Cecil Williams has been the pastor of the 7,000-member Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district since 1963. He is a spiritual, political and social force in the Bay Area, and the church is a leading voice in promoting diversity of all sorts, social activism and community programs.

Paul Harvey is a professor of American history at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He wrote Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South From the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era and co-edited (with Philip Goff) The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945. Harvey is working on a history of […]

Maisha Itia Handy is a womanist scholar and assistant professor of Christian education at the Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta. She is also minister of Christian education at First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Hans A. Baer is a professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He wrote The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (University of Tennessee Press, 2001) and African American Religion: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (University of Tennessee Press, 2002).

Stacey Floyd-Thomas is an associate professor of ethics and black church studies at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She is founder and executive director of the Black Religious Scholars Group and a second-generation womanist scholar.

Victor Anderson is Oberlin Theological School Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is also professor and director of the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and Religious Studies in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Sciences. Anderson was ordained in the Christian Reformed Church. His areas of expertise include African-American political theology, 20th-century ethics, […]

Betty Glover Palmer chairs the department of urban studies at Beulah Heights Bible College in Atlanta, where she also directs the Institute for Urban and Global Economic Development. She works to provide opportunities for urban and global disenfranchised families and communities. She is ordained through the Evangelical Church Alliance. Her B.G. Palmer Economic Development Training consults […]

Bishop Earl E. McCloud Jr. is ecumenical affairs officer for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He and leaders of the Interdenominational Theological Center organized a September 2006 meeting of 300 representatives of historic black churches and black Muslim leaders in Atlanta to organize an initiative against “black on black crime” in Atlanta.

Bertram L. Melbourne is an ordained minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and an associate professor of New Testament language and literature at Howard University School of Divinity.