Robert Kraynak is a political science professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He is the author of Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, which examines America’s civil religion and its government.

Julie Roy Jeffrey is a history professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. She has written about the religious landscape of the mid-19th century in relation to Lincoln’s presidency.

The Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia is a historical society dedicated to the study of Lincoln. John Elliff is president.

Gary Zola is an associate professor of the American Jewish experience at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. As part of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s celebration, Zola offers a lecture on Lincoln and the Jews that examines how he helped expand their civil rights.

Douglas Wilson is a co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.

Ronald C. White Jr. is the author of two best-selling books on Lincoln, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech and The Eloquent President. White’s newest, A. Lincoln: A Biography, was published to coincide with the bicentennial. In 2006, White gave a sermon at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., titled “Abraham Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount.”

Joshua Wolf Shenk is the author of 2005’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness and can discuss the 16th president’s possible depression and how it may have fed his spirituality. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Ronald D. Rietveld is professor of history emeritus at California State University at Fullerton. He has written extensively on Lincoln, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the history of religion in America. He was a historical consultant for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and is known as the only person who found […]

Lucas Morel is an associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. He is the author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government.