Rachelle Mee-Chapman is abbess and founder of a small urban abbey, ThPM (Thursday Night Gathering) in Seattle.

Deborah Loyd is a pastor and planter of The Bridge Christian Church for street kids and socially disenfranchised people in Portland, Ore. and is co-founder of Women’s Convergence that supports women in Christian ministries.

Heather Kirk-Davidoff is a pastor in Maryland and serves on the board of Emergent. She is co-founder of the Emerging Women Leaders Initiative. She has published a number of essays and is a frequent contributor to the Alban Institue’s Congregations Magazine.

Melissa Deckman is professor of political science and public affairs at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. Her specialties include religion and politics and women and politics. She wrote School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics (Georgetown University Press, 2004) and “Christian Right School Board Candidates” for the Encyclopedia of American Religion and Politics (Facts on File, 2003) and […]

Susan D. Rose is a professor of sociology at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. She wrote “Christian Fundamentalism and Education in the United States” for the book Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family and Education (University of Chicago Press, 1997), which includes a section on Christian fundamentalism and public education. She also wrote the article “The […]

John S. Grabowski is an associate professor of religious studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He also has an expertise in women’s issues. He and his wife were appointed to the Pontifical Council for the Family by Pope Benedict XVI in the fall of 2009.

Stephanie Mitchem is a professor of womanist theology and African-American spirituality at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. She is the author of Name It and Claim It? Prosperity Preaching in the Black Church (Pilgrim Press, 2006).

Read an Oct. 8, 2012, article in the Huffington Post about sexual misconduct being linked to prosperity gospel churches.

Full text of the Vatican instruction entitled, “Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with Regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of Their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders.” The document’s aim is to bar gay men from the priesthood.