Summer Hathout is a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and co-founder of the Muslim Women’s League. She has written about misperceptions of domestic violence within the American Muslim community. Contact via the Muslim Women’s League.

Salma Abugideiri is advisory board member and director of training of the Peaceful Families Project and a licensed professional counselor in private practice in Sterling, Virginia. She is the co-author of What Islam Says About Domestic Violence: A Guide for Helping Muslim Families.

Carol Goodman Kaufman is a psychologist and author of Sins of Omission: The Jewish Community’s Reaction to Domestic Violence. She was the founding chair of the Domestic Violence Task Force for the Jewish Community of Central Mass. She is based at the Haddassah Institute at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Rachel Lev is the author of Shine the Light: Sexual Abuse and Healing in the Jewish Community (Northeastern University Press, 2002).

Read a July 25, 2007 , Christian Science Monitor article about research on the health benefits of giving.

Doug Oman is an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkele , School of Public Health. He has researched the health benefits of empathy, of learning from spiritual role models and of spiritually oriented meditation.

Paul Wink is a professor of psychology at Wellesley College in Wellesley , Mass. He researches adult development and aging and has studied the effects of religion and spirituality on life development and choices, including religious commitment and altruistic behavior.

Jerome Kagan is the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. His research on human temperament has been influential. He spoke about the human moral sense at a 1999 conference on empathy and altruism.

Dr. Gregory Fricchione is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Mass. He is director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine and an expert on stress and depression. Among his publications are “Illness and the Origin of Caring” in the March 1993 issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities.