founder and director of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. A former Protestant minister who converted to Catholicism, his books include Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God (Doubleday, 2001), which examines the Marian doctrines and the […]

Melissa Rogers is a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies for Brookings, where she specializes in the First Amendment’s religion clauses and religion and faith-related political issues. She previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and executive director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Read a Dec. 21, 2000, Associated Press story posted by the Cincinnati Enquirer about a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that Christmas can continue to be a legal holiday, as it has been since 1870, because it has a secular purpose.

Religioustolerance.com offers a snapshot of the court decisions involving Good Friday holidays.

A segment on the website About.com looks at the legal questions surrounding making Good Friday a state holiday.

Read an essay by Karen Maudlin, a psychologist specializing in family therapy, on how to talk to children of different ages about Jesus’ crucifixion.

The Rev. Steven M. Avella is associate professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee and an expert on American Catholic history and the history of the American West.