William F. May, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life at the University of Virginia and most recently directed the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He founded the religious studies program at Indiana University in 1966 and continued as its chair for a decade. He has taught at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and at Indiana University in Bloomington, and held a chair at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. May also has been a visiting professor at Yale University and the University of Virginia. He served on the Clinton Task Force on Health Care Reform and on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics. May is the author of Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional, and The Physician’s Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics.

Emilie M. Townes, M.A., D.Min., Ph.D., an American Baptist clergywoman, is the first Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale University Divinity School. She currently serves as president-elect of the American Academy of Religion and is the former Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. Townes edited two collections of essays, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering and Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation. She also authored Womanist Ethics, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness, and Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. She continues her research on women and health in the African diaspora.

Keith G. Meador, M.D., Th.M., M.P.H., Professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and Medicine at Duke Divinity School, established Duke’s Theology and Medicine Program. His scholarship focuses on pastoral theology interpreted through practices of caring and their formation within the Christian community, as well as health ministries as a manifestation of these practices. A board certified psychiatrist, his work builds on his clinical, research and teaching background in mental health, pastoral theology, and public health. Co-author of Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity, Meador is co-director for the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health in the Duke University Medical Center. He holds a joint appointment as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the Duke School of Medicine.

Laura S. Mendenhall, M.A., M.Div., D.Min., serves as President of Columbia Theological Seminary (PCUSA) in Decatur, Georgia, a position she has held since 2000. Prior to that position, Dr. Mendenhall served as a pastor for 19 years in Texas and Florida and as a missionary in Zaire. She is a well known preacher and worship leader, and has served the national church in many capacities. Her current research interests include the role of the sacraments in the life of the church, the use of daily prayer in structuring Christian community, and strategies for faithful proclamation of Christian stewardship.