Leonard Zeskind is president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. He is the author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, in which he explores white nationalism’s relationship to religion. He lives in Kansas City, Mo.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia, Mo., is new to the sanctuary movement. Its pastor, the Rev. Molly Housh Gordon, called the decision to join “a process of discernment.”

Abram Van Engen is an associate professor of english and a faculty affiliate of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, where his interests include early American literature and culture, Puritanism, sentimentalism, and religion.

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics advances the study of the intersection of religion and politics and publishes the journal Religion & Politics. It is based at Washington University in St. Louis. R. Marie Griffith is director.

Tobias Winwright serves as an associate professor of health care ethics and is an associate professor of theological ethics at St. Louis University. He is a Roman Catholic moral theologian who has co-authored After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post War Justice, and he edited Green Discipleship: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Environment.

Leah Gunning Francis is associate dean for contextual education and assistant professor of Christian education at Eden Theological Seminary. She is based in St. Louis and was present in Ferguson, Mo., during the unrest in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death.

NightLight International works to prevent commercial sexual exploitation and help its victims escape from it by providing alternative employment and other assistance. CEO Annie Dieselberg founded the organization in 2005 after years of missionary work in Thailand with her husband, an evangelical pastor. In Bangkok, NightLight operates as a business and as a nonprofit; in the […]

Randy Dignan is pastor of Bible Baptist Church in Jefferson City, Mo. He is fluent in American Sign Language, and the church has an extensive ministry for the deaf, including worship services. Dignan grew up surrounded by deaf family members and says he has always felt called to ministry for the hearing-impaired.

Read a Sept. 14, 2013, story from Mid-Missouri Public Radio about a Baptist church in Jefferson City, Mo., that holds services for the deaf.