Leanne McCall Tigert is a United Church of Christ minister and pastoral psychotherapist. She is co-editor of Coming Out Young and Faithful and lives in Concord, N.H.

Alex Sanchez is a Florida-based author of several novels about being young, gay and Christian, including The God Box and Rainbow Boys.

Oct. 19, 2009, Religion Dispatches column by Rev. Irene Monroe about black churches’ failure to embrace young LGBT people.

The Rev. Irene Monroe is a syndicated columnist and the coordinator of the African American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. She has written about the black church’s failure to embrace young LGBT people. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. […]

The Rev. Cindi Love is the founder of FamLo, a faith-based nonprofit that works for social justice for the marginalized, including LGBT people. She is the author of Would Jesus Discriminate?: The 21st Century Question and can discuss the issues and conflicts faced by teenagers coming out in evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities. She is also […]

Art Farnsley  directed the research of the Project on Religion and Urban Culture at the Polis Center of Indiana University. He has extensively studied congregations and social services and is one of the authors of Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion (Indiana University Press, 2004). His most recent work is “Flea Market Jesus,” on […]

Marc Adams is the executive director of HeartStrong, an organization that supports LGBT youth in religious schools and institutions. He can discuss fundamentalist Christianity and abuse related to people of all sexual orientations, religious schools and LGBT youth, “ex-gay” issues and ministries and coming-out issues. He is the author of The Preacher’s Son, a memoir […]

Bishop E. Roy Riley of the New Jersey Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America testified about welfare reform July 19, 2006, before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. He expressed concern about persistent poverty and a growing gap between rich and poor in America.

The Crouch-Gregory book followed the publication of a similarly-themed book, Understanding and Transforming the Black Church, by Anthony Pinn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston. Pinn is also executive director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and he co-chairs the American Academy of […]