"On Faith" panelist Starhawk is a prominent voice in modern Wiccan spirituality and cofounder of Reclaiming (www.reclaiming.org), an activist branch of modern Pagan religion. She is the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979) --considered an essential text for the Neo-Pagan movement--and the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) . Her works have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, Japanese, and Burmese. Many of Starhawk's political essays were collected into her book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising . Her newest book is The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature . Starhawk has also recorded several tapes and CDs; most recently Wicca for Beginners (2002), Wiccan Rituals and Blessings (2003), and a four-CD set Earth Magic (2006), all produced by Sounds True. She consulted on and contributed to three films known as the Women's Spirituality series, directed by Donna Read for the National Film Board of Canada: Goddess Remembered, The Burning Times, and Full Circle . Committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism, Starhawk travels internationally teaching magic, the tools of ritual, and the skills of activism.

An ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist minister, "On Faith" panelist Dr. Willis E. Elliott has been a pastor, teacher, lecturer, administrator, consultant (to Newsweek for 38 years), church executive, and the author of six books. His five earned degrees in religion include a PhD, University of Chicago, where he was divinity research librarian. He taught in colleges, seminaries, & universities--including the University of Hawaii, where he taught "The World's Great Religions" and "Religion and the Meaning of Existence." At the 1966 Triennium of the National Council of Churches, he was the interlocutor with Billy Graham.

"On Faith" panelist Pamela K. Taylor is co-founder of Muslims for Progressive Values and director of the Islamic Writers Alliance. She is a member of the national board of advisors to the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and served as co-chair of the Progressive Muslim Union for two years. Taylor is a strong supporter of the woman imam movement, which seeks the full participation of Muslim women in every aspect of life, including the pulpit. In July 2005, she became the first woman in centuries to officiate Friday prayers in a mosque when the United Muslim Association of Toronto and the Muslim Canadian Congress invited her to serve as guest imam. (This event followed a number of services, sermons and prayer sessions led by women held in private venues because no mosque agreed to host them.) In February 2006, when the former Grand Mufti of Marseilles visited Toronto, he requested that Taylor lead him in congregational prayer as an unequivocal demonstration of his support for female imams. Taylor has also been active in interfaith dialogue for 20 years, both in local initiatives and speaking at numerous conferences, universities, and churches. She received her MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and writes regularly on spiritual matters and the Islamic faith. She has essays in Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality: Perspectives from the World's Religious Traditions (2006) and the forthcoming The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (2007). She has written hundreds of articles and opinion pieces for newspapers, magazines, and journals, and is an award winning poet.

"On Faith" panelist Dr. Bob Edgar is president of Common Cause and former general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, the leading U.S. organization in the movement for Christian unity. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, he came to the Council from Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, Calif., where he was president from 1990-2000. He was a six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was the first Democrat in more than 120 years to be elected from the heavily Republican Seventh District of Pennsylvania. He served in Congress from 1974 to 1987. His wide-ranging career has also included pastorates at United Methodist congregations and stints as a teacher, college chaplain, community organizer, and director of a “think tank” on national security issues. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Lycoming College, Williamsport, Pa., and a master of divinity degree from the Theological School of Drew University, Madison, N.J. He holds four honorary doctoral degrees. Later this year, he will become President and CEO of Common Cause.

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].

Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason. She began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post, and has been a contributor to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers for more than 25 years on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union and Russian literature. Jacoby has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Jacoby’s other books include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004); Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. She is working on a book about the relationship between American anti-intellectualism and political polarization, to be published by Pantheon in 2008. Her photo is by Chris Ramir.

Syndicated political columnist and “On Faith” panelist Cal Thomas has a twice-weekly column that appears in over 500 newspapers around the world. A graduate of American University, Thomas is a veteran of broadcast and print journalism. He has worked for NBC, CNBC, PBS television, and the Fox News Channel where he currently appears on the weekly media critique show, “Fox News Watch.” Thomas has authored ten books, including Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?, A Freedom Dream, Public Persons and Private Lives, Book Burning, Liberals for Lunch, Occupied Territory, The Death of Ethics in America, Uncommon Sense and Things That Matter Most. His latest was The Wit and Wisdom of Cal Thomas. In 1995, Thomas was honored with a Cable Ace Award nomination for Best Interview Program. Other awards include a George Foster Peabody team reporting award, and awards from both the Associated Press and United Press International. Common Ground, which Thomas writes for USA Today, offers insightful discussion of contentious social issues with his friend and political counterpart, Bob Beckel. The two are working together on a book to be published in 2007.

Martin E. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history, chiefly in the Divinity School, for 35 years, and where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. For a decade prior to entering academia, the “On Faith” panelist served parishes in the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago as an ordained Lutheran pastor. Marty is the author of more than 50 books including Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (1970), for which he won the National Book Award. His additional honors include the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the University of Chicago Alumni Medal, the Distinguished Service Medal of the Association of Theological Schools, and the Order of Lincoln Medallion (Illinois’ top honor). Marty has served as president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He also has served on two U.S. Presidential Commissions and was director of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago. He is Senior Regent of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is professor of theology at Chicago Theological Seminary and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. She was president of CTS from 1998-2008. Her area of expertise is contextual theologies of liberation, specializing in issues of violence and violation. An ordained minister of the United Church of Christ since 1974, the “On Faith” panelist is the author or editor of thirteen books and has been a translator for two translations of the Bible. Her works include Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States (1996) and The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Translation (1995). She edited and contributed to Adam, Eve and the Genome: Theology in Dialogue with the Human Genome Project (2003).

"On Faith" panelist Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and Distinguished Scholar of the City University of New York. He has written more than 40 scholarly articles and authored nine books, including the four-volume PARAL series on religion among Latinos. His book Prophets Denied Honor (1980) is considered a landmark in Catholic literature. With his spouse, Ana María Díaz-Stevens, he authored Recognizing the Latino Religious Resurgence , which was named an Outstanding Academic Book for 1998 by Choice magazine. A spokesperson for civil and human rights, he has testified before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations and was named by President Jimmy Carter to the Advisory Board of the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights for two terms. Presently, he directs the Research Center for Religion In Society and Culture (RISC).

Kathleen Flake is associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University. The "On Faith" panelist teaches courses in new religious movements and the relation between church and state in America. She researches the effect of politics on religion and the strategies by which religious communities maintain a sense of fidelity to an originating vision, while changing over time. Her recent book, "The Politics of American Religious Identity: the Seating of Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle," addresses both questions in the context of twentieth-century Mormonism. Descended from Southern Mormon pioneers and Baptist dust bowl migrants who ended up in Arizona, she now lives in Nashville, and is a practicing Latter-day Saint. Prior to her appointment to Vanderbilt, she was a litigation attorney in Washington, D.C., representing the government in civil rights and professional liability cases.

Charles W. "Chuck" Colson is founder of Prison Fellowship, a Christian outreach ministry to the prison population of this country, as well as to ex-prisoners and crime victims. The "On Faith" panelist's daily radio commentary, BreakPoint, is aired daily on over a 1,000 radio outlets nationwide. Colson also is a syndicated columnist, lawyer, and author of 25 books, most recently The Faith (2008). He served as special counsel to the late President Richard M. Nixon (1969-73). After pleading guilty to a Watergate-related charge of obstruction of justice in 1974, Colson served seven months of a one to three-year federal prison sentence. His 1973 Christian conversion was documented in the internationally best-selling book and film, Born Again. He founded Prison Fellowship in 1976. In 1993, Colson was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion and donated the $1 million prize to Prison Fellowship. In the last 28 years, Colson has visited more than 600 prisons in 40 countries and, with the help of nearly 50,000 volunteers, has built Prison Fellowship into the world's largest prison outreach, serving the spiritual and practical needs of prisoners in 93 countries including the U.S.

"On Faith" panelist Sulayman S. Nyang teaches in the Department of African Studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. A scholar of African and Muslim affairs, Nyang, who is a native of the Republic of the Gambia, also served as his homeland's deputy ambassador to seven Middle Eastern and North African countries from 1975-78. Except for those three years, Nyang has taught at Howard since 1972, serving as acting director of the African Studies Program from 1973-75 and from 1986-1993, as chairman of the Department of African Studies. In 1993, he became senior consultant on the African Voices Project of the Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution..In 1997, Nyang became the first scholar to be named the Henry Luce Professor for Abrahamic Religions at the University of Hartford and Hartford Seminary. From 1999 to 2002 Professor Nyang served as a principal investigator and co-director of the Muslims in the American Public Square (MAPS) project sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust and housed at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Now a U.S. citizen, Nyang has written extensively on African, Islamic and Middle Eastern affairs .His most widely-known book is Islam, Christianity and African Identity. He has also authored or co-edited Religious Plurality in Africa, with Jacob Olupona; A Line in the Sand: Saudi Arabia's Role in the Gulf War, with Evans Heindricks; and Islam:Its Relevance Today, co-edited with Henry Thompson. Nyang also wrote Islam in the United States of America (1999). His latest work is Muslims' Place in the American Public Square. Hopes, Fears, and Aspirations (2004), jointly edited with Zahid Bukhari and John Esposito of Georgetown University, and Mumtaz Ahmad of Hampton University). Nyang, who holds a doctorate in government from the University of Virginia, also serves on the advisory boards of several national African and Muslim organizations and was the first American Muslim president of the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, D.C.