Monique Moultrie is a professor of religious studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who specializes in women/gender studies, African-American studies and sexuality – specifically on African-American single Christian women.  She says more black women are single – and likely to stay that way – than any other population.

F. Stanley Jones is a professor of religious studies at California State University, Long Beach. He is the editor of a collection titled Which Mary?: The Marys of Early Christian Tradition.

Stephen J. Shoemaker is an associate professor of Christian history in the department of religious studies at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He has written widely on the Virgin Mary in early Christianity and in Gnostic traditions and teaches a course on early Islam.

Mark Miravalle is a professor of theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. Miravalle was at the forefront of a push in the 1990s to have the Catholic Church name Mary as “co-redemptrix,” or a co-redeemer, with Jesus, as well as a singular mediator between God and men and women. The campaign was controversial […]

Kathleen E. Corley is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Her expertise is on the role of women in Christianity, and she wrote an entry titled “The Portrayal of Mary and the Other Women Characters” in the collection Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the […]

Charlene Spretnak is one of the founders of the women’s spirituality movement in the U.S. She is the editor of The Politics of Women’s Spirituality and author of Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence in the Modern Church.  She is a professor emerita at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She lives in Ojai, […]

Gene Sager is professor of philosophy at Palomar College in San Marcos, Calif. He wrote a Dec. 7, 2007, essay in Commonweal magazine titled “A Gringo’s Devotion” about his journey from a childhood as an “Anglo Protestant” to his devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and eventual conversion to Catholicism.

Thomas Oden is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University in Madison, N.J. He is a leading Protestant scholar of church history who has argued that Protestants should explore history and scripture to recover Mary of Nazareth as a model of spirituality.

Kristy Nabhan-Warren is a professor of religion at the University of Iowa. She has written widely on the role of the Virgin Mary in Latino cultures. Her research focuses on Catholic studies. She is the author of Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland.