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.

Jok Madut Jok is Executive Director of the Sudd Institute. Jok joined the Government of South Sudan as undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. He was an associate history professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and author of Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (OneWorld Publications, 2007) and War and Slavery in Sudan (The Ethnography of […]

Patrick A. Polk is a lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2004, he was the guest curator of an exhibit at the Fowler Muesum on roadside religious displays found throughout Los Angeles.

Bernadette Murphy is the author of Zen and the Art of Knitting: Exploring the Links Between Knitting, Spirituality and Creativity (Adams Media Corp., 2002). She is a fiction writer and instructor at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

Christina Cabeena wrote a paper on Las Vegas and nuns while she was doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Robin Sylvan is an adjunct professor of art and religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. He has written about religion and rave culture, popular music, rap and hip-hop.

Kate McCarthy is an associate professor of religious studies at California State University, Chico. She has written about religious expression in rock music, including the music of Bruce Springsteen.