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.

Pope Benedict’s first encyclical. An encyclical is considered one of the most authoritative documents from the pen of the pope, and a new pontiff’s first encyclical is considered something of a “mission statement” for the rest of the pontificate. Benedict’s first, Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love, was considered surprising by some in that […]

Article by the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus about American dissent to official Vatican positions on sexuality as well as criticism of some of Pope Benedict’s early appointments of bishops including promoting the archbishop of San Francisco, William Levada, to succeed himself at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as the church’s doctrinal gatekeeper and the […]

Carol J. Adams is an independent scholar and self described “feminist-vegan” based in Dallas, Texas. She writes and lectures widely. She has written about the relationships between religion and animals.

Lorenzo Cohen is a professor of medicine and director of the integrative medicine program at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Cohen has investigated the benefits of different forms of yoga for women undergoing breast cancer treatment.  

Ingrid Mattson holds the London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at Huron University College at Western University in London, Ontario, where she studies Islamic ethics, Muslim women and Christian-Muslim relations. She previously taught at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, where she developed the first accredited graduate program for Muslim chaplains in the U.S.