Sheldon “Shelley” E. Steinbach is former vice president and general counsel for the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., and works for Education Industry Reporter. He says campuses must ensure that their nondiscrimination policies are applied fairly and consistently. The conflict between religious rights and individual rights is difficult and not clear-cut, he says.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan chairs the department of religious studies and is an affiliate professor of law at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is interested in the legal regulation of religion in modern pluralistic societies. She wrote The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Ask her to discuss the history of religious groups that are pressing for rights of religion […]

John Haught, an emeritus professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., believes that spiritual experiences are connected to the brain processes and dependent on them but not reducible to them. He says it is possible to distinguish between the chemical basis of experiences and the experiences themselves. Life and mind cannot be reduced […]

Steven Pinker, psychology professor at Harvard University, formerly with the department of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002). He says seeing morality as a product of the brain is less dangerous than the […]

Harvey Cox is the Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Harvard Divinity School and a renowned author and commentator on religious issues. He has written many books on the future of religion and theology, including The Future of Faith and The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective.

Read a Dec. 21, 2000, Associated Press story posted by the Cincinnati Enquirer about a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that Christmas can continue to be a legal holiday, as it has been since 1870, because it has a secular purpose.

Fenggang Yang directs the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including Religion in China: Survival and Revival Under Communist Rule. He is also an expert in Asian immigration and Eastern religions.

Ross B. Emmett is Professor of Political Economy and Political Theory & Constitutional Democracy at James Madison College, Michigan State University. He has written “The Idea of a Secular Society Revisited” in Faith, Reason, and Economics: Essays in Honour of Anthony Waterman, edited by Derek Hum (St. John’s College Press, 2003; and “Frank Knight: Economics vs. Religion” […]