The Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, focuses on research and teaching; research projects there include Rethinking Confucianism.

The Stanford China Program, begun in 2007 and part of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford, includes conferences, exchanges and fieldwork in China. Program director is Jean C. Oi.

Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies is a multidisciplinary teaching and research effort. Religious studies is among the disciplines, and faculty there have expertise in Buddhism, Taoism and classical Chinese thought.

Hanif Mohebi is executive director for the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Paul Ford, a professor of systematic theology and liturgy at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, Calif., is an internationally recognized authority on Lewis. Ford is author of Companion to Narnia: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (HarperSanFrancisco July 2005). He founded the Southern California C. S. Lewis Society.

James W. Lewis was executive director of the Louisville Institute, a program for the study of American religion at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary until 2011 when he retired. With funding from the Lilly Endowment, the Louisville Institute has sponsored research on multiethnic congregations. Lewis can connect reporters with scholars and pastors who’ve studied multiethnic congregations.

Erwin Raphael McManus, a native of El Salvador, is lead pastor and cultural architect at Mosaic, a diverse Southern Baptist church in Los Angeles. Mosaic is packed with a multiethnic mix of artistic young adults; McManus describes Mosaic as a cosmopolitan congregation serving the post-modern, post-Western, post-Christian world. McManus is the author of An Unstoppable Force: Daring […]

Gary A. Tobin is president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, a nonprofit think tank in San Francisco. He formerly directed the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University and is the co-author of In Every Tongue: The Racial and Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People.

Choyin Rangdrol is a teacher in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism and the founder of Rainbow Dharma, a Buddhist center in Oakland, Calif., and of the website RainbowDharma.com. The author of Black Buddha: Changing the Face of American Buddhism (published in 2006), Rangdrol has written about racial separation in American Buddhism.