David Baggett, professor of philosophy at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., co-edited Harry Potter and Philosophy.

W. Christopher Stewart works at Templeton Religion Trust as its Vice President of Grant Programs.He is on leave of absence from teaching philosophy at Houghton College in Houghton, N.Y., and co-authored, with Houghton colleague Ben Lipscomb, a chapter for Harry Potter and Philosophy. 

The Rev. Francis Bridger is dean of the Diocese of Brechin in Scotland. He was formerly ecclesiastical professor of Anglican studies and executive director of the Center for Anglican Communion Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. He is the author of A Charmed Life: The Spirituality of Potterworld.

Robert L. Brown is a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written about Buddhism, asceticism, health and the body.

Jill Dubisch is a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. She has written about religious aspects of the health food movement in a journal about magic, witchcraft and the supernatural.

Marleen Williams is a clinical professor of counseling psychology at Brigham Young University, a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints school in Provo, Utah. She specializes in women’s mental health and focuses her research on eating disorders, depression, trauma and spirituality in women. She says religious beliefs that see the body as a God-given gift […]

Mark Roehling is an assistant professor of labor and industrial relations at Michigan State University in Lansing. In 1999 he published a study that found that overweight and obese people were discriminated against – often openly – in the workplace.

Gillian Feeley-Harnik is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has written about religion and food and the role food played in early Judaism and Christianity.

Mary Louise Bringle is chair of the humanities division of Brevard College in Brevard, N.C. She wrote of her eating disorder in “Confessions of a Glutton” in the Oct. 25, 1989, issue of The Christian Century.