Bruce Phillips is a professor of Jewish communal service at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, a leading seminary of the Reform movement. He was on the team that completed the National Jewish Population Survey 2000 and says the Jewish institutional landscape will be reshaped by children of intermarriage who do not belong […]

The Religion, Politics and Globalization Program, based at the University of California, Berkeley, looks to create an intellectual space where scholars from the humanities and social sciences can come together to share and deepen their understanding of the role of religion in world affairs. Lynne Gerber is the associate director and postdoctoral fellow at the […]

William Lobdell is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and the author of Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace (2009). He is now editor of iBusiness Reporting and is a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Irvine.

Mynga Futrell is co-founder and executive director of The Brights’ Network, an international Internet community aspiring to enhance civic understanding of a naturalistic worldview (“free of supernatural and mystical elements”) and to promote acceptance of those who hold such an outlook. A longtime educator, she also coordinates a religion-neutral Web resource called Teaching About Religion. She lives […]

Richard Carrier holds a doctorate in ancient history, and his research specialties include the origins of Christianity. He is the author of Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, and he contributed chapters (“Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable” and “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science”) to the book The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (2010). […]

Lara Buchak is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include what faith is, under what circumstances faith is rational and how to characterize the central nondoxastic attitudes associated with religious practice. She is also interested in how one ought to be religious if one takes current science […]

Debbie Allen is director of the San Diego Coalition of Reason, a partnership of 15 atheist, humanist and skeptic organizations. She is also a humanist chaplain.

David J. Wolpe is senior rabbi of Temple Sinai, a Conservative congregation in Los Angeles. A well-known speaker and writer, he has written several books, among them The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God (Henry Holt & Co., 1990) and (with Mitch Albom) Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times (Riverhead Trade, 2000).

William Dyrness is professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Among his books are Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism, which he co-authored with Jonathan A. Anderson, and Visual Faith: Art, Theology and Worship in Dialogue.