Joan Heifetz Hollinger is the John and Elizabeth Boalt Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. She is a scholar of adoption law, including the Indian Child Welfare Act, and of psychosocial aspects of adoptive family relationships. She is an advocate of adoption law reform and has served on […]

Khaleel Mohammed is an assistant professor of religion at San Diego State University who specializes in Islam, Islamic law and comparative religion. He teaches courses in world religions, the Quran, sex and gender in Islam, and Islamic bioethics. He has been trained as a jurist in both the Sunni and Shiite schools and posts his […]

The Center for Christian Bioethics, which opened in 1984, sponsors teaching, research and service in biomedical ethics and related fields at Loma Linda University in California. The university includes a health sciences campus operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It conducts monthly bioethics grand rounds at Loma Linda University Medical Center; an annual bioethics seminar in […]

Michael Bernard Beckwith is minister of the 8,000-member Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, Calif. He is one of the spiritual leaders featured in The Secret, and the Agape Center is part of the New Thought tradition.

J. Gordon Melton is a distinguished professor of American religious history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Formerly, he directed the Institute for the Study of American Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written about New Religious Movements and about Christian Science and is an expert on American-born religions. He co-wrote Perspectives on […]

Risa Levitt Kohn is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism at San Diego State University. She was also curator of the June 2007 Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Della Reese Lett (aka the singer/actress Della Reese) is the minister of the Understanding Principles of Better Living Church in West Hollywood, Calif. The church, which calls its message one of practical Christianity, offers to teach worshippers not what to think but how to think. It is part of the Universal Foundation for Better Living association of […]

Rennie B. Schoepflin is a history professor at California State University, Los Angeles. He is interested in the historical interplay among science, health and religion. He has studied religious healers, including Christian Science healers, and can talk about the Christian Science view of the power of thought.

John Lofland is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Davis, and author of Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization and Maintenance of Faith, which stemmed from research among the Unification Church’s U.S. members in the 1960s.