Religion

Powers looks at religion and the media in the wake of public reaction to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

John Dominic Crossan is professor emeritus of biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago. A native of Ireland, and ordained as a priest in the United States, he left the priesthood in 1969. Crossan is a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who meet to determine the authenticity of Jesus' sayings in the Gospels. Crossan wrote the books Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Historical Jesus and Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of The Death of Jesus.

When Armstrong decided to leave the Roman Catholic convent where she was a nun in 1969, she entered a world vastly different than the one she had been isolated from for seven years. She had no idea what was going on in Vietnam and had little idea what was happening in popular culture. She's written a new memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, about her life in the convent and the spiritual quest that followed. Her other books include The Battle for God and A History of God.

Matt is a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Center for Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. He taught at the Graduate Theological Union for nearly 20 years. He's translated the new book The Zohar: Pritzker, Vol. 1. His other published works include God and the Big Bang and Varieties of Mystical Nothingness: Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist.

Marty is one of the foremost authorities on religion and society. He is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught for over 35 years. His new book is a biography of Martin Luther, one of the leading figures of the Protestant Reformation. The book is Martin Luther. Marty is also the author of a five-volume work on religion in the 20th century.

Saudi Arabian-Born Ambah is participating in the five-day Muslim pilgrimage (known as the "hajj") to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It began on Jan. 30. She is traveling with her two sisters. Over the weekend, 244 people were crushed to death in a stampede. Ambah is writing about her journey for The Christian Science Monitor. She now makes her home in Arlington, Va.

Along with her ex-husband, Jim Bakker, she built the Praise the Lord televangelist network. She gained a reputation for crying often on television and smearing her abundant mascara. Their empire crumbled when Jim Bakker was convicted of bilking followers out of millions of dollars. She survived the scandal, the divorce, as well as cancer and drug addiction and wrote about it in her memoir I Will Survive: And You Will, Too! She is also starring in the new reality show on the WB network, Surreal Life 2.

He talks about living as a closeted homosexual in the priesthood, finally having an affair with a man, going into therapy and then leaving the ministry. All this occurred by 1992, years before the sexual abuse scandal. Schiavone wrote about his experience in an article in the December 8, 2002 issue of the Boston Globe Magazine.

He's the Bowman and Gordon Gray professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His new book, Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, chronicles the second and third centuries before Christianity as we know it came to be. Ehrman has also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ called Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make it Into The New Testament.

The 82-year-old historian and rabbi has been at the center of events that shape American Jewish life for more than 50 years. He is the former president of the American Jewish Congress, and helped to found the movement called Peace Now in Israel. His 1959 book, The Zionist Idea, is considered a classic. Last year he wrote his memoir A Jew in America: My Life and a People's Struggle for Identity. His new book is The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine.