Leila Ahmed is a professor of divinity at Harvard University Divinity School. She has a background in women’s studies and is a pre-eminent scholar of Islam as it pertains to women. She has written about the resurgence of the veil and about Islam and women’s bodies, among other things. Contact her through faculty assistant Kristin Gunst.

Mark Jordan is a professor of Christian thought at Harvard University’s Divinity School and is an expert on issues of homosexuality in Catholic life, especially in the priesthood. He is the author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, 2002) and Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality (2011). He calls on the church to […]

Thomas Groome is a professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, where he chairs the department of religious education and pastoral ministry. His primary area of interest is the history, theory and practice of religious education. He wrote Educating for Life: A Spiritual Vision for Every Teacher and Parent and is the primary author of various […]

The Rev. John Baldovin is professor of historical and liturgical theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass. His books include Worship, City, Church and Renewal and Bread of Life, Cup of Salvation: Understanding the Mass. He delivered a paper, “Priesthood and Sacramental Ministry: History and Theology,” at a 2005 Boston College conference on the Roman […]

BishopAccountability.org is a Massachusetts clearinghouse for information on sexual abuse by priests and on the hierarchy’s reactions. Contact President Terry McKiernan.

Voice of the Faithful is the leading grass-roots lay organization to emerge in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal. Based in Boston, the organization pushes for church governance reform and holding bishops accountable, and promotes victims rights. It has been critical of an effort to ban gay priests from ordination. Contact President Mark Mullaney.

Robert Melson is political professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and current president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which he co-founded in 1995. His primary area of research is ethnic conflict and genocide, and he has written widely on the topic.

Alan Kuperman is associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Brookings Institution Press, 2001) and co-editor of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion, and Civil War (Routledge, 2006).

Helmut Walser Smith is Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German. He is author of The Holocaust and Other Genocides: History, Representation, Ethics (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002).