Charlton McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (Hampton Press, 2003), which examines African-American funeral practices.

Elizabeth Westrate wrote, produced and directed A Family Undertaking, a documentary about the home funeral movement.  

Garrett Epps is a law professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in constitutional law. He covers the Supreme Court for The Atlantic as a contributing writer and is the author of several books on the topic, including American Justice 2014: Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court. 

Ian I. Mitroff is president of Mitroff Crisis Management in Manhattan Beach, Calif., and Professor Emeritus at the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. His books include, as co-author, A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America: A Hard Look at Spirituality, Religion and Values in the Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 1999). Contact […]

Kevin Bumgarner is executive editor of Florida Baptist Witness, a weekly newspaper based in Jacksonville, Fla., and criticized the Democrats’ effort to reach out to religious voters during the 2004 election.

Read a Nov. 7, 2012, article talking about how President Barack Obama did with white religious voters versus nonwhite religious voters.

Read a Nov. 8, 2012, article from the American Spectator about how Catholic and evangelical voters supported the Republican candidate in the 2012 election.

Amy Sullivan is a contributing writer for TIME magazine and a former editor for Washington Monthly, where she wrote of the Democrats’ need to reclaim religion from the Republican Party. She is the author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (Scribner, 2008).

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics 2012. He has said Americans increasingly vote as they pray or don’t pray.