E. Brooks Holifield is a professor of American church history at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University in Atlanta.

Stephen M. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware and a member of the editorial board of the conservative religious periodical First Things. He writes frequently about the intersection of faith and science, often critiquing the strictly materialist point of view of many atheists.

H. Allen Orr is a biology professor at the University of Rochester in New York. He wrote a Jan. 11, 2007, essay, “A Mission to Convert,” in The New York Review of Books that critiqued recent books on atheism.

Joan Konner is a professor emerita and dean emerita of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and is author of The Atheist’s Bible: An Illustrious Collection of Irreverent Thoughts, which was published in June 2007.

Penny Edgell is a professor in sociology at the University of Minnesota and lead author of a 2006 study on the social acceptance of atheists in America. She is beginning new research on the moral communities of those who aren’t traditionally religious. She wrote Religion and Family in a Changing Society.

Robert Altemeyer is a retired associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. He is the co-author of Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America’s Nonbelievers (2006) and Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion (1997).

James A. Beverley is a theologian and professor of Christian thought and ethics at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto. He is the author of The God Solution: A Reply to the God Delusion. He is also an expert on Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the fiction of Dan Brown.

Julian Baggini is a British philosopher, writer and blogger who is the author of Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. He is also the founder of the magazine and website The Philosophers’ Magazine.

Erik J. Wielenberg is an associate professor of philosophy at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. He is the author of Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, which argues that life has meaning and a moral structure even if God does not exist.