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.

Patricia M.Y. Chang is a lecturer in the sociology department at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. She has studied clergy career characteristics and the supply of ordained leadership in some Protestant denominations, and she co-authored Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling.

Charlyn M. Singleton is president of God’s Woman Conferences, based in Rialto, Calif. She is a motivational and revival speaker, working with youth, women and men at conferences, marriage events, retreats, workshops and worship services.

Cecil Williams has been the pastor of the 7,000-member Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district since 1963. He is a spiritual, political and social force in the Bay Area, and the church is a leading voice in promoting diversity of all sorts, social activism and community programs.

Angel Kyodo Williams, an ordained Zen priest, is founder of New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace in Oakland, Calif., and the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace (Viking Press, 2000). She can be contacted through her website.

Jon B. Eisenberg is an appellate lawyer who was part of the legal team of Schiavo’s husband, Michael Schiavo. He also teaches appellate procedure at University of California Hastings College of the Law. Eisenberg wrote Using Terri: The Religious Right’s Conspiracy to Take Away Our Rights (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

Claudine Michel chairs the department of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She edits The Journal of Haitian Studies and co-edited (with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith) two books on Vodou, Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, And Reality (Indiana University Press, 2006) and Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).