The Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook is a distinguished fellow at the Freedom Forum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center. She served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from 2011 to 2013. Cook is an ordained Baptist pastor.

Read a June 1, 2010 essay in Christianity Today by Mark Galli titled,  “Judgment in the Gulf: Woes and blessings of the oil spill.”

The Most Rev. Wilton Gregory is Roman Catholic archbishop of Atlanta. He served as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2001 to 2004. During his term the bishops developed new policies on clergy sexual abuse. He also has written about the death penalty, physician-assisted suicide and African-American liturgy.

Read “The Cry of the Oil-Soaked Pelican: How the birds mired in the Gulf oil spill teach us to properly grieve,” a June 9 essay at Christianity Today relating the disaster to man’s fallen nature.

Read a June 11, 2010 story, “Gulf spill seeps into spiritual life,” from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and posted at the Huffington Post.

“How should Christians respond to the oil spill?” is a June 18 column by Jonathan Merritt, author of “Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for Our Planet.” The essay is at CNN’s Belief Blog.

Louis Farrakhan leads the Nation of Islam, based in Chicago. In September 2006 he handed over daily leadership of the Nation of Islam to its executive committee. Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam, founded in 1930 to address the spiritual, economic and social needs of African-Americans and criticized as separatist and anti-Christian, has become more mainstream. […]

Vashti (pronounced “Vasht-eye”) M. McKenzie is bishop of the 13th Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first woman bishop in the denomination. Formerly a journalist and radio broadcaster, she wrote Not Without a Struggle: Leadership Development for African American Women in Ministry (Pilgrim Press, 1996) and Strength in the Struggle: Leadership Development for Women (Pilgrim Press, 2002).

An online petition, “The BP Oil Spill: A Christian Call for Lament and Reconciliation,” called on Americans to observe a “fast from oil” on Sunday, June 20, 2010, the two-month anniversary of the spill. Composed at the 2010 Duke Divinity Center for Reconciliation Summer Institute, the petition includes a Litany of Lament and suggestions for reducing oil […]