Jesse Is Heavyweight is the stage name of Dallas-based rap/hip-hop artist Jesse McDaniel. He is a Southern Baptist and has taken Anthony Pinn and Bun B’s hip-hop and religion course at Rice University.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer describes herself as a “scholar-artist-activist.” She is an associate professor of American culture and Arab and Muslim American studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States. She wrote and performs a one-woman work called Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life.

Monica R. Miller is an associate professor of Africana studies and religious studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., and the author of Religion and Hip Hop.

Susan Schreiner is a professor of the history of Christianity and theology at The University of Chicago Divinity School, where she specializes in early modern Europe (14-16th centuries) including the Protestant Reformation, early modern Catholicism, and the Renaissance. She teaches courses on both Luther and John Calvin. Contact via Terren Wein, director of communications.

Joerg Rieger is a professor of Wesleyan studies and theology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. His areas of study include social justice, liberation theory, the relationship between theology and public life, and the misuse of power in religion, politics and economics.

Graham Reside is the executive director of the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership for the Professions at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. He researches ethical leadership, religion and globalization and race, religion and poverty. He is also an expert on prison reform.

Phillis Sheppard is an associate professor of religion, psychology and culture at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn. She is an expert on the role religion plays in self-understanding, womanist theology and psycholanalysis.

David Perkins is the director of the Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He is a guitarist and songwriter who plays for the Nashville chapter of Beer and Hymns. He teaches courses on religion and the arts, including the theology of song.

Thomas Albert Howard is a professor of humanities and history at Valparaiso University where he is an expert on the Protestant Reformation. He is the author of Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Protestantism (2016).