Michael Burlingame is a history professor emeritus at Connecticut College in New London. He wrote the 1995 book The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln and the 2008 book Abraham Lincoln: A Life.

Lori Gruen is an associate professor of philosophy and of women’s studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Among her areas of interest is injustice to animals. As a guest on a May 11, 2004, podcast of Philosophy Talk, she discussed the morality of eating animals.

Koichi Shinohara is a senior lecturer in the department of religious studies at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. She wrote the entry “Changing Roles of Miraculous Images in Medieval Chinese Buddhism” for the publication Images, Miracles and Authority in Asian Religious Traditions.

Lamin Sanneh is the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale University. He wrote the entry “Gratitude and Ingratitude” in the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān.

Priyamvada Natarajan is an associate professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University in New Haven. She studies cosmology and galaxy evolution.

The Rev. Clive Calver is senior pastor at Walnut Hill Community Church in Bethel, Conn., and former president of World Relief.

Kenneth A. Couch is an associate professor of economics at the University of Connecticut. He has done research showing that increasing the minimum wage reduces the employment of some of the most vulnerable categories of workers, including teenagers and adults who lack a high school degree.

Abby Anderson is executive director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, a community-based organization that seeks to reduce the number of youths who go through the juvenile justice system.

Dr. Thomas Duffy is a professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.; director of the Program for Humanities in Medicine; and chairman of the Working Group on End of Life Issues of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.