The Rev. Dermot S. Roache is director of the Society of African Missions House of Studies in Dedham, Mass. The American province of the missionary group, based in Tenafly, N.J., has priests tending to the spiritual and social needs of Africans in 16 countries, including Liberia, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania.

Kim Pozniak is communications officer for Sub-Saharan Africa at Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore. Catholic Relief does emergency response, such as shelter and famine relief, and long-term projects in education, agriculture and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in more than 30 African countries.

The Rev. Jonathan Bonk is executive director of Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, Conn., a renewal center for missionaries of all Christian denominations. He is the project director of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography and editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

Linda E. Thomas, professor of theology and anthropology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has written about survival and resistance in an African indigenous church and about ritual process and spiritual resilience in South Africa.

• Dana Robert is professor of world Christianity and history of mission and director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University School of Theology. She is the editor of African Christian Outreach, Vol. 2: Mission Churches (Southern African Missiological Society, 2003) and co-editor of Frontiers of African Christianity (Unisa Press, 2003).

Read a March 27, 2013, article from Christianity Today, “Is Coptic Evangelism in Africa Really on the Rise?”

Read a June 29, 2005, Christian Science Monitor story about U.S. churches addressing poverty in Africa.

Rabbi Goldie Milgram, founder and executive director of Reclaiming Judaism, has spoken at a Thanksgiving Spiritual Health Retreat at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico.

The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., claims to be the largest mosque in the U.S. It is a Shiite mosque, and its congregation is predominantly Arab. Contact Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini.