Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry in Mount Rainier, Md., which serves gay and lesbian Catholics, has been critical of the Vatican’s resistance to homosexuality.

Monsignor Edward J. Arsenault is head of the St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md., which treats psychologically troubled clergy.

James E. Waller is the Cohen Chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire and author of Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Thomas Plante is a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California and an expert on the causes and frequency of sexual abuse by clergy. He is the editor or author of multiple books, including Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis, 2002-2012. 

Michael J. Bland, a psychologist with a doctorate in ministry, is clinical-pastoral coordinator for victim assistance ministry for the Archdiocese of Chicago and a clinical counselor at the Center for Psychological Services in Oak Lawn, Ill. The ex-Servite priest was on the 13-member board appointed by the U.S. Catholic bishops to investigate the sexual abuse […]

Donald E. Capps is a professor emeritus of pastoral psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, N.J. He is the author of A Time to Laugh: The Religion of Humor (Continuum, 2005). Contact 609-497-6442.

Read a Nov. 21, 2011, article in the New York Times about gratitude and Thanksgiving.

Chris Boyatzis is a developmental psychologist who teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. He has studied religious and spiritual development in families, including how teenagers talk to their parents about religion. He’s also worked in an area he calls “God in the Bod,” looking at how young people’s spirituality affects their body image and […]

Ann Cook is director of the National Rural Bioethics Project, based at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she is a professor of psychology. The project helps address ethics issues in rural communities.