Feeding America, the country’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization, distributes food to food banks and works on policy. Vicki B. Escarra is president and CEO of the Chicago-based organization. They list all their local media contacts.

The Zygon Center for Religion and Science is dedicated to relating religious traditions and the best scientific knowledge in order to gain insight into the origins, nature and destiny of humans and their environment. The center is based at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

Randi Barnabee of Bedford, Ohio, who underwent sex-change surgery to become a woman, is a civil rights attorney who specializes in transgender cases.

Modesto Tico Valle is executive director of the Center on Halsted, the Chicago community center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Christian K. Wedemeyer is associate professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Buddhism section.

Read a transcript of an Oct. 21, 2005, interview by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life with Robert A. Pape after a forum titled, “In God’s Name? Evaluating the Links Between Religious Extremism and Terrorism.”

Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Program for International Security Politics. He is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Media contact is Jann Ingmire.

Martin Riesebrodt is a sociology professor at the University of Chicago. He has written on fundamentalism in the United States and Iran.

Jerry Root, associate professor of Christian education at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., co-edited The Quotable C.S. Lewis (Tyndale House, 1990). Root’s master’s and doctoral dissertations were on Lewis, on whom he’s taught courses for 25 years.