Assistant pastor at Riverside Chapel Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nashville, Tenn., which collaborated with several other local Adventist churches on a recent “purity ball.”

An associate professor and program director of public health at Western Kentucky University. He is an expert on teen issues, including sex education.

Read a Jan. 28, 2013, commentary from The Washington Post about the positive contributions of faith-based initiatives.

Gregory Hall is president and CEO of Warner Southern College in Lake Wales, Fla.

Joseph A. Pipa, Jr. is president of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Taylors, S.C., as well as a professor of historic and systematic theology.

Read a March 13, 2009, essay on faith-based initiatives in Commonweal magazine by Lew Daly, a senior fellow and director of the Fellows Program at Demos, a public-policy organization in New York City. Daly is the author of God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State, published in fall 2009.

Read a March 1, 2009, commentary by Mark Silk of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College. The essay, posted at the Spiritual Politics blog, disputes Susan Jacoby’s assertions about Obama’s faith-based initiative.

Read a Feb. 28, 2009, op-ed in The New York Times about Obama’s faith-based initiative by Susan Jacoby. Jacoby is a well-known secularist and champion of the separation of church and state.

Timothy D. Terrell is an associate professor of economics at Wofford College in South Carolina. He is a senior fellow with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.