The Rev. Robert “Bud” Grant is an environmental theology professor and Catholic priest at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa.

Samuel D. Brownback is the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. He previously served as governor of Kansas, as well as a U.S. representative and senator. 

Hille Haker is the chair of Catholic moral theology at Loyola University Chicago, where she studies human rights, bioethics and feminist ethics. Haker serves as editor of the Values in Bioethics book series and is a member of the European Group on Ethics in Sciences and New Technologies of the European Commission.

The Rev. David J. Collins is a Catholic priest, a Jesuit and an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with an interest in science, religion and space. He sometimes teaches a course on outer space, science and religion.

James Matthew Ashley is an associate professor of the history of Christianity and systematic theology at the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Ind. One of his areas of study is science and theology.

Mary Doria Russell is a novelist whose 1997 book The Sparrow is about first contact with intelligent aliens and the Jesuit priest who is part of an expedition to their planet. The book and its sequel, Children of God, deals with how the contact changes theology. She lives near Cleveland.

The Rev. Michael Heller is a Catholic priest, philosopher and cosmologist at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland. He has written numerous books and articles — mostly in Polish — about the nature of the universe, its origins and something he calls a “theology of science.” He received the 2008 Templeton […]

The Rev. Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti is an Opus Dei priest and a professor of fundamental theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He previously was an astronomer and researcher at the Observatory of Turin in Turin, Italy. He is editor of The Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, where he tackled the […]

The Rev. Paul Gabor is a Catholic priest and vice director for the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Ariz. He is a frequent contributor to the Vatican Observatory’s blog. Contact via Katie Bannan Steinke, development coordinator for VORG.