What may houses of worship do to advance political causes or candidates? By Ira Rifkin Freelance Writer The Church at Pierce Creek was a non-denominational, conservative Protestant congregation outside Binghamton, N.Y., until the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax-exempt status for sponsoring a 1992 newspaper ad attacking then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s stands on abortion and […]

Debra Y. Fraser-Howze is president and CEO of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. Her professional career has been spent delivering social services to African-American communities.

Alice M. Graham is professor of pastoral care and counseling at Hood Theological Seminary in Salisbury, N.C. She is an ordained minister in the American Baptist denomination. Among her interests is the subject of the psychological and emotional issues facing inmates released from prison. She teaches a seminar for inmates in a transitional program at North […]

Ronald B. Mincy is Maurice V. Russell Professor of Social Policy and Social Work Practice at Columbia University School of Social Work in New York. His work focuses on public policy, family, race, the role of men in poverty and the relationship between marriage and poverty. He coined the term “fragile families.” Mincy says that a […]

Sylvia A. Law is Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine and Psychiatry and co-director of the Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program at New York University Law School.

Jeffrey McCune Jr. is an associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as african and african american studies, at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester in New York. He teaches about black masculinity, […]

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and is an advocate of a single-payer system, as he wrote in a July 14, 2009, article in The Christian Century titled “Health-Care Fix.”

Milton C. Sernett is a history professor in the African-American studies department of Syracuse University. He wrote Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 1997) and has co-chaired the American Academy of Religion’s African American Religious History Group. He has retired from teaching.

The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III is head pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, N.Y. Butts chairs the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS.