John Voll is professor of Islamic history and associate director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is an expert in Middle Eastern, Islamic and world history, and he has written on Islam in the modern world and Islam and democracy.

The Rev. Lizette Larson-Miller, a professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., wrote an article in the May 23, 2005, edition of America magazine (subscriber-only) titled “Holy Ground: Roadside Shrines and Sacred Space.” She identified five general characteristics of roadside shrines, and she ponders what liturgical churches might learn from this widespread trend.

Read a New York Times review of Roadside Religion: Cross Country. Contact Beal.

Tom Bruce is a psychologist, thanatologist and author who teaches a class in death and dying at Sacramento City College in California.

Cari Leversee is director of Thresholds Home Funerals. Founded in 2003, Thresholds is a non-embalming funeral establishment in San Diego, Calif. It has offered classes on “reclaiming death as a sacred event.”

Ronald Barrett is a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is an expert on African-American contemporary funeral practices.

Dave Burrell is a historian for Historical Insights who has studied American funeral practices and written four papers on the subject. He says one of the major shifts in American funerals and attitudes toward death are that the body is now seen as “symbolically empty.” He lives in the Denver area.

Corky Ra is the founder of Summum, a nonprofit organization in Salt Lake City that offers mummification services. The group bills itself as “the source of all spiritual progression.” The mummification process involves soaking the body in embalming fluid, wrapping it in gauze and covering it with polyurethane before installing it in a bronze casing that […]

Rochelle Millen is a religion professor at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and author of Women, Birth, and Death in Jewish Law and Practice (University Press of New England, 2004), which examines the role of women in Jewish funerals.