Jerimarie Liesegang directs the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition.

Mongi Dhaouadi is the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Connecticut chapter. He can discuss accommodation of Muslim students in Bridgeport, Conn., schools, which assigned a room for Muslim students during lunches at Ramadan.

The Rev. Michael Westerberg is rector of Holy Transformation Orthodox Church in New Haven, Conn. Founded by immigrants from the Belarus area of Russia, the parish has become multiethnic and interracial. Email through the website.

Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies, American studies and  history and divinity at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. She has written about the religious content of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire and is knowledgeable about American religion and materialism, especially Christian kitsch.

Dale Martin is the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies and specializes in New Testament and Christian origins at the department of religious studies at Yale University. He specializes in the social and cultural history of the Greco-Roman world.

Richard A. Freund is a professor of history and director of the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford. He is a field archaeologist and has written extensively on biblical archaeology, from the Exodus story to the origins of Christianity.

John J. Collins is a professor of Old Testament interpretation and criticism at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Conn. He is an expert on Jewish apocalypticism.

Josef Sorett studies religious and spiritual expressions in hiphop music and culture. He has a master of divinity degree and is a graduate student in African-American studies at Harvard University, where his dissertation is on race, religion and the arts in 20th-century America. He has worked extensively with young people in nonprofits and religious communities.

John E. Thiel is a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn., and the author of God, Evil and Innocent Suffering: A Theological Reflection.