Stephen Winzenburg a is a professor of communications at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he has studied the fund-raising activities of televangelists, some of whom avow the prosperity gospel.

R. Drew Smith is a Baptist minister and professor of urban ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He has studied and written about black megachurches and has edited four volumes on American religion and public life, including New Day Begun: African American Churches and Civic Culture in Post-Civil Rights America.

Sam Pollard is a professor of film and television at New York University in New York, N.Y. He has produced and directed several documentaries, including one about black preachers for the History Channel.

Douglas John Hall is author of The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, in which he examines whether Christianity teaches some a love of consumption and waste. He is emeritus professor of theology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He has written extensively about neo-Orthodoxy.

Tony Campolo is a prominent evangelical pastor who helps lead Red Letter Christians, a progressive Christian movement aimed at building a more just society. He is also an author and a professor emeritus at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. Campolo served as a spiritual adviser to President Bill Clinton.

Read an April 21, 2013, interview with Joel Osteen, pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, about his aversion to being lumped in with “prosperity gospel” preachers.

Listen to a July 31, 2005, All Things Considered story on National Public Radio about African-American churches debating the prosperity gospel.

Read an Oct. 8, 2012, article in the Huffington Post about sexual misconduct being linked to prosperity gospel churches.

Read a piece on the Washington Post giving background on the prosperity gospel.