Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, with Richard Thomas, co-edited Lights of the Spirit: Historical Portraits of Black Bahá’ís in North America, 1898-2000, which featured, among others, jazz great Dizzy Gillespie. She is a professor of English at Miami University in Ohio.

Kenneth Bowers is secretary-general of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. He is chief administrative officer of the Bahá’í Faith in the U.S. and author of God Speaks Again: An Introduction to the Bahá’í Faith.

Michael Karlberg, associate professor of communications at Western Washington University, is the author of Beyond the Culture of Contest, which includes an examination of the Bahá’í system of governance.

Joel Gordon is a history professor at the University of Arkansas. He is an expert on religion and politics in the Arab world.

Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, which says it promotes moderate Muslim views. Schwartz has taken credit for coining or popularizing the term.

The Rev. Patrick Howell is vice president for mission and ministry at the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University. He co-edited the book Empowering Authority: The Charisms of Episcopacy and Primacy in the Church Today. He has frequently written about Pope Benedict XVI for the Seattle Times.

Hussein Rashid is a visiting professor of Islam at the religion department at Hofstra University and a prolific blogger and commentator on Islam in America. He has written about Islamophobia, for example in this June 3, 2009, column for the website Religion Dispatches.

Frederick W. Kagan is a widely read military historian and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., who is associated with the neoconservative movement. Kagan has said he prefers the term Islamist to Islamofascist.

Sandra Yocum is chair of religious studies at the University of Dayton who specializes in the history of theology, which is Benedict’s forte.