Julie Hicks Patrick is an associate professor of psychology at West Virginia University in Morgantown. She is working on a journal article that examines what adults pray and why.

Mary Elizabeth Perry is a certified spiritual director in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who teaches Lectio Divina and meditation as a form of prayer. She can discuss the mainline Protestant concept of meditation. She lives in Mobile, Ala.

Laurence Hull Stookey is a professor of preaching and worship at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. He has written about the language of prayer and praying in public.

Darrell J. Fasching is a professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is co-author of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach and can discuss the different attitudes toward lying and honesty among the world religions.

Gregory R. Erlandson is president of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, which is based in Indiana and produced a number of Pope Benedict XVI’s works. Erlandson is co-author of the 2010 book Pope Benedict XVI and the Sexual Abuse Crisis: Working for Reform and Renewal. He also worked in Rome covering the Vatican for Catholic News Service.

Robert Mickens is editor-in-chief at Global Pulse, a Catholic magazine. He has been the Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic weekly published in London. He is based in Rome.

The BBC maintains a profile on Pope Benedict XVI.

The New York Times has a Times Topics page on Benedict.

Sandro Magister is a Vaticanologist and an Italian journalist whose website, Chiesa, has an English-language archive of Magister’s insider essays on the Vatican, including all the developments of Benedict’s papacy.