Samuel Newlands is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and co-director of a four-year research initiative there titled “The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought.” He teaches a graduate-level seminar at Notre Dame on evil and previously taught a class at Yale University on free will, God and evil..

Terry Eagleton, a noted British scholar and cultural theorist, is currently distinguished professor of english literature at Lancaster University. His books include On Evil (2010), which examines ideas about evil through the lenses of literature, religion and psychoanalysis.

Roy F. Baumeister is a professor and Francis Eppes Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He is the author of Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.

Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in Britain. His research interests include empathy, and he is the author of The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (May 2011).

A Religion News Service piece analyzing the portrayal of torture in the 2012 movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”

An May 31, 2013, opinion piece published in the New York Times that asks if force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike constitutes torture. The question came about after detainees in the U.S.’s Guantánamo Bay prison facility in Cuba refused to be fed in protest of new rules.

Jerry Walls, philosophy of religion professor at Houston Baptist University, has written about making sense of evil and Christian conceptions of God. He is co-editor of The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy (Open Court Press) and co-author of C.S. Lewis & Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century From the Most Influential Apologists (InterVarsity Press, 1998).

Written by Victor Stenger. Stenger presents a defense of Atheism using scientific and historical evidence. He argues that religion has been a source of social ills and evils, and argues in favor of a belief-system more in line with the “way of nature” than with traditional monotheism.

Charles Kimball is Presidential Professor and director of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of When Religion Becomes Evil: Five Warning Signs, and his most recent book is When Religion Becomes Lethal: The Explosive Mix of Politics and Religion in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (April 2011).