Directs the nondenominational group “Silver Ring Thing,” based just outside Pittsburgh, Pa. The group uses comedy, drama, music videos and testimonials to promote abstinence in live events each year throughout the country.

Professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York.

A sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States.

Candace Chellew-Hodge leads Jubilee! Circle, a church plant of the United Church of Christ in Columbia, S.C. Chellew-Hodge, a lesbian who writes frequently on gay issues in the churches, founded Whosoever.org, an online magazine for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christians.

Nancy Faust Sizer is a teaching a course on school reform at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement. She was an adjunct lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She co-wrote The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract.

Assistant pastor at Riverside Chapel Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nashville, Tenn., which collaborated with several other local Adventist churches on a recent “purity ball.”

An associate professor and program director of public health at Western Kentucky University. He is an expert on teen issues, including sex education.

A professor of anthropology at Radford University in Radford, Va. She wrote God’s Schools: Choice and Compromise in American Society.

Director of the Center on Children, Families and the Law and a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska. He reported on research findings that deal with both abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education.