Read a June 22, 2009, National Catholic Reporter story, “Progressive Catholics at home in Obama administration.”

Read a June 22, 2009, analysis of the encyclical’s themes, “Economic encyclical expands on church’s ‘best kept secret’,” by National Catholic Reporter columnist John L. Allen Jr.

Namsoon Kang, associate professor of world Christianity and religions at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, researches Asian and Korean feminist theology.

Read a June 24, 2009, blog post at the Web site of the Jesuit magazine America, “Obama going to the Vatican,” by Michael Sean Winters.

Sze-Kar Wan, who is an Episcopal priest, is a professor of New Testament at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. His research includes neo-Confucianism.

John J. Thatamanil, who emigrated from India to the United States as a child, is assistant professor of theology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. He teaches courses on Hindu-Christian dialogue and Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and wrote The Immanent Divine: God, Creation and the Human Predicament — An East-West Conversation.

Jonathan Y. Tan, who was born in Malaysia, is a theology professor at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He teaches courses on Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

Frank H. Wu, dean and professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, wrote Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White and co-authored Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment.

W. Anne Joh, assistant professor of theology at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Okla., is co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Asian North American Religion, Culture and Society Group. Her research includes colonization and postcoloniality, race/racism and religion, gender/sexism/heterosexism and religion, and Asian-American history.