Adam Pertman is the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York City. He wrote Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America.

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization. He says apocalyptic anxiety has never been wholly absent from our culture, but it is at an all-time high now, due to current events and natural disasters.

John R. Hall is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity (2009) and can discuss the history of apocalyptic movements, prophets and groups.

Crawford Gribben is a director of the Trinity Millennialism Project at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Joseph Gelfer is an adjunct research associate in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University in Australia and editor of the anthology 2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse (2011).

The Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago surveyed 1,590 African-Americans, whites and Latinos aged 15 to 25 in several Midwest cities on subjects including rap music, premarital sex, politics and the “color-blind” society. The results included: 58 percent of black youth listen to rap music daily, compared with 45 percent of Latinos and 23 percent of […]

Princeton University associate law professor Imani Perry wrote Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004). She studies race, legal history and culture.

Josef Sorett studies religious and spiritual expressions in hiphop music and culture. He has a master of divinity degree and is a graduate student in African-American studies at Harvard University, where his dissertation is on race, religion and the arts in 20th-century America. He has worked extensively with young people in nonprofits and religious communities.

Derrick P. Alridge is an associate professor in the college of education at the University of Georgia. He wrote “From Civil Rights to Hiphop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas,” an article in the 2005 Journal of African American History (Vol. 90).