The Rev. Thomas J. Reese is a Jesuit priest and senior analyst for Religion News Service. He writes and comments widely on Catholic culture and politics. He is the author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. 

Washington, D.C., attorney Robert Bennett was part of the 13-member board of prominent lay Catholics appointed by the U.S. Catholic bishops to investigate the sexual abuse crisis. He chaired the research committee that interviewed some 100 victims, psychiatrists, theologians, seminary heads and church officials and prepared the report on causes of abuse.

Bettina Arnold is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of “Justifying Genocide: The Supporting Role of Archaeology in ‘Ethnic Cleansing’” for the book Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (University of California Press, 2002).

Eric D. Weitz is a history professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis-St. Paul and author of A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Michael A. Sells is professor of Islamic history and literature at the University of Chicago. He has written on genocide in Bosnia in the context of Islamic belief.

Rabbi Peter J. Haas is a Jewish studies professor and director of the Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He wrote Human Rights and the World’s Major Religions: The Jewish Tradition (Greenwood Press, 2005).

Robert Melson is political professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and current president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which he co-founded in 1995. His primary area of research is ethnic conflict and genocide, and he has written widely on the topic.

Alan Kuperman is associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Brookings Institution Press, 2001) and co-editor of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion, and Civil War (Routledge, 2006).

Helmut Walser Smith is Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German. He is author of The Holocaust and Other Genocides: History, Representation, Ethics (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002).