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.

The “All About Mary” page at the University of Dayton in Ohio, a Marianist Catholic college, is the portal to the Marian Library/International Marian Research Institute, one of the largest collections of resources on the Virgin Mary in the world.

Philip Watkins teaches psychology at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. He specializes in gratitude and has researched its relationship to spirituality.

Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside. She studies human happiness. She has researched the effects of “counting one’s blessings” as a way of enhancing happiness.

Jo-Ann Tsang is an associate professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She has researched gratitude extensively.