“On Faith” panelist Lyle Dukes is Senior Pastor and founder of Harvest Life Changers Church in Woodbridge, Virginia. He and his wife, co-pastor Deborah Dukes, have served the church since its inception in 1995. Among the church’s ministries are an international television program, a regional radio program, world missions outreach as well as Christian bookstores, a record label (The Sound of Harvest), a publishing company (Harvest Word Publishing), community self-improvement courses (GED program, computer and financial courses) and numerous community service projects (prison and social services outreach). He and his wife produced CDs featuring the Harvest Life Changers Church Mass Choir and solo performances by Deborah Dukes. Their most popular CDs include Through the Eyes of God and In His Presence. Dukes and his wife were recognized as one of gospel industry’s top couples by Gospel Today Magazine. Dukes, a U.S. Army veteran, also is the author of several books and articles including, Possessing The Kingdom Anointing, The Ministry In You, Let Us Pray, Give It To Me Straight and Three Steps In Defeating Temptation and the co-author of The What Works The Best Principle.

Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. He is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. An American Muslim of Indian heritage, Eboo has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. He is on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Committee of the Aga Khan Foundation and the Advisory Board of Duke University's Islamic Studies Center. Eboo is an Ashoka Fellow, part of a select network of social entrepreneurs with ideas that could change the world.

Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. The “On Faith” panelist also teaches in the University’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. She also serves on the University’s Committee on Social Thought. Doniger’s research and teaching center on Hinduism and mythology, with courses in the latter focusing on cross-cultural themes. Her courses in Hinduism cover a broad spectrum, including mythology, literature, law, gender, and ecology. After training as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham, Doniger earned two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard and Oxford Universities. Before moving to the University of Chicago in 1978, she taught at Harvard, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and the University of California at Berkeley. She has served as president of the American Academy of Religion and of the Association of Asian Studies. She holds four honorary degrees and serves on the International Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia Britannica and on the board of Daedalus. In 2000, she was recognized by PEN Oakland for excellence in multi-cultural non-fiction for Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (1998). That same year she received the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize for her work on myths about sex: The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000). Doniger has authored more than 20 other books, including translations of Sanskrit texts, among which are The Rig Veda: An Anthology (1981); Laws of Manu(1991) [with Brian K. Smith], and Kamasutra(2002) [with Sudhir Kakar]. She also wrote The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was (2005) and Off with Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture [with Howard Eilberg Schwartz].

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. His most recent book is “God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush” (HarperOne). The “On Faith” panelist has written ten other books, including Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, which was made into a three-part documentary for PBS. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for his script-writing on that series. His second documentary, Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham and a two-part examination of the creation-evolution debate, In the Beginning: The Creationist Controversy, also aired on PBS. Balmer has lectured at the Chautauqua Institution, the Commonwealth Club of California and the Smithsonian Associates and been a visiting professor at Rutgers, Yale, and Princeton. He has published widely in academic journals and his syndicated commentaries on religion in America have appeared in newspapers across the country. He is editor-at-large for Christianity Today. A spiritual memoir, Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father's Faith (2001) was named spiritual "book of the year" by Christianity Today. He is currently at work on a history of religion in North America.