Born in California, David Chidester trained in the academic study of religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his PhD in Religious Studies in 1981. After lecturing there for a few years, he moved to South Africa in 1984 to teach at the University of Cape Town. In 1994 he became the university's Professor of Comparative Religion. Serving as Head of the Department of Religious Studies, he is also Director of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa and Co-Director of the International Human Rights Exchange, a transatlantic project in human rights education. Chidester has published extensively on religion in North America and Southern Africa. He is author or editor of fifteen books, including Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa and Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple and Jonestown, both of which received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Religious Studies. His most recent book, Christianity: A Global History, has been described by the Christian Science Monitor as "the greatest story ever told-in a single volume."

University of California, Santa Barbara

Edward T. Linenthal is the Edward M. Penson Professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and serves as a contributing editor of the JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY. He has been a research fellow in the Arms Control and Defense Policy program at MIT, where he did the research for his book SYMBOLIC DEFENSE: THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE. His other books include SACRED GROUND: AMERICANS AND THEIR BATTLEFIELDS (Illinois) and PRESERVING MEMORY: THE STRUGGLE TO CREATE AMERICA'S HOLOCAUST MUSEUM (Viking). He is the co-editor of A SHUDDERING DAWN: RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE NUCLEAR AGE (SUNY); AMERICAN SACRED SPACE (Indiana); and HISTORY WARS: THE ENOLA GAY AND OTHER BATTLES FOR THE AMERICAN PAST (Metropolitan Books/Holt), cited by the LOS ANGELES TIMES as one of the ten most significant non"fiction books of 1996. Linenthal was the only historian to testify before the Senate on the Enola Gay controversy at tne National Air and Space Museum. A frequent consultant for the National Park Service on issues of interpretation of controversial historic sites, Linenthal worked for the Park Service at the 50th anniversary events at the USS Arizona Memorial in 1991, and delivered the commemorative address at the Memorial in 1994.