ReShonda Tate Billingsley writes Christian fiction directed at African-American women and teenage girls. Some of her books feature single characters using their faith to cope with issues. She left her job as a television news reporter in Houston to write full time.

Christa Ann Banister of St. Paul, Minn., drew on her experiences with single life for her 2007 novel Around the World in 80 Dates: Confessions of a Christian Serial Dater.

Monique Moultrie is a professor of religious studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who specializes in women/gender studies, African-American studies and sexuality – specifically on African-American single Christian women.  She says more black women are single – and likely to stay that way – than any other population.

Read a January 7, 2011, column at the website of First Things that rounds up a number of recent books and articles on views of the Virgin Mary among Protestants.

Kathleen E. Corley is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Her expertise is on the role of women in Christianity, and she wrote an entry titled “The Portrayal of Mary and the Other Women Characters” in the collection Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the […]

Mary F. Foskett is Wake Forest Kahle Professor of Religion and director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. She has written widely on representations of Mary throughout the centuries, including the book A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity.

Elizabeth A. Johnson is a religious sister of the Congregation of St. Joseph and a theologian at Fordham University in the Bronx, N.Y. She is one of the foremost feminist theologians and has written extensively on the Virgin Mary, including the book Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints.

The “All About Mary” page at the University of Dayton in Ohio, a Marianist Catholic college, is the portal to the Marian Library/International Marian Research Institute, one of the largest collections of resources on the Virgin Mary in the world.

Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Religion, Gender and Sexuality at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a professor in the Divinity School. Her research interests include feminist theology; theories of sexuality, race, gender, disability and embodiment; and contemporary continental philosophy.