Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez is an assistant professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She specializes in American religious history and women and religion. She is at work on The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, in which she argues that Mary appealed to both American Catholics and Protestants at a time when […]

Kathleen Townsend was Maryland’s first woman lieutenant governor, from 1995 to 2003, and is the author of Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Mixed God With Politics and Lost Their Way.

Onleilove (pronounced “only love”) Alston is the executive director at Faith in New York, a coalition of 70 congregations in New York City. She is a social justice activist and an expert on black lives in the Bible. She recently participated in a panel sponsored by PICO National Network about the black church and the […]

Mark Bowman is founder and coordinator of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Religious Archives Network at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. He was an original member of the National Religious Leaders Roundtable of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and has […]

Kelsey Pacha is youth resource coordinator at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. He is the author of “Transition to Inclusion,” a resource for congregations seeking to include and understand transgender youth.

Letitia Campbell is an assistant professor of ethics at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, where she also coordinates the Laney Legacy Program in moral leadership and the clinical pastoral education program. She studies Christian evangelization, especially in short mission trips, and helps run a Facebook group on virtual ministry tools.

Jim Winkler is president and general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, an organization that represents 37 religious denominations. He is based in Washington, D.C.