Sushil Mittal is professor of religion at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. He is an expert on Gandhian thought and a specialist in Indian studies. He is the author of several books on Hinduism.

Lester R. Kurtz is a professor of sociology and anthropology at George Mason University. He is an expert in Gandhian thought and  editor of the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace & Conflict and lectures around the world on violence, politics and peacemaking.

Peter Gottschalk is a professor of religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. He studies the dynamic of the cultural interplay between Hinduism, Islam, and the West.

Whitney Sanford is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She is an expert on Hindu narratives of agriculture and religion and nature in South Asia.

Timothy Lubin is an associate professor of religion at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. He teaches a course on Hindu temples.

Linda B. Hess is a lecturer in religious studies at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. She is an expert in the poetry of 15th- and 16th-century Hindu saints and can discuss their continued influence.

Thomas E. Buckley is a Jesuit who teaches American religious history at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif. He wrote Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776-1787 and is working on a study of Jefferson and religious freedom.

Bruce Braden edited ‘Ye Will Say I Am No Christian’: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values (Prometheus, 2005), source documents that trace the views of Jefferson and Adams over time.

Robert Hanser is the head of the criminal justice department and the assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.