The Rev. Clyde Lanier is senior pastor of Westwood Missionary Baptist Church in Winter Haven, Fla. The church’s missionaries have helped spawn 200 churches in Kenya, and they continue to evangelize there.

The Rev. Dermot S. Roache is director of the Society of African Missions House of Studies in Dedham, Mass. The American province of the missionary group, based in Tenafly, N.J., has priests tending to the spiritual and social needs of Africans in 16 countries, including Liberia, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania.

The Rev. Jonathan Bonk is executive director of Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Conn., a renewal center for missionaries of all Christian denominations. He is the project director of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography and editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

Read a June 29, 2005, Christian Science Monitor story about U.S. churches addressing poverty in Africa.

Read the July 6, 2005, Washington Times article “Christian groups unite against worst African ills.”

Rabbi Goldie Milgram, founder and executive director of Reclaiming Judaism, has spoken at a Thanksgiving Spiritual Health Retreat at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico.

The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., claims to be the largest mosque in the U.S. It is a Shiite mosque, and its congregation is predominantly Arab. Contact Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini.

Marcia Hermansen is director of the Islamic World Studies Program and a professor in the theology department at Loyola University Chicago. She is an expert on Islamic spirituality and Sufism.

The center is an interdisciplinary program in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East and the geo-cultural area in which Islamic civilization prospered, and continues to shape world history.  The center at the University of Arkansas includes professors in a variety of disciplines.