Ben Birnbaum (moderator)

The editor of Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time, Ben Birnbaum is chief marketing and communications officer and special assistant to the president at Boston College. He is also editor of Boston College Magazine and a frequent writer on religious culture and Judaism in particular, with work anthologized in Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing and Best Catholic Writing.

Dan Barry (panelist) 

Dan Barry is the author of Pull Me Up: A Memoir and City Lights: Stories About New York, drawn from his “About New York” columns in the New York Times. He is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award, and a Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He now writes the “This Land” column for The Times.

Lawrence Joseph (panelist) 

Lawrence Joseph is a prizewinning poet and professor of law at St. John's University in New York City. The grandson of Arab-American immigrants to Detroit, he has degrees from the University of Michigan and Cambridge. Into It, his fourth book of poetry, addresses 9/11, which occurred within view of his bedroom windows. His prose book, Lawyerland, has provoked further discussion of his work at the intersection of law and poetry.

Nancy Mairs (panelist) 

Nancy Mairs is an essayist and poet. Her nine books trace a trajectory from a Congregationalist upbringing in New England to her conversion to Catholicism and life with multiple sclerosis in Tucson. She has written provocatively and unsparingly about sex, marriage, family, tragedy, feminism, art, illness, and her restless faith. Her most recent book is A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith.

Carol Zaleski (panelist)

Carol Zaleski is a professor of world religions at Smith College. She is the author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times and The Life of the World to Come and has co-authored Prayer: A History and The Book of Heaven, with her husband Philip. She is also a columnist for the Christian Century.