Kenneth Pennington holds the Kelly-Quinn Chair of Ecclesiastical and Legal History at the Catholic University of America and is an expert in church history and canon law. He has written extensively about the papacy.

NBC News posted a timeline of the pope’s life on Feb. 11, 2013.

Read a Feb. 11, 2013, Washington Post story about past papal resignations.

Read a Feb. 11, 2013, article from USA Today about other popes who have resigned.

Paul Williams is a emeritus professor of Indian and Tibetan philosophy in the department of theology and religious studies at the University of Bristol, England. He has mainly studied Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, a school of Buddhism which developed in India initially during the first century and had a wide influence on Buddhist thought in India.

The Crouch-Gregory book followed the publication of a similarly-themed book, Understanding and Transforming the Black Church, by Anthony Pinn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston. Pinn is also executive director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and he co-chairs the American Academy of […]

A March 2010 forum at ReligionDispatches featured responses from six historians, religious scholars and other experts on the black church, as well as a response from Glaude.

Read a May 24, 2010 Religion News Service story, about African-American atheists, “Blacks, Mirroring Larger U.S. Trend, ‘Come Out’ As Nonbelievers.”

The Fund for Theological Education (FTE), described as “a nonprofit advocate for improving faculty diversity in theological schools and cultivating the next generation of leaders for the church, academy and society,” held a June 11-13, 2010 conference in Chicago on the future of African-American Religious leadership. Read the group’s press release.