Jennifer Johnson is a senior associate specializing in Mexico and the U.S./Mexico border with the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), based in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit coalition including many religious groups that encourages the U.S. to develop policies toward Latin America that promote human rights, justice and peace.

John Hammett is professor of systematic theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C..He is the author of Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology (Kregel Publications, 2005).

Diana Butler Bass is an author, speaker and scholar who specializes in American religion and culture. She is the author of many books, including Christianity After Religion and Grounded: Finding God in the World – A Spiritual Revolution. Arrange an interview through Melinda Mullin at HarperCollins.

Linda Hartke is the president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, an organization that serves both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It helps resettle refugees, protect unaccompanied refugee children, advocate for the just treatment of asylum seekers and seek alternatives to detention for those incarcerated during immigration proceedings.

Edwin I. Hernández is the director of the Center for Study of Latino Religion at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind. The center conducts social-scientific study of the U.S. Latino church, its leadership and the interaction between religion and community.

Joerg Rieger is a professor of constructive theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is an expert on mainline Protestant denominations and says some of those churches, while they do not teach a prosperity gospel, share a “prosperity mentality” when they preach that “good things happen to good people.”

Douglas John Hall is author of The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, in which he examines whether Christianity teaches some a love of consumption and waste. He is emeritus professor of theology at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. He has written extensively about neo-Orthodoxy.

The Roman Catholic Church welcomes thousands of new believers into the faith each year at Easter Vigil. Some are converts from Protestantism, but those who are new Christians make the sacraments of baptism, First Eucharist and confirmation all in one momentous night. Read the blog of a lifelong Methodist who became a Catholic during Easter vigil 2005.

Read an April 10, 2004, Boston Globe story describing how Roman Catholic Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley declined to wash the feet of women on Holy Thursday, saying that Jesus had only male disciples.