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David M. O’Leary

David M. O’Leary is a Jesuit priest and a senior lecturer in comparative religions and medical ethics at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He contributed articles on heaven and hell to The Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development.

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Maria Erling

The Rev. Maria Erling is a Lutheran pastor and an associate professor of the history of Christianity and global missions at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in Gettysburg, Pa. She contributed a chapter on mainline Protestants in New England to Religion and Public Life in New England: Steady Habits Changing Slowly.

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Mark Shibley

Mark Shibley is a sociologist at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Ore. He has studied spirituality in the Pacific Northwest, historically the region with the greatest number of religiously unaffiliated people in the United States, and contributed a chapter on the subject to Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone.

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Bill McKinney

Bill McKinney was president of the Pacific School of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. for fourteen years before he retired in 2010. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a religion sociologist who is an expert on American Protestantism.

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“Some Aspects of Christian Meditation”

Read an October 1989 letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the subject of Christian meditation written by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. In it, Ratzinger addresses yoga.

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