Bill Aiken is director of public affairs for Soka Gakkai International-USA, an American Buddhist association based in Santa Monica, California, that opposed the “Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act of 2005.”

Sister Donna Marie Beck is professor emerita and former director of music therapy at the Mary Pappert School of Music at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pa. She is also a Catholic nun and the facilitator of a healing community drum circle.

Marc Anderson has a DVD/CD titled Drums in the Church: A Practical Guide for Percussion in Christian Worship. He teaches workshops and classes and is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Ruben Habito is a professor of world religions and spirituality at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is co-editor of The Practice of Altruism: Caring and Religion in a Global Perspective. He specializes in Buddhism and wrote a chapter in Altruism in World Religions.

B. Alan Wallace, president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies in California, trained as a monk in Buddhist monasteries. He teaches Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and the United States and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars. His academic training is in religious studies, physics and philosophy of science. He can be […]

Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University in New York, wrote “Human Rights and Responsibilities: Buddhist Views on Individualism and Altruism” in Religious Diversity and Human Rights. Thurman is also the author of The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism.

Keishin Inaba, associate professor of human sciences at Osaka University in Japan, has a website on altruism. He is author of Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain, which examines whether Christianity and Buddhism change people’s attitudes and behavior towards altruism. He also edited The Practice of […]

Bernadette Murphy is the author of Zen and the Art of Knitting: Exploring the Links Between Knitting, Spirituality and Creativity (Adams Media Corp., 2002). She is a fiction writer and instructor at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

Leslie E. Sponsel is a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He specializes in religion and ecology and has written about Buddhism and the environment.