Kathryn Barush is an assistant professor of art history and religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where she studies art and the material culture of pilgrimage, domestic and urban shrines, sacred art and sacred space, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and the visual arts.

Ronald Nakasone is a senior lecturer in Buddhist art and culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. His research interests include Buddhist aesthetics, art, and ethics, spirituality and aging.

Kathe Schaaf is co-editor of Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership: Where Grace Meets Power. She is co-chair of the Women’s Task Force for the Parliament of the World’s Religions and an artist, a poet and a marriage and family therapist based in California.

Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies, American studies and  history and divinity at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. She has written about the religious content of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire and is knowledgeable about American religion and materialism, especially Christian kitsch.

William Dyrness is professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Among his books are Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism, which he co-authored with Jonathan A. Anderson, and Visual Faith: Art, Theology and Worship in Dialogue.