Marsha Cohen is a law professor at Hastings College of Law of the University of California, San Francisco. Her expertise include food and drug law, torts and administrative law.

Dr. Leonard Deftos is a physician, medical researcher and lawyer. He is a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine, a physician at the VA San Diego Healthcare System and an adjunct professor of law at California Western School of Law in San Diego.

Paula Nesbitt is a visiting associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Feminization of the Clergy in America: Occupational and Organizational Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Freethought Day commemorates an Oct. 12, 1692, evidentiary decision by William Phipps, governor of the Colony of Massachusetts, that ended the Salem witch trials. An outdoor observance marking the anniversary is held each year in Sacramento, Calif.

U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., in 2007 became the first member of Congress in memory to publicly self-identify as an atheist.

Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University works to provide a home to the “broad range of activities illuminating the Nobel Peace laureate’s life and the movements he inspired.” This organization includes the King Papers Project, in which Stanford historian Clayborne Carson edited and published The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kirk O. Hanson is Santa Clara University’s John Courtney Murray S.J. University Professor of Social Ethics. He is one of the pioneers of the business ethics field and taught business ethics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for 23 years.

Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer leads the Community Shul of Montecito and Santa Barbara, Calif. He has spoken out about the problem of rabbinical burnout.

Edmund Gibbs is professor emeritus of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif. He is an expert on the emerging church and has called for seminaries and theological schools to rethink the way they train pastors for the 21st century. His books include LeadershipNext: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture.