Authors and Contributors

Here are the world-class historians, theologians, philosophers, scientists, art historians, technologists, occultists, and writers and thinkers who are represented in the book:

Dan Burstein is the coeditor, with Arne de Keijzer, of Inside Angels & Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the International Bestseller. He was previously the editor of Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code, which spent more than twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and appeared on ten other notable bestseller lists around the world. The Secrets series, developed by Burstein and de Keijzer now includes five books (Secrets of the Code, Secrets of Angels & Demons/Inside Angels & Demons, Secrets of the Widow’s Son, Secrets of Mary Magdalene, and Secrets of 24), as well as two special collector’s editions of US News & World Report and three documentary films now available on DVD, including Sony’s Secrets of the Code (narrated by Susan Sarandon). Currently, some four million copies of Secrets books are in print in more than 30 languages.

The founder and managing partner of Millennium Technology Ventures, a New York–based family of venture capital and private equity funds, Burstein enjoys a “day job” as an investor in innovative new technology companies. Over the last decade, he has served on the boards of more than a dozen technology companies. Prior to Millennium, Burstein was the longtime senior adviser at The Blackstone Group, one of Wall Street’s leading private equity firms. He is also a prominent corporate strategy consultant and has served as an adviser to CEOs, senior management teams, and global corporations including Sony, Toyota, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

Dan Burstein is also an award-winning journalist and author of numerous books on global economics, politics, technology, and culture, including Blog! an in-depth analysis of the emergence of the blogosphere and new social media in the first decade of the 21st century.

Arne de Keijzer's writings have ranged from a newsletter about boats to books on China. In his early career he founded a business consultancy for the China trade and wrote China: Business Strategies for the ’90s, and the best-selling China Guidebook. Most recently, he helped launch the Secrets series, for which he is co-editor with Dan Burstein. He and Burstein together wrote Big Dragon, an innovative look at China’s economic and political future and its impact on the world, and The Best Things Ever Said About the Rise, Fall, and Future of the Internet Economy. Current titles include the world-best selling Secrets of the Code as well as Secrets of Mary Magdalene, Secrets of Angels and Demons, and Secrets of 24. He is also a founder of Squibnocket Partners LLC, a creative content development company.

Amir D. Aczel was a professor of mathematics and statistics whose works of nonfiction include the international bestseller Fermat’s Last Theorem, translated into nineteen languages. His other books include The Mystery of the Aleph, Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics, The Artist and the Mathematician, and The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man. Aczel is a frequent guest on the lecture circuit, radio, and television. In 2004 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to support the writing of Descartes’ Secret Notebook, which was published in 2005.

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is an adjunct professor of religious art and cultural history at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and an adjunct professor of art and culture in the Liberal Studies Program of Georgetown University. A widely published cultural historian specializing in the study of religious art, she also contributed to Secrets of Mary Magdalene and Secrets of the Code.

Michael Barkun, a professor of political science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, has written widely on conspiracy theories, terrorism, and millennial and apocalyptic movements. He is the author of A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America and has served as a consultant to the FBI.

Paul Berger is a British freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. His articles have appeared in a range of newspapers, magazines and websites, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Forbes, Movie Maker, and Online Journalism Review. He is also the contributing editor of five books, including Blog!  and three of the books in the Secrets Series.

James Carlisle, PhD, is a venture capital investor, an adviser to CEOs, a scientist, and a serial entrepreneur. Jim has done defense research funded by ONR, DARPA, NSF, the RAND Corporation, and the Department of Defense. Jim’s current investing and research activity includes biometrics applications for homeland defense, access, home automation, medical diagnosis, product marketing, and inventory control. He is a managing partner at Graystone Capital.

Jennifer Carlisle, the author of B.I.S. Biometric Identification System: A Radical Proposal for Solving the Identity Problem in a Time of Heightened Security, is an expert in biometrics, international security, and economics.

John Dominic Crossan, a monk for nineteen years (and a priest for the last twelve years of that time), was also a university professor for twenty-six years. He lectures to lay and scholarly audiences around the world and is interviewed regularly about religious matters by both print and electronic media. In 2007 Crossan received the Albert Schweitzer Memorial Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in the Critical Study of Religion.

Paul Davies works at Arizona State University as a professor and director of the research center BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Physics. His research has spanned the fields of cosmology, gravitation, and quantum field theory, with particular emphasis on black holes and the origin of the universe. He has written more than twenty-five books, including Other Worlds, The Edge of Infinity, God and the New Physics, and The Mind of God. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1995.

Richard Dawkins, the International Cosmos prizewinner for 1997, is the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. Professor Dawkins’s first book, The Selfish Gene, became an immediate bestseller and The Blind Watchmaker won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His next bestseller was The God Delusion, Climbing Mount Improbable, a 2008 bestseller. He has honorary doctorates in both literature and science and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as a fellow of the Royal Society.

Hannah de Keijzer is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where she pursued her interests in cognitive science and religion. As a writer and editor she has worked for the publishers David R. Godine and Squibnocket Partners. A publisher herself, she started Bell Buoy Press as a showcase for her collages and other art work. Also a dancer, she was a founder of the Green Chair Dance Group, a professional company based in Philadelphia.

David Downie is a Europe-based freelance write, editor, and translator. His topics are European culture, travel, and food, and his articles have appeared in more than fifty magazine and newspapers worldwide.

Glenn W. Erickson has taught philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Texas A&M University, Western Carolina University, and the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as at five federal universities in Brazil and Nigeria, sometimes as a Fulbright Scholar. He is author of a dozen works about philosophy, literary criticism, poetry, short fiction, art history, and the history of mathematics.

Owen Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He is a leading authority on German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicolaus Copernicus. Professor Gingerich has edited, translated, or written twenty books and hundreds of articles and reviews. He is the author of God’s Universe.

Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He has been a research fellow at Fermilab as well as at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California. He is the recipient of a Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and National Science Foundation, one of only fifteen scientists to receive the award.

Deirdre Good is a professor of the New Testament at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. She reads Greek, Coptic, Latin, Hebrew, and some Aramaic. She has a special interest in the Greek language found in the book of Matthew and its use of both Greek idioms from the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures. Good’s book, Beginning New Testament Study, with Bruce Chilton, will be published in 2009.

Dean Hamer has done work on the biology of sexual orientation, thrill seeking, anxiety, anger, and addiction. His books on these topics, Science of Desire and Living with Our Genes, were bestsellers in the science category. Recently, Dr. Hamer has become interested in spirituality. In his new book, The God Gene, he argues that our inclination toward religious faith is no accident; it is hardwired into our genes.

Steven J. Harris has taught at Harvard University, Brandeis University, Wellesley College, and Boston College, winning two awards for outstanding teaching. His main areas of interest are the scientific revolution, the history of astronomy and cosmology, and especially the scientific activity of members of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Michael Herrera is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colorado. He has an undergraduate degree in history and spent several years pursuing a PhD in early Christianity before leaving academia for a career in high-tech public relations.

Stephan Herrera is a New York-based journalist with eighteen years of experience writing about science and technology for the likes of The Economist, Nature, Forbes, Red Herring, and the Acumen Journal of Science. He is the former life sciences editor at MIT’s Technology Review magazine.

George Johnson writes about science for the New York Times and other publications from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award. His books include Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics, and The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. He is co-director of the Santa Fe Science-Writing Workshop.

Scott Kim has been a full-time independent designer of visual puzzles and games for the
Web, computer games, magazines, and toys since 1990.

George Lechner teaches courses on Italian art and culture. He earned his master’s degree in art history at Bryn Mawr, specializing in religious symbolism. As a Whiting fellow in Rome, he spent two years researching Andrea Sacchi, a baroque painter and contemporary of Bernini.

Tod Marder is Professor II (distinguished professor) and Program Director for Historic Preservation, Renaissance and Baroque Architecture at Rutgers University, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He has published two books on Bernini’s work: Bernini’s Scala Regia in the Vatican Palace, Architecture, Sculpture, and Ritual and Bernini and the Art of Architecture.

Richard P. McBrien is Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, having formerly served three terms as chair of the Department of Theology. He is also past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The author of more than twenty books, including Catholicism, Lives of the Popes, and Lives of the Saints, he appears regularly on network television as a commentator on Catholic events.

Mark Midbon is a senior programmer and analyst at the University of Wisconsin. While working for the Y2K project at Arizona State University, he became interested in pure science. It was during this time that he wrote a number of Internet articles about the priest-geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître.

Tom Mueller is a writer based in Italy. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, BusinessWeek, Best American Travel Writing, and other US and European publications. He is completing a novel about the building and rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica, as well as what he calls a “user’s guide” to underground Rome—the vast realm of temples, palaces, brothels, and humble homes that lie buried beneath the modern city.

John W. O’Malley, a Jesuit priest, is the Distinguished Professor of Church History at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is also past president of the American Catholic Historical Association and the Renaissance Society of America. His most recent book is Four Cultures of the West.

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguist specializing in English grammar. Currently a Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Pullum has also served as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Constance E. Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. He contributes frequently to the popular Language Log site www.languagelog.com.

Alexandra Robbins is a New York Times bestselling author and lecturer whose books include Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis: Advice from Twentysomethings Who Have Been There and Survived, and most recently, The Overachievers: The Secret Life of Driven Kids.

Wade Rowland is the author of Galileo’s Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church, and more than a dozen other books. He is an award-winning journalist and television producer of news and documentary programs. Rowland currently teaches the history, sociology and philosophy of communications technologies at the Atkinson School of Arts and Letters, York University.

Susan Sanders is the cofounder and executive director of the Institute of Design and Culture in Rome.

David A. Shugarts is a journalist with more than thirty years’ experience, having served on newspapers and magazines as a reporter, photographer, desk editor, and editor-in-chief. His fields of expertise include aviation and marine writing. He was the recipient of five regional and national awards from the Aviation/Space Writers Association. His latest book is Secrets of the Widow’s Son: The Mysteries Surrounding the Sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

Greg Tobin is an author, editor and journalist who has written extensively about popes and the papacy. His handbook about the history and future of the papal elections, Selecting the Pope: Uncovering the Mysteries of Papal Elections, has been revised, updated and reissued in paperback.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, has research interests in star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of the Milky Way. He has served on two presidential commissions on America’s future in space. Among his books is the bestselling Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries. He is the director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium and served as host for NOVA’s Origins miniseries and NOVA ScienceNow program.

James Wasserman is a lifelong student of esotericism. His writings include Secret Societies: Illuminati, Freemasons, and the French Revolution, Art and Symbols of the Occult, and Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary. His Chronicle Books edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, edited by Dr. Ogden Goelet, features a full-color papyrus with an integrated English translation. His The Templars and the Assassins has thus far been published in five languages.

Cyril H. Wecht Prior to his retirement in 2008, Wecht served as the elected coroner of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has personally performed approximately 15,000 autopsies and has supervised, reviewed, or been consulted on approximately 35,000 additional postmortem examinations. He frequently provides expert testimony in court cases and appears regularly on national TV and radio shows.

Mark S. Weil, PhD, a leading expert on the art of sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini and baroque imagery, is the E. Desmond Lee Professor Emeritus in the department of Art History at the University of Washington and author of The History and Decoration of the Ponte S. Angelo. Weil has gone to Rome each year to conduct research at the Vatican Library and Archives.

Robert Anton Wilson was an acclaimed author of more than thirty books. He was associate editor at Playboy in the late 1960s and is a futurist, playwright, poet, lecturer, and stand-up comic. With Robert Shea, Wilson coauthored the Illuminatus! Trilogy, which the Village Voice called “the biggest sci-fi cult novel . . . since Dune.” The trilogy has been reprinted in many languages and adapted into a ten-hour epic theater piece and won the Prometheus Award as a classic of science fiction.

Josh Wolfe is a managing partner of Lux Capital, and is also editor of the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, and writes a column at Forbes magazine. Red Herring has called him “Mr. Nano” and Steve Forbes has called him “America’s Leading Authority of Nanotechnology.” He has appeared in BusinessWeek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and is a regular television guest.