Read influential evangelical Brian McLaren’s blog post addressing conservative Christians on the subject of health care.

Evangelical speaker and minister Claudette Anderson Copeland founded New Creation Christian Fellowship and Destiny Ministries for women. She wrote Stories From Inner Space: Confessions of a Preacher Woman and Other Tales (Red Nail Press, 2003) and Coming Through the Darkness: Cancer and One Woman’s Journey to Wholeness (Destiny Press, 2000). Contact her through executive director Destiny Ministries.

Read an Aug. 18, 2009, Religion News Service story about the religious element to the health care debate.

Quinton Hosford Dixie advised the makers of the PBS series “This Far by Faith” and, with Juan Williams, co-wrote the book of the same title. He also edited (with Cornel West) The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption (Beacon Press, 1999). Dixie teaches in the philosophy department of Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He […]

Vincent Wimbush is a religion professor at Claremont Graduate University. He also directs the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in Claremont, Calif. His three-year “African Americans and the Bible” research project was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Lilly Endowment.

Rosetta E. Ross is an associate professor of religion and chairs the department of philosophy and religious studies at Spelman College in Atlanta. An elder in the United Methodist Church, she writes and lectures widely about African-American religion and is treasurer of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. She is an expert on women […]

David Chappell is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas and a historian of the American South, the civil rights movement and race relations in the United States. He is the author of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina, 2004).

The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III is head pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, N.Y. Butts chairs the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS.

Christine D. Chapman wrote (with Stephen C. Rasor) Black Power From the Pew: Laity Connecting Congregations and Communities (Pilgrim, 2007). She is an adjunct professor at Georgia State University and at the Interdenominational Theological Center.