The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops answers questions about the role of the paschal candle in Easter rites.

Read about the symbolism and history of the paschal candle in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

Jennifer Michael Hecht teaches at the New School University in New York City. She is the author of Doubt: A History and The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism and Anthropology in France.

Daniel Garber is a philosophy professor at Princeton University. In his essay “Religio Philosophi” (included in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life), he writes that he is fascinated by religion’s role in the lives of the historical figures he studies, even though he is a nonbeliever.

Ronald Inglehart is a political science professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a research professor at its Center for Political Studies. He is particularly interested in the effects of changing belief systems on societies socially and politically. His books include (as co-author) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, which concluded that industrial […]

Sam Harris is a leading figure in the New Atheism movement. His 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, was a New York Times best-seller and was followed by his Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris also wrote The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, which rejects the argument that religion plays a necessary […]

Tom Flynn is executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism and director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, America’s only freethought museum. He is also editor/publisher of Free Inquiry, the world’s largest-circulation secular humanist magazine, and editor of The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Flynn is based in Amherst, N.Y.

The Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, N.Y., is described as America’s only freethought museum. It tells the story of the noted 19th-century agnostic orator, including his most famous speech, “Ghosts.”

What are some helpful hints on covering highly charged religious services, especially ones that seem to defy rational explanation? By Sandi Dolbee The San Diego Union-Tribune* You walk into the room and the first things you hear are the sounds. People mumbling and wailing, speaking in languages you simply don’t recognize. Others are falling down, […]