Danny L. Balfour is a professor and past director of the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is co-author of Unmasking Administrative Evil and of “Abu Ghraib, Administrative Evil, and Moral Inversion: The Value of ‘Putting Cruelty First’ ” in the September/October 2006 issue of Public Administration Review.

Laura Lein is dean of the University of Michigan School of Social Work and Collegiate Professor of Social Work. She is an expert on poverty and the author of many studies of families in poverty, including Katrina evacuees and people living on the Texas-Mexico border. She co-authored Life After Welfare: Reform and the Persistence of Poverty (2007).

Matthew Halteman is an assistant professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he teaches a course titled “Peaceable Kingdom: Transforming Our Relationship With Animals,” about the Christian idea of stewardship with animals. He wrote a booklet for the Humane Society of the United States titled Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation, which examines […]

The National Poverty Center is at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The chair of the steering committee is Sandra Danziger, professor of social work in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

The Michigan Program on Poverty and Social Welfare Policy is at the University of Michigan. Its director is Sandra K. Danziger, professor in the School of Social Work and research professor in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Ken Wilson is senior pastor at the Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, Mich., which encourages its members to make fixed-hour prayers, an unusual thing for a nondenominational church to do.

Jim Mullin-Norgaard teaches Celtic Body Prayers at his retreat center in Beaver Island, Mich.

Sybil MacBeth is the author of Praying in Color: Drawing a New Path to God, published in 2007. She conducts workshops in drawing and painting as prayer.

The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship is an organization based in Grand Rapids, Mich., dedicated to promoting Christian scholarship. Its online resources include information about the practice of fixed-hour prayer and about disability within faith communities.