Beattie was a mature student at the University of Bristol, where she read theology and religious studies before going on to do a PhD on Marian theology and symbolism in engagement with the ideas of Luce Irigaray under the supervision of Professor Ursula King. Since then, she has lectured at the University of Bristol and Wesley College, Bristol and also taught with the Open University before taking up a full-time post at Roehampton University in 2002. She has a wide range of teaching and research interests in the area of...

Todd A. Salzman has a Ph.D. in theology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He completed his dissertation in 1994, taught at the University of San Diego from 1995-1997, and began teaching at Creighton university in 1997. He has published six books, written over 50 scholarly articles, and presented numerous papers at national and international conferences. Salzman's essay on religious, cultural, and ethical responses to the rape victims in the former Yugoslavia was honored by the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in New York in 2001. Saltzman...

Tomáš Špidlík was born in Boskovice, now in the Czech Republic, in 1919. In 1938, he entered the Department of Philosophy at the University of Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. In the following year, he entered the Jesuits. In 1951, Spidlik began broadcasting programs from Vatican Radio to the countries behind the Iron Curtain calling for freedom. Among others, he met with Alexander Dubcek, the former First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and Václav Havel, who became President of Czechoslovakia and...

Troy W. Martin, Ph.D. is an author and professor of religious studies at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Tu Weiming is professor of Chinese History at Harvard Univeristy. He has also co- edited Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World(State Univ. of New York, 2000) and Confucianism and Human Rights (Columbia University Press, 1998).

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who was to be created a cardinal of the Catholic Church but died before the ceremony. He is considered one of the most important Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century.

Archimandrite Vassilios Bakoyannis was born in Greece in 1953 and was ordained in 1980. He serves in the metropolis of Patras, Greece. He received a bachelor's degree in theology from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, a master in theology from St. Vladimir Seminary, New York, and a PhD in theology from Atlantic International University, USA. Since 1975, he has authored over 50 spiritual books, several of which have been translated from Greek to English, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, Italian, German and Indonesian.

Walter Cardinal Kasper was born in Heidenheim-Brenz, Germany, in 1933 and was ordained in 1957. He studied at the University of Tübingen where he later became professor of dogmatic theology. He also taught in the United States at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., in 1983. In 1987 he was ordained bishop of Rottenberg-Stuttgart, Germany. Widely respected for his work in Christian ecumenical relations, Kasper was chosen in 1979 as one of a dozen Catholic theologians to sit on the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission, one of...