Lael Atkinson is pastor of Payson Park United Church of Christ in Belmont, Mass. In 2003, she delivered a sermon about America as a culture that consumes too much of everything, including food.

Miriam Berg is president of the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, a national nonprofit group based in Mount Marion, N.Y., that works to eliminate weight discrimination and “sizism.”

Ravindra S. Khare is a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He has written about Hindu gastrosemantics.

Francine Prose is the author of 10 books, including Gluttony, part of the “Seven Deadly Sins” series (Oxford University Press, 2003). She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College in New York. She lives in New York City.

Jualynne Dodson is a visiting professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan State University in East Lansing. She has written extensively about African-American Christians and food.

The Rev. O.S. Hawkins is president of Dallas-based GuideStone Financial Resources. He has said that taking care of the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit is one of the duties of a Baptist. The top two medical claims paid by the denomination’s health insurance program in 2002 were for obesity-related ailments, including back […]

Theodore C. Bergstrom holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the economics department at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is the author of On the Economics of Polygyny (University of Michigan, 1994), which is available online.

Armand L. Mauss, a professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University who now lives in Irvine, Calif., has written extensively on Mormonism. His most recent book is All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003).

Jenifer Kunz, an associate professor of sociology at West Texas A&M University, has researched the attitudes of 21st-century members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints toward polygamy.