Marilyn Holt is a historian of American orphanages and an expert on the history of American Indian adoption. She wrote Indian Orphanages and The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America.

Midnight Call is an online magazine of Christian prophecy that watches world events with an eye toward the Second Coming of Jesus. Email through the website.

Princeton University associate law professor Imani Perry wrote Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004). She studies race, legal history and culture.

The Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant is founder and pastor of the large Empowerment Temple, an AME church in Baltimore, and was previously director of the NAACP’s youth and college division. He co-authored The Gospel Remix: Reaching the Hip Hop Generation (Judson Press, 2007).

Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. is an associate professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He leads a band, Dr. Guy’s MusiQologY, and has expertise in African-American and American music, jazz, cultural studies, popular music, film studies and historiography. He wrote Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2003).

Darren A. Ferguson is founder and pastor of Luke 4:18 Ministries, an umbrella organization of hiphop ministers and services in New York, including the Soldiers of Praise hiphop choir and Friday Night FLAYVA (Freedom, Love and Abundant Youth Victory Alliance) worship. He is also youth director for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. Ferguson calls his preaching style […]

Josef Sorett studies religious and spiritual expressions in hiphop music and culture. He has a master of divinity degree and is a graduate student in African-American studies at Harvard University, where his dissertation is on race, religion and the arts in 20th-century America. He has worked extensively with young people in nonprofits and religious communities.

Hampton, Va., hiphop artist Sean Slaughter writes a column, Freestylin‘, for GospelFlava.com, the gospel music industry newsmagazine. He can discuss the relationship between gospel and hiphop.

Derrick P. Alridge is an associate professor in the college of education at the University of Georgia. He wrote “From Civil Rights to Hiphop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas,” an article in the 2005 Journal of African American History (Vol. 90).