This July 25, 2013, explainer from the Religion News Service answers common questions about Shariah.

Michelle Whittaker is communications director for the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church and Society. Part of the GBCS’s mission is to promote “personal, social and civic righteousness.” Contact through the website.

R. Collin Mangrum is a law professor at Creighton University in Omaha who teaches on church and state issues and on the history of American legal thought. He is co-author of Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (University of Illinois Press, 1988).

Brahma Kumaris is a spiritual, educational institution that works to promote humanism, tolerance and enthusiasm for spreading Hinduism across the globe. The institute is located in India.

The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture provides educational resources on religions around the world, including each of their different practices, beliefs and histories. It is based in Kolkata, India.

More than 15,000 ethnic Hmong refugees now living in Thailand are eligible to be resettled in the United States, but their common practice of polygamy raises problems, according to a March 2, 2004, Reuters article posted by the Washington Times.

Read an article published in the spring 2003 issue of the Houston Law Review on the constitutionality of banning polygamy in the United States.

The Detroit Free Press provides this resource on Islam and Arab-Americans in the U.S.

Religion and the Founding of the American Republic is a Library of Congress Exhibition. It provides a history of the role of religion in the founding of the United States.