Ruth Haley Barton is co-founder of The Transforming Center, an organization in Wheaton, Ill., that helps develop church leaders. She teaches separate workshops on encountering God alone and in community. She is the author of Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence (Intervarsity Press, 2004).

Peter Casarella is a professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago. He wrote the book El Cuerpo de Cristo: The Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church (Crossroad Publishing, 1998).

Read an essay by Karen Maudlin, a psychologist specializing in family therapy, on how to talk to children of different ages about Jesus’ crucifixion.

Read a statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics on the impact of violence on children. It states that the average American child watches as much as 28 hours of television a week and that viewing violence can lead to emotional desensitization, to a perception that the world is a mean and violent place, and to children […]

Dennis Martin is an associate professor of theological history at Loyola University in Chicago and an expert on papal history and Pope John Paul II’s life, history and writings.

The Rev. Peter J. Bernardi is an associate professor of religious studies at Loyola University in Chicago. He can talk about the papacy in the contemporary world. He contributed an essay to the collection in Catholicism Contending With Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context.

Eugene Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago and a columnist for National Catholic Reporter. Kennedy has argued that the Catholic church needs to go in a more reformist direction. He is author of several books, including The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality (St. Martins Press, 2001).

Carmel Chiswick was a professor emerita of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago until her retirement. She focuses on the economics of religion, especially involving the American Jewish family, Jewish religious observance and American Jewish communal institutions.

Barry Chiswick is chair of the department of economics at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University in Washington D.C.  He specializes in the economics of religion. During his former post at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he published widely on the topic of economic issues involving Jewish people.