Jeremy Biles wrote a paper about ritual and salvation in the television show The Swan while doing doctoral work in religion and literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He teaches photography at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Peter Gilmour is professor emeritus at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University in Chicago, where he taught a graduate course on Jesus in the movies.

Marcia Hermansen is director of the Islamic World Studies Program and a professor in the theology department at Loyola University Chicago. She is an expert on Islamic spirituality and Sufism.

Carl Jeffrey Wright is the author of God’s Vision or Television: How Television Influences What We Believe (Urban Ministries, 2004), about African-Americans, television and religion. He is the CEO of Urban Ministries Inc., an African American Christian publishing and communications company.

Fred M. Donner is a professor of near Eastern history at the University of Chicago. He wrote Seeing the Origins of Islam in Historical Perspective.

John W. Vest is the associate pastor for youth ministry at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago and a Ph.D student in Biblical Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Vest wrote “When a Hero Dies,” a June 2007 essay from Sightings, the online journal maintained by The Martin Marty Center at the Divinity School […]

David A. Zimmerman is an associate editor at InterVarsity Press, a Christian publishing house in Downers Grove, Ill., and the author of Comic Book Character: Unleashing the Hero in Us All.

The Web of Creation, an ecumenical site maintained by the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, provides congregational resources on ecology and religion. Contact director David Rhoads.

Faith in Place works with religious and spiritual leaders in Illinois on issues of environmental sustainability. It has offices in Chicago, Champaign and Waukegan, Ill.