Cathy Cleaver Ruse is Senior Fellow, Legal Studies at the Family Research Council. Her professional experience spans the fields of communication, public policy and law. She has appeared on PBS’s Firing Line and CNN’s Crossfire. She has published scholarly legal articles on constitutional issues and has filed “friend of the court” briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court. She […]

Vanessa Ochs is the author of The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices: CLAL’s Guide to Everyday and Holiday Rituals and Blessings. She is a professor in the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She can talk about the role of the Internet in the contemporary Jewish dating scene, life cycle rituals for […]

Read the results of a 15-year longitudinal study released in March 2003 by University of Michigan researchers who found that children’s viewing of violent television shows, their identification with aggressive characters and their perception that TV violence is realistic were linked to later aggression as young adults.

Read a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics on the impact of violence on children. It states that the average American child watches as much as 28 hours of television a week and that viewing violence can lead to emotional desensitization, to a perception that the world is a mean and violent place, and to children […]

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 […]

John L. Allen Jr. is editor of Crux, a website specializing in coverage of the Catholic Church. He previously was the longtime Rome correspondent for National Catholic Reporter. Allen is considered a top Vaticanologist and a leading English-language expert and commentator on the papacy.

Helen M. Alvaré is a professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia. Alvaré chaired the commission investigating clerical abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and was an adviser to Pope Benedict XVI’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, as well as an ABC News consultant. Her scholarship regularly addresses current controversies about marriage, parenting and the […]

Linda Kintz is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She co-edited the book Media, Culture and the Religious Right (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Stewart M. Hoover is a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is an expert on religion and popular culture, focusing on how many people use popular culture to make sense of life in a way religion once was used.