Kenneth Pargament is a professor emeritus of psychology at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. His research addressed religious beliefs in various traditions and health. He also researched how the elderly who struggle with their religious beliefs and hold negative perceptions about their relationships with God and life meaning have an increased risk of […]

Richard Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has studied the brain activity of meditators and since 1992 has collaborated with the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks to study the effect of meditation on mental activity.

Richard P. Sloan is professor of behavioral medicine (in psychiatry) at the New York Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center. He examines the link between psychological factors and heart disease, among other issues. Sloan cautions physicians against prescribing religion as medicine, and he urges them to maintain a separation between their role as physicians and […]

Read “How the Mind Hurts and Heals the Body,” by Oakley Ray of Vanderbilt University.

The American Psychological Association offers guidelines for ethical conduct in the care and use of animals.

Charles Ridley is professor of counseling psychology at Texas A & M University. Previously, he has taught at Indiana University and the Graduate School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is also licensed psychologist and Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. He wrote an April 20, 2007, essay, “The DNA of Religious Faith,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Penny Edgell is a professor in sociology at the University of Minnesota and lead author of a 2006 study on the social acceptance of atheists in America. She is beginning new research on the moral communities of those who aren’t traditionally religious. She wrote Religion and Family in a Changing Society.

Robert Altemeyer is a retired associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. He is the co-author of Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America’s Nonbelievers (2006) and Amazing Conversions: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion (1997).