Lawrence M. Krauss is a cosmologist and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, which explores questions ranging from the origin of the universe to the origins of human culture and cognition. His commentaries on matters of science and religion have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, including a Sept. 8, 2010, column, “Our Spontaneous Universe,” and one […]

Jack David Eller is an assistant professor of anthropology at Community College of Denver and the author of Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History (October 2010) and Natural Atheism, Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker (2007). He also contributed two chapters to the anthology Atheism and Secularity (2009).

Keith Augustine is executive director of the Internet Infidels, a nonprofit educational organization based in Colorado Springs, Colo., that is dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet.

David J. Wolpe is senior rabbi of Temple Sinai, a Conservative congregation in Los Angeles. A well-known speaker and writer, he has written several books, among them The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God (Henry Holt & Co., 1990) and (with Mitch Albom) Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times (Riverhead Trade, 2000).

Sharon D. Welch is provost and professor of religion and society at Chicago’s Meadville Lombard Theological School, which educates students in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Humanist Studies.

James Tappenden is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His essay “An Atheist’s Fundamentalism” is included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (2007).

Stewart Shapiro is O’Donnell Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. In his essay “Faith and Reason, the Perpetual War: Ruminations of a Fool” (included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life), he discusses growing up in a Jewish home and his fondness for the faith’s traditions and the intellectual aspects of […]

Paul Z. “PZ” Myers is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is known for his provocative challenges of religion, including a 2008 incident in which he drove a rusty nail through a consecrated Eucharistic host. He describes himself as a “a godless liberal” on his blog, Pharyngula.

Bryan F. Le Beau is a history professor and vice president of academic affairs at the University of St. Mary in Leavenworth, Kan. He is the author of The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair.