For 22 years, Rev. Talitha Arnold has worked to develop a theology to match the landscape of the desert lands of the American Southwest and to help her congregation be at home spiritually in this landscape. In sermons, educational materials and other venues, she has written extensively on these topics. Through articles in journals and books, Rev. Arnold has also linked desert theology with Biblical studies. During sabbaticals focused on the desert, she lived with a Navajo family in 1984 and did fieldwork with a Louisville Institute Pastoral Study Grant in 2000. Arnold is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and a minister at the United Church of Santa Fe in New Mexico. She is currently working on a book, Desert Faith in a Time of Global Warming, also with a grant from the Louisville Institute. Rev. Arnold grew up in the West, as did her mother, father and three grandparents. Her academic background is in religion and political science, but her family background was in ecology. Her mother was a desert botanist; her father a desert biologist. Therefore, she can address both the scientific and the theological issues of living in the desert landscape of the American Southwest.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is the director of ASU's Center for Jewish Studies and is the Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She writes on Jewish intellectual history with a focus on philosophy and mysticism in pre-modern Judaism; the interaction between Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages; feminist philosophy; Judaism and ecology; bioethics; and religion and science. She holds a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and mysticism from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a bachelor's in religious studies from the State University of New York. Since 1999 she has taught undergraduate courses in Jewish history at ASU. In addition to her academic position, Professor Tirosh-Samuelson sits on the editorial board of the Journal of American Academy of Religion and the academic advisory board of the Metanexus Institute of Science and Religion, and is the co-editor of a book series, Studies in Jewish History and Culture, for Brill Academic Publishers.

Shahla Talebi is an assistant professor at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at ASU and holds a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University. Her research is concerned with discourses and practices of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, violence, memory, commemoration, state and religion (Islam in particular), and the role of language and metaphor in subject and social transformation. She is the author of Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran and is currently working on her second book.

Tod Swanson is an associate professor of Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies as well as Senior Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability. He teaches undergraduate courses on South American Indian religion and nature as well as a graduate course on religion in Latin America. Every summer he brings faculty and students from various disciplines together for the Andes and Amazon Field School held in Napo Province, Ecuador, where he teaches courses on Kichwa language and Amazonian Ethnobiology. In 1999 Swanson founded the Andes and Amazon Field School at Santu Urku, an Amazonian Kichwa community in Napo Province. During the summer months he resides at this site with his wife and four children while he manages an Amazonian forest preserve and serves the Santu Urku community in an elected capacity as councilman for environmental affairs. Swanson's work comes out of a lifelong interest in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where he grew up as the son of evangelical missionaries. His work on Amazonian Kichwa and Shuar religion seeks to understand how heightened empathy with plant and animals species is believed to mediate emotional relations to family and community. His approach uses linguistic analysis of native discourse to uncover implicit assumptions underlying Amazonian thinking.