Gary Zola is an associate professor of the American Jewish experience at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. As part of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s celebration, Zola offers a lecture on Lincoln and the Jews that examines how he helped expand their civil rights.

Ronald C. White Jr. is the author of two best-selling books on Lincoln, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech and The Eloquent President. White’s newest, A. Lincoln: A Biography, was published to coincide with the bicentennial. In 2006, White gave a sermon at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., titled “Abraham Lincoln’s Sermon on the Mount.”

Joshua Wolf Shenk is the author of 2005’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness and can discuss the 16th president’s possible depression and how it may have fed his spirituality. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Ronald D. Rietveld is professor of history emeritus at California State University at Fullerton. He has written extensively on Lincoln, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the history of religion in America. He was a historical consultant for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and is known as the only person who found […]

Lucas Morel is an associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. He is the author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government.

Gordon Leidner is a Lincoln scholar and former president of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia. He maintains the website Great American History, on which he has written about Lincoln’s religious faith. He says Lincoln’s legacy in American civil religion is that he never doubted the existence and sovereignty of God or that God had […]

Harold Holzer is senior vice president of external affairs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He is also co-chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and a member of its speakers bureau. Among the lectures he offers is “Lincoln and the Jews.” He has written several books on Lincoln.

Allen Guelzo wrote Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, a 1999 book that challenged the reigning thought about Lincoln’s faith – basically, that he had little, if any. He is a professor of Civil War era history at Gettysburg College.

Read an excerpt of Mark Noll’s book A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. The section is titled “The Ambiguous Religion of President Abraham Lincoln” and is reprinted on the Web site Adherents.com.