A segment on the website About.com looks at the legal questions surrounding making Good Friday a state holiday.

Charles E. Curran is the Scurlock Professor of Human Values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He specializes in moral theology, social ethics and the role of the church as a moral and political actor in society. He is a liberal theologian who was dismissed from Catholic University of America for his teachings on human sexuality after […]

Rabbi A. James Rudin was the senior interreligious adviser for the American Jewish Committee and a longtime veteran of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. He met with Pope John Paul II many times and participated in high-level talks at the Vatican between Catholic and Jewish leaders. He has also consulted frequently with Christian churches and groups that want […]

The Rev. Gerald P. Fogarty is a professor of religious studies and history at the University of Virginia and an expert on the Vatican. He is the author of several books on Catholicism and the papacy. His essay “The Papacy: From Low Regard to High Esteem” is part of a 2000 collection from Liturgical Press […]

Roberto Suro is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. Before moving to USC in 2007 he was director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan research center established in 2001. Suro can talk about the growth of Hispanic Catholicism in […]

Jo Renee Formicola is a professor of political science at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and author of Pope John Paul: Prophetic Politician (Georgetown University Press, 2002). She can discuss the impact of John Paul’s papacy on world affairs. She is co-author, with Mary C. Segers and Paul Weber, of Faith Based Initiatives and the Bush Administration: The Good, […]

Robert P. George is the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. He has written on natural law, marriage and family life, religious freedom, bioethics and public morality. Additionally, he’s served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School and was a vocal advocate of  Pope John Paul II’s views on women, abortion, sexuality and related issues. In 2004 the pope appointed her as head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, at that time the highest Vatican post ever held […]

Stephen Pope is a professor of theology at Boston College and a frequent commentator on church affairs and the papacy. He is author of The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love and writes about different forms of love in Christian thought, Christian ethics, justice, and charity, and evolutionary theory.