The Rev. Warner H. Brown Jr. is a United Methodist Church bishop and head of its California-Nevada Council. He has also served as president of the UMC’s council of bishops. He is based in Sacramento, Calif.

Jeffrey Walton is communications manager for the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. where he often writes about the Anglican and Episcopal churches.

Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez is an assistant professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She specializes in American religious history and women and religion. She is at work on The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, in which she argues that Mary appealed to both American Catholics and Protestants at a time when […]

Omar Ahmed Shahin is an imam, a lawyer and director of the Islamic studies program at the Graduate Theological Foundation in Mishawaka, Ind. He is an expert on Islam in the Middle East and in the U.S. and Islamic law and the family.

Michael Schuck is co-director of the International Jesuit Ecology Project and an associate professor of theology at Loyola University in Chicago. He is an expert on the social teachings of papal encyclicals.

Thomas Peters started and runs the American Papist blog and works with Catholic Vote. He speaks about Catholicism and politics, pro-life issues and pro-family activism, the future of social media and youth activism.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo is a lecturer in the department of religion and ancient civilizations at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research interests include women in Buddhism, death and identity, Buddhist feminist ethics, Buddhism and bioethics, Buddhist social ethics and Buddhist transnationalism.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor is the spiritual leader of Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, Calif. He is also an author, musician, teacher, and activist, and he has worked in Ghana and in the White House. He writes for the Huffington Post and the Times of Israel and blogs at menachemcreditor.org.