The Rev. James Forbes Jr. is senior minister emeritus at Riverside Church in New York City.

Gerald Zelizer is a Conservative rabbi and pastor of Neve Shalom in Metuchen, N.J.

Erin Splaine is pastor of the First Unitarian Society of West Newton, Mass., which describes itself as a church of “liberal faith.”

James Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C.

Shelley Ross Saxer is a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. She has written widely on land use issues, including a 1995 Kentucky Law Journal article, “When Religion Becomes a Nuisance: Balancing Land Use and Religious Freedom.”

Brad Dacus is president of the Pacific Justice Institute of Sacramento, Calif. The institute is a religious liberty advocacy organization that has litigated on behalf of churches such as the Independent Baptist Church of Sacramento in land use cases.

Jesse H. Choper is emeritus professor of public law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert on church-state issues and U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding religion. He is the author of Securing Religious Liberty: Principles for Judicial Interpretation of the Religion Clauses. He was a law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Alan E. Brownstein is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Davis. He is a nationally known expert on religious freedom issues and has written widely about religious land use issues and states’ rights.

Frederick Gedicks is an expert on law and religion who teaches at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School. He regularly writes amicus briefs, law review articles and columns on religious freedom cases before the Supreme Court.