Leonard Sweet is E. Stanley Jones professor of evangelism at Drew University in Madison, N.J., and has been dean of the theological school there. Sweet is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. He and his wife, Karen Elizabeth Rennie, are the primary contributors to the web-based preaching resource preachingplus.com. A popular speaker, he has written numerous books, […]

Mark Driscoll is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church, a fast-growing, nondenominational, theologically conservative congregation in Seattle’s urban Ballard neighborhood. He was named one of the 25 most influential pastors of the past 25 years by Preaching magazine in 2010.

Andrew Jones, a New Zealander and a pivotal emerging thinker, has been blogging tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com since 2001 – a long time as these things go. He is project director for the Boaz Project, based in the Czech Republic and developing “a support structure for church in the emerging culture.”

Edward J. Larson is a professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, Calif. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of several books dealing with the controversy of evolution versus creationism, including Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution and Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over […]

Patrick N. Allitt is a professor of American history at Emory University in Atlanta. In his book Religion in America Since 1945: A History, he looks at the role religion has played in public school education. He is also an expert on religion and environmentalism and is author of the book A Climate of Crisis: America […]

Susan D. Rose is a professor of sociology at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. She wrote “Christian Fundamentalism and Education in the United States” for the book Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family and Education (University of Chicago Press, 1997), which includes a section on Christian fundamentalism and public education. She also wrote the article “The […]

Steven Schafersman is president of Texas Citizens for Science. He has accused critics of trying to water down school textbook coverage of evolution so they can pressure publishers to include religious-based explanations for the origin of life.

Steven Buri is president of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. The think tank is a prominent opponent of Darwinian orthodoxy and has found many instances in which it says Texas biology textbooks are inaccurate or misleading. It also pushes school districts to have textbooks that teach the controversy over creationism and evolution.

Read a July 21, 2004, MSNBC.com article on the sex education textbook debate in Texas.