Rudolph McKissick Jr. is co-senior pastor at the 9,000-member Bethel Baptist Institutional Church in Jacksonville, Fla. He is a national leader in contemporary sacred music and developed a professional-quality national recording choir at his church. He is an expert in sacred music and opera.

Mark Anthony Neal is associate professor of black popular culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He wrote What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003).

The Universal Health Care Action Network is an education and advocacy group working to provide comprehensive health care for all Americans. Its comprehensive Web site links to other health care reform campaigns, including Faithful Reform in Health Care. Rachel DeGolia is executive director.

Radhika Balakrishnan is  is the Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University. Currently, she serves as the Chair of the Board of the United States Human Rights Network and Chair on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Her interests include ethics, sexuality and reproduction. A participating scholar with the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health […]

Eugene F. Rivers is pastor of Pentecostal Azusa Christian Community (affiliated with the Church of God in Christ) in south Boston and president of Ella J. Baker House community organization in the Dorchester Four Corners neighborhood of Boston. Rivers co-founded the clergy-led National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, which is credited with helping to diminish gang violence in Boston and […]

Evangelical speaker and minister Claudette Anderson Copeland founded New Creation Christian Fellowship and Destiny Ministries for women. She wrote Stories From Inner Space: Confessions of a Preacher Woman and Other Tales (Red Nail Press, 2003) and Coming Through the Darkness: Cancer and One Woman’s Journey to Wholeness (Destiny Press, 2000). Contact her through executive director Destiny Ministries.

Mary R. Sawyer was a professor of religious studies at Iowa State University in Ames. She wrote the entry “National Conference of Black Christians” for the Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (Routledge, 2001). She has written about women’s leadership roles in the black church.

Aldon D. Morris is a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. His classic book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (Free Press, 1986) examines black church organization and influence on the civil rights movement.

Clayborne Carson is a Stanford University history professor and founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. He is an expert on the interface between faith and social justice.