Stephen L. Censky is chief executive officer of the American Soybean Association, which has posted its outlook for the farm bill. The association lists executive committee members from around the country.

Rabbi Irwin Kula is president of CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a think tank dedicated to training Jewish leaders. He wrote Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life (Hyperion, September 2006), among others, and is a highly regarded commentator on the modern approach to understanding and practicing Judaism.

Written by John Danforth (Viking Adult, 2006). Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and an ordained Episcopalian minister, speaks out against the conflation of political agendas with religious views and the religious right’s focus on wedge issues.

Theresa Torres is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, religious studies and anthropology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.  She studies U.S. Hispanic Catholics, Hispanic women’s religious and civic activism, and immigration/refugee issues.

The Society for Pentecostal Studies is a scholarly organization that advances the work of Pentecostal and charismatic scholars and studies Pentecostal theology. Dr. Lois E. Olena is executive director. She is based in Springfield, Mo.

The Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology in St. Louis is an interfaith organization of Christians working to foster a “community of scientists and technologists who are dedicated both to the advancement of scientific understanding AND to the growth of Christianity.” Sister Marianne Postiglione is director of communications.

The Rev. John F. Kavanaugh is a philosophy professor at St. Louis University. He wrote the book Who Counts as Persons? Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing.  

Mark R. Rank is a professor of social welfare at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (Oxford University Press, 2004). His focus is on poverty, social welfare and economic inequalities.

The Rev. Charles E. Bouchard, O.P., is a moral theologian and president of the Aquinas Institute of Theology, a Dominican graduate school in St. Louis.