Ruth Haley Barton is co-founder of The Transforming Center, an organization in Wheaton, Ill., that helps develop church leaders. She teaches separate workshops on encountering God alone and in community. She is the author of Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence (Intervarsity Press, 2004).

JoAnn Heaney-Hunter is an associate professor of theology and religious studies at St. John’s University in Jamaica, N.Y. She is particularly knowledgeable about couples’ retreats and about Christian practice in marriage and families. Ask her about how retreats may relieve stress and strengthen religious practice for individuals in families or marriages.

The Christine Center, a retreat center in central Wisconsin honoring traditions of mystical spirituality, meditation and contemplation, hosts a weekend retreat at Easter, including daily spiritual rituals, spiritual guidance, and an Easter service and celebration.

Timothy Matovina is an associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. He is an expert in theology and culture, specializing in U.S. Catholic and U.S. Latino theology and religion.

Beverly Roberts Gaventa is Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary. She wrote Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1999) and co-edited Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).

Cheri Fuller is a Christian speaker and author whose son, Lt. Chris Fuller, was a Navy doctor who was deployed to Iraq. She encourages people to organize prayer groups in their homes or churches to lift up service members and their families, and she launched a website for military families that provides spiritual and other resources. Contact Cheri via […]

Scott Hahn chair of Biblical Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, and the founder and director of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. A former Protestant minister who converted to Catholicism, his books include Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God (Doubleday, 2001), which examines the Marian doctrines and the […]

Read a Dec. 21, 2000, Associated Press story posted by the Cincinnati Enquirer about a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that Christmas can continue to be a legal holiday, as it has been since 1870, because it has a secular purpose.

Religioustolerance.com offers a snapshot of the court decisions involving Good Friday holidays.