The Rev. Robert E. Shore-Goss is a former Jesuit priest who now is senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley in North Hollywood, Calif. He has been an activist in gay rights organizations, and among the books he has co-edited are Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible and Gay Catholic Priests and […]

The Los Angeles Times did extensive surveys of U.S. priests in 1994 and in 2002. Read the story with links to other aspects of the poll.

Read a Nov. 25, 2005,  opinion piece in the LA Times written by a former priest.

Illume magazine focuses on the Islamic community in America. It is published in southern Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif., is the first Muslim seminary in the United States. It is run by two influential American clerics who received classical training abroad and who have large followings here, particularly among young American Muslims. A 2006 New York Times article credited the scholars, Sheik Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, with countering the influence […]

Eliz Sanasarian is political science professor at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and has written on gender distinction in genocide in the context of Armenia.

Michael S. Rose is associate editor of the New Oxford Review, based in Berkeley, Calif. He wrote an influential book, Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church (Regnery, 2002), which argues that the priesthood is a largely gay profession and that many seminaries are run by a “lavender subculture” of homosexuals who are unfriendly […]

Thomas Plante is a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California and an expert on the causes and frequency of sexual abuse by clergy. He is the editor or author of multiple books, including Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis, 2002-2012. 

is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting equality of Muslim women throughout the world. It is based in Los Angeles.