Faith Angle West 2025 Forum

Molly Worthen’s research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Spellbound, is a history of charisma as both a religious and political concept over the past 400 years in America. Worthen teaches courses in North American religious and intellectual history, global Christianity and the history of politics. In 2017 she received the Manekin Family Award for Teaching Excellence in Honors Carolina. She writes regularly about religion, politics and higher education for the New York Times and has also contributed to the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Slate, and other publications. She has created courses for Audible and the Teaching Company on the history of charismatic leadership as well as the history of global Christianity since the Reformation.

Jonah Goldberg is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty. In 2019, he left National Review magazine after a 21-year stint to cofound The Dispatch, where he is Editor-in-Chief. He has been a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 2005 and a nationally syndicated columnist since 2000. He hosts the popular podcast The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg.

His syndicated column appears regularly in many of America’s leading newspapers. His first book, Liberal Fascism, was a #1 New York Times and Amazon bestseller and was selected as the #1 history book of 2008 by Amazon readers. His second book, The Tyranny of Clichés, was also an instant bestseller and hailed as perhaps “the best and most fun-to-read primer on the tenets of conservative politics since P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores.”

His most recent book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy, was also a New York Times bestseller in 2018.

Goldberg has previously served as a columnist for the Times of London, Brill’s Content, and The American Enterprise. His writings have appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Commentary, The New Yorker, Food and Wine, and numerous other publications. For over a decade he was a Fox News Contributor and Special Report “All Star.”  He is currently a CNN commentator. He has appeared on numerous news programs including, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Fox News Sunday, and State of the Union. The Atlantic magazine has named him one of the top fifty political commentators in America.

Emma Goldberg is a features writer for the New York Times. She writes about cultural and economic change. She has recently written about an atheist on death row, a grieving son who became an Israeli peace activist, and how the pandemic changed our relationship with time. Her book, Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, was published by HarperCollins in June 2021. The Washington Post called it “essential reading.” Her work has received the Newswomen’s Club of New York Best Feature Award, the Religion News Association’s Award for Excellence in Feature Writing, the New York Press Club’s Nellie Bly Award, and the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award. She has also been a finalist for the Livingston Award and a Deadline Award. She received her BA at Yale and MPhil at Cambridge University.

Zvika Krieger was the first-ever Director of Responsible Innovation at Meta/Facebook, where he worked with product teams across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Reality Labs, and more to help surface and address potential product harms.

He now works with industry-leading companies to develop Responsible Innovation strategies to effectively anticipate and mitigate potential harms in their products. His current and recent clients include TikTok, Google, Airbnb, and Pixar.

He previously served on the Executive Committee of the World Economic Forum, where he launched Centers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in 13 countries, working with governments, companies, and stakeholders from around the world to accelerate the adoption of new technologies in the global public interest. He has taught courses on design, technology, and social impact at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Zvika is the Spiritual Leader of Chochmat HaLev, a progressive spiritual community in Berkeley, California for embodied prayer, heart-centered connections, and mystical experiences.

Yii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School, where she teaches the critical study of ancient texts and their interpretation, especially in relation to race and gender. She is the author of Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (Yale 2024), which traces Christian apocalyptic thinking from Columbus to the second Trump administration to show how the images, vocabulary, and ideas of Revelation have fueled anti-immigrant movements throughout American history. Lin is also the author of The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford 2016), which examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.

Dr. Lin serves on the executive Council for the Society of Biblical Literature as well as the society’s committees on the Bible in America, and Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Early Christianity, as well as in The Conversation and Religion Dispatches, and she has been interviewed for AXIOS and Rolling Stone.

Her current project continues her work on migration and religion in a books focused on the proliferation of militarized borders and walls globally, and the use of sacred texts to understand them.

Lloyd Barba is a historian of religion in the Americas with training in Latinx history; American race, ethnicity, and immigration; and the American West/Mexico borderlands. His scholarship on Mexican farmworkers in California (1906-1966) is based on oral histories and extensive archival research he has conducted. It also draws from the fields of immigration history, material culture, and scholarship on Pentecostalism and Catholicism. His more recent and ongoing research on the Sanctuary Movement (1980s to present day) brings together questions from religious history and immigration studies to understand the context of social activism and politics.