David Silverman is president of American Atheists. He co-hosts the TV show Atheist Viewpoint and is the author of Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World. Silverman resides in Piscataway, N.J.

Enlighten the Vote is a nonpartisan political action committee working to elect atheists. Ellen Johnson is executive director. Contact through the website.

American Atheist magazine is a quarterly magazine published by American Atheists. It is a platform and a resource for Atheists in America.

Leigh Eric Schmidt teaches religion and chairs the religion department at Princeton University. He wrote Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality From Emerson to Oprah (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) and can speak about expressions of American spirituality, including their role in 19th-century communal living arrangements.

With attendance down in mainline Protestant churches and older ministers delaying retirement, many recent seminary graduates are finding that pastoral jobs are scarce, according to a Religion News Service story published Sept. 30, 2006, by The Washington Post.

Wallace D. Best is professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University. He has written about storefront churches and other topics concerning black Americans and religion, and he teaches a course titled “The African-American Sacred Music Tradition.”

Cornel West is the Princeton University Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion. His interests include philosophy of religion and cultural criticism. Among his many books are Race Matters and Democracy Matters. Among courses he teaches is “The Religious Dimensions of Du Bois, Baldwin and Morrison.”

Stephanie Bennett writes about the home church/simple church movement for the webzine Relational Christianity and for AOL Hometown. She lives in Brick, N.J.

David Greenberg is an associate professor of history, journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey.