Phyllis Nelson is the teacher and director of Christ’s Jewels of Truth, a Nashville study group affiliated with the Universal Foundation for Better Living.

The Rev. Temple Hayes is pastoral care minister of First Unity Church and spiritual leader of Unity Campus, a New Thought center, in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Amanda Porterfield, historian of American religion, is a religion professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She is particularly interested in the interplay of religion and culture and has written about Mary Baker Eddy.

Henry S. Levinson is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He wrote The Religious Investigations of William James (University of North Carolina Press, 1981) and is an expert on 19th-century American transcendentalist thinkers.

Tommie Novick-Lunsford is a minister of the Universal Foundation for Better Living who leads the Christ Delta study group in Indianola, Miss.

Risa Levitt Kohn is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University. She was also curator of the June 2007 Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Catherine Wessinger, professor of religious studies at Loyola University in New Orleans, has written widely on theosophy, millennialism, New Religious Movements and New Age religions. She is co-editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.

John K. Simmons is professor and chairman of the department of religious studies at Western Illinois University in Macomb. He has written about metaphysics, the Unity Church and Christian Science.

Stuart A. Irvine is an associate professor of Old Testament and Israelite religion at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.