Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez is an assistant professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She specializes in American religious history and women and religion. She is at work on The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, in which she argues that Mary appealed to both American Catholics and Protestants at a time when […]

Daniel Scheid is an assistant professor of theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He teaches classes on Christian social ethics.

Wakar Uddin is director general of the Arakan Rohingya Union, an umbrella organization of Rohingya advocacy groups worldwide. He is also a professor of plant pathology and microbiology at Penn State University.

The Rev. Dr. Karyn Wiseman is an associate professor of Homiletics at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. She blogs, and she also contributed a “preaching reflection” about the death of Michael Brown to Odyssey Networks.  

Greg Carey is a professor of New Testament at Lancaster Seminary. He is a contributor to media outlets such as the Huffington Post, and his areas of interest include early Christian practices and the Bible and sexual ethics. He contributed a “preaching reflection” about the death of Michael Brown to Odyssey Networks.  

Azhar Majeed is director of the Individual Rights Education Program at the Pennsylvania-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The foundation’s mission is to defend and sustain individual rights, including freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty and sanctity of conscience at U.S. colleges and universities. In 2014, Majeed debated Jeremy Waldron on […]

Rachel Kranson is an assistant professor and author at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in modern Jewish history, Judaism in America, religion in America, and gender studies. She teaches Religion in Modern America, Modern Jewry, Jews and the City, and Gender and Jewish History.

Paul A. Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphiaas well as the Maurice R. Hilleman professor of vaccinology and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.. He is also an author, most recently of the book “Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines […]

Jonathan Montaldo is one of the foremost Thomas Merton scholars and interpreters of  his writings. Montaldo has served as associate director of the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, director of a retreat center near Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani and director of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. Montaldo is also editor of the 10-volume Bridges to Contemplative […]