Spencer Beebe
is an environmental visionary and the president and founder of Ecotrust (ecotrust.org), a think tank that includes biologists, legal experts, economists, agriculturists, and Native Americans, who came together in 1991 to bring some of the good ideas emerging around sustainability back to the rain forests of home. See his map of a new kind of ecologically sustainable nation — Salmon Nation — where the borders are determined by nature, here.

Rev. Susan Baller-Shepard
is ordained as a minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church and takes great joy in blessing work spaces — whether or not the call comes from her fellow Presbyterians. She received her master of divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary and her master of social work from the University of Illinois. To learn some of her nondenominational workplace blessings, see here.

Anne Foerst, Th.D.
set out on her doctoral thesis to prove that artificial intelligence was not possible. In the process, she decided she was wrong — that someday we might even baptize a robot. She became a research scientist at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and initiated “God and Computers,” a dialogue project that began with Harvard Divinity School and MIT. Now  an assistant professor at St. Bonaventure in New York, Foerst researches embodiment and social interaction as central elements in human cognition. See here as she turns her researcher’s eye on the real reasons for sex.


Maurya Simon
has written many books, including Speaking in Tongues (Gibbs Smith, 1990), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Ghost Orchid (Red Hen Press, 2004), which was nominated for a 2004 National Book Award in poetry. WEAVERS, based on the paintings of artist Baila Goldenthal, was published by Blackbird Press in October 2005. Simon teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and lives in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. She discovers her “animal nature” in her poem here.