Mark Franken is executive director of migration and refugee services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The General Commission on Religion and Race is one of six commissions of the United Methodist Church.

Rabbi Marc Schneier is founder and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and a leading figure in building up relationships between the Jewish community and African-Americans, Latinos, Christians and Muslims. He wrote Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King Jr. & the Jewish Community.

Fumitaka Matsuoka is Robert Gordon Sproul Professor of Theology of Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, Calif., where he is executive director of the Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion. He is an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. He co-edited Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of […]

Ed Gilbreath, who lives in the Chicago area, is editor of Today’s Christian magazine and editor at large for Christianity Today. He wrote Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity and Gospel Trailblazer: An African-American Preacher’s Historic Journey Across Racial Lines.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen wrote Love in Black and White: A Memoir of Race, Religion and Romance with his wife, Janet Langhart. Cohen is white and the son of a Jewish father and a Protestant Irish mother, while Langhart is African-American and the daughter of a Southern Baptist mother, a single parent. Contact […]

A study by USC surveyed 20,000 white Christians and found that  “members of religious congregations tend to harbor prejudiced views of other races.”

Keith Ward is an ordained Anglican priest and a senior fellow at the Metanexus Institute, where he gives frequent public lectures on the subject of science and religion. Topics have included “Has Science Made Belief in God Obsolete?” and “Can the Cruelty and Waste of Evolution Be Reconciled With Creation by a Good God?”

The Rev. George Coyne is a Jesuit priest and director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., which he led for more than 25 years. He presented a lecture titled “The Dance of the Fertile Universe: Evolution or Intelligent Design?” at the Houston Museum of Science in 2009. He is an expert on the religious implications of evolution.