Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. He is the author of The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies.

Gregory Koukl is founder and president of Stand to Reason, an organization devoted to Christian apologetics and based in Signal Hill, Calif. He is also an adjunct professor of Christian apologetics at Biola University and has written in defense of faith against the arguments of the new atheists.

Farid Senzai is a fellow and director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which researches the Muslim community in the United States. He is also an assistant professor of political science at Santa Clara University. A co-editor of Educating the Muslims of America (2009), he helped organized a 2006 conference on Islamic education in […]

Read a Feb 22, 2007, Associated Press profile (posted at the San Diego Union Tribune) of Annie Laurie Gaylor, head of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which leads in challenging government policies on religious issues.

Read a March 15, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed by Sam Harris in which he argues that moderate believers give merit to religious fanatics.

William Hurlbut is a physician and professor of human biology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., whose training in medical ethics and theology informs his work on the biological basis of moral awareness, and the integration of theology and philosophy of biology. He edited  Becoming Human: Evolutionary Origins of Spiritual, Religious and Moral Awareness. […]

Samuel Oliner is emeritus professor of sociology and director of the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. Oliner co-founded the institute in 1982 to study altruism and seek ways to enhance altruism and prosocial behavior in society. A native of Poland, Oliner was rescued by a non-Jewish family at age […]

University of California at Los Angeles anthropology professor Joan Silk published a study of chimpanzees in the Oct. 27, 2005, Nature that showed that the chimps were motivated to obtain rewards for themselves but not to provide rewards for other group members. In other words, they did not show altruistic behavior, contrary to expectations raised […]

B. Alan Wallace, president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies in California, trained as a monk in Buddhist monasteries. He teaches Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and the United States and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars. His academic training is in religious studies, physics and philosophy of science. He can be […]