As Aseem Shukla, a doctor who is also on the board of the Hindu American Foundation, wrote at the On Faith blog for The Washington Post, that the Indian-American candidates for public office do not always embrace their Indian religious traditions.

There are currently at least eight Indian-Americans running for Congress or statewide office, which may be a record, according to this Associated Press report in June 2010.

Read an Aug. 23, 2010, story in The Washington Post about Indian concerns over “yoga theft” by American practitioners.

Read an Aug. 27, 2010, story in The New York Times about the growing belief in reincarnation.

In The Daily Beast, Indian author Gita Mehta wrote about Eat Pray Love and the attractions and perils for Westerners of “spiritual tourism” in India.

Read an essay at the website Patheos about Julia Roberts and the appeal of Hinduism and Eastern religions throughout American history. The article is by Suhag Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation.

Christopher Kaczor is a philosophy professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and author of The Seven Big Myths About the Catholic Church: Distinguishing Fact From Fiction About Catholicism, in which he discusses the papacy. He can discuss Benedict’s legacy.

Phillip Thompson is executive director of Emory University’s Aquinas Center of Theology. The Aquinas Center is one of four independent Catholic intellectual centers at a non-Catholic U.S. university.

Kenneth Pennington holds the Kelly-Quinn Chair of Ecclesiastical and Legal History at the Catholic University of America and is an expert in church history and canon law. He has written extensively about the papacy.