Christine Wicker is the author of two books on the supernatural and paranormal, Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead and Not in Kansas Anymore: The Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America (both Harper Collins, 2003 and 2005 respectively). She says there is more “magical thinking,” in part, because people are more […]

William Dinges is a professor of religious studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and an expert on American Catholicism. He says the growing divide between what is “religious” and what is “spiritual” has resulted in spirituality that lends itself easily to supernatural and paranormal phenomena. He is a co-author of Young Adult Catholics: […]

Randy Frazee wrote Making Room for Life: Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships (Zondervan, 2004). He is senior pastor of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas. Ask him about the spiritual value of relationships in the quest for rest and peace.

David L. Weddle, a professor emeritus of religion at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, has written about Jehovah’s Witness and Christian Science faiths. Ask about the Sabbath, rest and restoration in those traditions.

Siang Yang Tan is pastor of the First Evangelical Church in Glendale, Calif. He wrote Rest: Experiencing God’s Peace in a Restless World (Regent College Publishing, 2003). He can discuss the concept of spiritual rest and how to achieve it through the practices of solitude and silence, surrender, simplicity and Sabbath-keeping. Ask him about sleep […]

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.