Jacques B. Doukhan is a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis and director of the Institute of Jewish-Christian Studies at Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Berrien Springs, Mich. He is an expert in the area of the Sabbath.

Read the transcript of a March 9, 2001, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program on Celtic spirituality, which discusses the Celts’ sense of nature as “the theatre of divine presence.”

The Rev. Lizette Larson-Miller, a professor at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif., wrote an article in the May 23, 2005, edition of America magazine (subscriber-only) titled “Holy Ground: Roadside Shrines and Sacred Space.” She identified five general characteristics of roadside shrines, and she ponders what liturgical churches might learn from this widespread trend.

Read a New York Times review of Roadside Religion: Cross Country. Contact Beal.

Ronald Barrett is a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is an expert on African-American contemporary funeral practices.

Brendan Freeman is a Cistercian monk and abbot of New Melleray Abbey, a community of about 30 monks in Peosta, Iowa. The monks hand-make wooden caskets and urns that they bill as a “soulful alternative” to more elaborate caskets.

Gayden Metcalfe is co-author, with Charlotte Hays, of Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (Miramax Books, 2005). She lives in Greenville, Miss.

Christopher Leevy Johnson is a funeral director and was an African-American studies professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. He researches the role of African-American funeral directors in the black church, politics and community affairs.

Sarah York is author of Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death (Jossey-Bass, 2000). She conducts workshops based on her book and is a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives near Asheville, N.C.