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 […]

A March 2010 forum at ReligionDispatches featured responses from six historians, religious scholars and other experts on the black church, as well as a response from Glaude.

The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., supports LGBT seminarians and the schools and churches that hire them. The center provides the media with information about several experts, including its executive director, Bernard Schlager.

The Fund for Theological Education (FTE), described as “a nonprofit advocate for improving faculty diversity in theological schools and cultivating the next generation of leaders for the church, academy and society,” held a June 11-13, 2010 conference in Chicago on the future of African-American Religious leadership. Read the group’s press release.

Judson Press, the publishing arm of the American Baptist Churches USA, which has a substantial African-American membership, released a new book in May 2010 called What We Love About the Black Church: Can We Get a Witness? The volume is a collection of essays on best practices in the African-American churches. It is edited by two white […]