David J. Wright is director of urban and metropolitan studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York and project director and associate director of the Roundtable on Religion & Social Welfare Policy. He is the author of It Takes a Neighborhood: Strategies to Prevent Urban Decline and The Flip Side of the Underclass: […]

Margery Austin Turner is a scholar who specializes in housing, community development and racial issues at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. The Urban Institute posts a page with resources from its focus on “Housing America’s Low-Income Families.”

Stephen Frederick Uhl is a former Roman Catholic priest and the author of Out of God’s Closet: This Priest Psychologist Chooses Friendly Atheism (2009). He lives in Oro Valley, Ariz.

Ronald Lawson, a sociologist, teaches in the urban studies department of Queens College at the City University of New York. His research focuses on urban religious movements. Previous research included landlord-tenant politics.

John Loftus is a former minister and the author of Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity (2008). He followed up that book with an anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (2010). His blog is called Debunking Christianity. Loftus lives in Indiana.

Richard Haynes (known by many as “Brother Richard”) is president of Atheist Nexus, an online community with nearly 20,000 nontheist members. He’s also co-host of the freethinking podcast Atheist News, and he blogs at Life Without Faith. A former associate minister at a Georgia megachurch, he now travels the country speaking to nontheist groups and encouraging others “to […]

Daniel M. Farrell is a philosophy professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. In his essay “Life Without God: Some Personal Costs” (included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life), he tells about losing his faith while he was a seminarian, and how coming to terms with that affected other aspects of his […]

Bruce Katz is vice president and director of Metropolitan Policy and holds the Adeline M. and Alfred I. Johnson Chair in Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is also a former chief of staff of HUD.

Dan Barker is a former evangelical preacher turned atheist. He and his wife, Annie Laurie Gaylor, are co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wis. Barker’s books include Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist and Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists (2008).