The Rev. Renita J. Weems was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in Old Testament studies. She taught at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Spielman College. She is one of the founding pastors and chief servants at the Ray of Hope Community Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact through website.

Barbara Harris is a retired Episcopal bishop. Harris was the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion. She is past president of the Episcopal Urban Caucus and has worked on prisoner issues and in other organizations serving the urban poor. She currently is assisting Bishop John B. Chane in the Diocese of Washington, D.C. Contact her […]

The Rev. Chuck Freeman, founder of The Free Souls Project and a self-described liberal, has a May 31 column at The Huffington Post religion blog titled “Hearing the Prophetic Call in the Gulf Oil Disaster.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Chicago organization that works on issues involving economic development and economic justice, health care, voter registration, jobs and peace.

Otis Moss III is pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He espouses Black theology and advocates efforts to reach Black youth in the city. A poet, he wrote Redemption in a Red Light District: Messages of Hope, Healing, and Empowerment.

Joan Kaufman is former director of the AIDS Public Policy Training Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also a senior scientist at Brandeis University’s Schneider Institute for Health Policy at the Heller School of Social Policy and Management. She directs the International […]

Read a June 1, 2010 blog post, “Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience,” by Russell D. Moore, a popular writer and dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook is a distinguished fellow at the Freedom Forum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center. She served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from 2011 to 2013. Cook is an ordained Baptist pastor.

Read a June 1, 2010 essay in Christianity Today by Mark Galli titled,  “Judgment in the Gulf: Woes and blessings of the oil spill.”