Karen Leonard is an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include Muslims in the United States: The State of Research and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America.

Peter C. Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California in Los Angeles, wrote American Mania: When More Is Not Enough (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005).

This 1998 article in the Turkish-American magazine Anadolu looks at one Muslim woman’s challenges in raising children in North America.

Dawn Kepler is the director of Building Jewish Bridges, an outreach to interfaith families in Berkeley, Calif.

The Self-Realization Fellowship, which has headquarters in Los Angeles, follows the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) that are based on yoga and on Jesus. The fellowship has temples and meditation centers around the United States.

The painting “Christ the Yogi” hangs at the San Francisco temple of the Vedanta Society of Northern California, where congregants regard Jesus to be a spiritual master who embodied pure love.

Lee Strobel, who lives in Southern California, researches the Christmas story in The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger (Zondervan, 2005). Contact him via his website.

Islamic Relief Worldwide, based in Birmingham, U.K., provided aid to Darfur. Its U.S. branch is based in Buena Vista, California.

Mahmood Mamdani is an anthropology and government professor at Columbia University in New York and author of When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2002.). He has also researched Sudan.