Ronald William Nelson is a Kansas family lawyer who is chairman of the custody committee of the American Bar Association’s family law section.

Lynne Marie Kohm is John Brown McCarty Professor of Family Law at Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va. Kohm describes herself as “dedicated to family restoration through the application of Christian legal principles.” She also has a blog called Family Restoration.

Patrick M. Garry is director of the Center for Empirical Legal Research at the University of South Dakota’s School of Law in Vermillion, S.D. His publications include Wrestling With God: The Courts’ Tortuous Treatment of Religion (2007).

Read a Jan. 28, 2013, commentary from The Washington Post about the positive contributions of faith-based initiatives.

Read a March 13, 2009, essay on faith-based initiatives in Commonweal magazine by Lew Daly, a senior fellow and director of the Fellows Program at Demos, a public-policy organization in New York City. Daly is the author of God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, published in fall 2009.

Read a March 1, 2009, commentary by Mark Silk of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College. The essay, posted at the Spiritual Politics blog, disputes Susan Jacoby’s assertions about Obama’s faith-based initiative.

Read a Feb. 28, 2009, op-ed in The New York Times about Obama’s faith-based initiative by Susan Jacoby. Jacoby is a well-known secularist and champion of the separation of church and state.

Read a March 2, 2009, article about conservative criticism of Obama’s faith-based initiative posted at U.S. News & World Report.

Read an essay about Obama’s faith-based initiative in the February edition of First Things, written by John J. DiIulio Jr., a University of Pennsylvania professor who was the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.