Rosalind Edwards is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton. She has researched and published widely in the areas of family life and policies. In her work she uses feminist relational perspectives and is especially interested in family members’ own understandings and how these are shaped in particular contexts by gender, social class, race/ethnicity and generation.

She is an elected member of the Academy of Social Sciences and sits on the Methods and Infrastructure Committee of the ESRC, the Economic and Social Research Council. Her books include “Key concepts in family studies” (2011, Sage, with Jenny Ribben McCarthy).

Ronald Hutton is Professor of History at Bristol University. He has published extensively on the history of paganism, as well as his specialist period, the British Isles in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. His recent books include “A Brief History of Britain, 1485-1660” and “Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain”.

Ronald is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Polly Toynbee is a columnist for The Guardian newspaper. In the 1990s she was the BBC’s Social Affairs editor. She is a former President of the British Humanist Association.

Her writing conveys her concern for social justice. In 2003 she wrote “Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain” which she researched by taking jobs paying the minimum wage or less. “Dogma and Disarray – Cameron at Half-Time”, co-authored with David Walker and published in 2012, warns of the potential disintegration of the welfare state.

Dr Andrew Goddard is Associate Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics. He writes on and teaches Christian ethics. At the Kirby Laing Institute he focuses on marriage and sexual ethics. He serves on the leadership team of Fulcrum, a network of evangelicals “seeking to renew the centre of the evangelical tradition and the centre of Anglicanism”, and is an honorary canon of Winchester Cathedral.

In a recent article he asks with regard to traditional understandings of marriage: “… do we really wish our law to redefine marriage so that legally, and increasingly socially, we have no terminology to speak precisely of that particular way of life which is ‘the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others’?”