Cherry Hill Seminary is the leading provider of education and practical training in leadership, ministry and personal growth in pagan and nature-based spiritualities. Holli S. Emore is the executive director.

Laurence Hull Stookey is a professor of preaching and worship at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. He has written about the language of prayer and praying in public.

Morris Fiorina is co-author, with Jeremy Pope, of Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., where he is an expert in public opinion.

Darrell J. Fasching is a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is co-author of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach and can discuss the different attitudes toward lying and honesty among the world religions.

Gregory R. Erlandson is president of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, which is based in Indiana and produced a number of Pope Benedict XVI’s works. Erlandson is co-author of the 2010 book Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal. He also worked in Rome covering the Vatican for Catholic News Service.

Robert Mickens is editor-in-chief at Global Pulse, a Catholic magazine. He has been the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic weekly published in London. He is based in Rome.

The BBC maintains a profile on Pope Benedict XVI.

The New York Times has a Times Topics page on Benedict.

National Geographic Kids information page on Diwali.