Kristen Archer is acting manager of media relations at Bread for the World in Washington, D.C., a Christian advocacy organization that lobbies to increase funding for more and smarter aid to Africa.

Jean Graybeal is a professor at the Gallatin School of Independent Study at New York University. She wrote a chapter called “Cathy on Slenderness, Suffering, and Soul” for God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2001).

Mark Graham is an associate professor of religious studies at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He has written a paper on comedy and religious criticism.

Buzz Dixon is the author of Serenity: Bad Girl in Town (Barbour, 2005), a comic book whose publisher believes it is the first Christian-themed manga, a form of Japanese comic book.

Tom Lansford, academic dean at the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast in Long Beach, has written about religion in West Africa.

Robert Darden was the editor at The Wittenburg Door, a former religious satire magazine that took special pleasure in skewering televangelists. Darden is an journalism professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He can be contacted through Terry Goodrich at 254-710-3321.

Donald E. Capps is a professor emeritus of pastoral psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, N.J. He is the author of A Time to Laugh: The Religion of Humor (Continuum, 2005). Contact 609-497-6442.

Linda E. Thomas, professor of theology and anthropology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has written about survival and resistance in an African indigenous church and about ritual process and spiritual resilience in South Africa.

Jeffrey Howard Mahan is a professor of religion and communication at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He is the author of Media, Religion and Culture: An Introduction and Religion and Popular Culture in America.