Janice Willis is a retired professor emerita of religion and social sciences at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. She is the author of Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey. Read an excerpt on Beliefnet.com. Willis has talked about her journey from the segregated, revival-preacher South to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal where she began to find peace.

Christopher S. Queen is a lecturer on the study of religion and dean of students for continuing education at Harvard University in Boston, where he teaches courses on Buddhism in America and Buddhism and social change. Read a June 18, 2004, interview he did with the Echo Chamber Project, in which he discusses Buddhism, war, peace and […]

Joseph Goldstein is co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., where he is part of the IMS Guiding Teacher Council. He is the author of One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism.

Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist monk, is founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, Calif. Kornfield is the author of Buddha’s Little Instruction Book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path and other books on Buddhist life.

Janet Gyatso is a specialist in Buddhist studies and author of multiple books, including Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet (2015).

Charles Muller is a professor in the humanities department at Toyo Gakuen University in Japan. He is the author of The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment: Korean Buddhism’s Guide to Meditation and can speak about Buddhism among Koreans. He also runs the website Resources for East Asian Language and Thought and has become interested in how the Internet can be […]

Read a Jan. 25, 2013 article about the conflicting relationship between religion and science and its development into a peaceful coexistence in India.

Michele Desmarais is the associate editor of the Journal of Religion and Film and an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She specializes in Buddhism and other Eastern religions.

Carol S. Anderson is an associate professor in the departments of religion and women’s studies at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich. She wrote a chapter about Gauri Ma in The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States.