New Islamic Directions is a website featuring news, opinion and information. It is the project of Imam Zaid Shakir, a teacher at the Zaytuna Institute. It is published in Hayward, Calif.

Ask Rabbi Mayer Waxman at the Orthodox Union in New York about travel trends, about trips and whether families around the country are planning bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs in Israel.

Lynn Schofield Clark is Associate Professor in Media, Film, and Journalism Studies, and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. She directs the Teens and the New Media@Home Project, which studies how young people use new media technologies. She also is the author of From Angels to […]

William Dinges is a professor of religious studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and an expert on American Catholicism. He says the growing divide between what is “religious” and what is “spiritual” has resulted in spirituality that lends itself easily to supernatural and paranormal phenomena. He is a co-author of Young Adult Catholics: […]

Alan Jacobs is an English professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. An evangelical Christian, he wrote about how Harry Potter’s magic fits with faith in an essay in First Things. He is the author The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (HarperCollins, 2005).

Glenn Sparks, a communications professor at Purdue University in Indiana, says television shows may influence what people believe about the supernatural. He studied how television in the 1990s influenced people’s belief in UFOs and alien abductions.

Dr. Margaret Poloma is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at the University of Akron in Ohio. She wrote about miracles as supernatural/ paranormal phenomenon in Main Street Mystics: The Toronto Blessing and Reviving Pentecostalism (Alta Mira Press, 2003). She describes herself as a Pentecostal Christian who has experienced paranormal phenomena within the framework of her religion.

Randy Frazee wrote Making Room for Life: Trading Chaotic Lifestyles for Connected Relationships (Zondervan, 2004). He is senior pastor of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas. Ask him about the spiritual value of relationships in the quest for rest and peace.

Sandra A. Wawrytko, professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, has written about the integration of Buddhist values in the modern world; ask where rest and retreat fit into this picture.