Marilyn J. Kurata is director of core curriculum enhancement and an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She worked on a program, supported by the Ford Foundation, integrating into the curriculum a focus on race, ethnicity, religious values and place to give students a better understanding of ethics and civic […]

Cindy Brown is a photojournalist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She became a Pluralism Project affiliate in 2002 while teaching photojournalism in the journalism department at the University of Southern Mississippi. Brown worked with the Pluralism Project at Harvard University and used photography to document religious diversity in Southern Mississippi; view images from her photo essay.

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., is the ranking minority member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.

Neil A. Manson is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and editor of God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (Routledge, 2003).

The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Miss., works to bring educational and rabbinic services to isolated Jews and Jewish communities in a 13-state Southern region. Macy B. Hart is president.

Roberta Avila is executive director of Steps Coalition and former executive director of the Interfaith Disaster Task Force of South Mississippi.

Beverly Wright is founder and director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans. She is co-author of a report, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation and released in May 2006, which concluded that minorities and low-income residents have recovered more slowly after Katrina, in part because they have less […]

Manuel Sprung, assistant professor of psychology with a focus on social-cognitive development in children. He was one of the researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast in Long Beach, Miss., who studied how Katrina has affected children’s thinking – including the impact of intrusive thoughts about the storm on their concentration levels.

The Economic Research Service offers state profiles that include income and poverty rates for rural and urban dwellers.