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Faith Angle Miami brings together 16-18 leading US journalists for engaging discussions led by 4-6 premier scholars on critical issues to help bridge the gap between religion and journalism.
Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. Since 2013, he has also been a frequent opinion writer for The New York Times, covering politics and religion in the Muslim world. He is the author of Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (2021), Why, As A Muslim, I Defend Liberty (2021), The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims (2017), and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (2011).
“The Thinking Muslim,” a popular podcast, defined Akyol as “probably the most notable Muslim modernist and reformer.”
Researcher and pollster Dalia Mogahed is an author, advisor and consultant who studies Muslim communities. As director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, Dalia Mogahed keeps her finger on the pulse of the Muslim world. She served on Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in 2009, advising the president on how faith-based organizations can help government solve persistent social problems. Mogahed is a former director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, where her surveys of Muslim opinion skewered myths and stereotypes while illuminating the varied attitudes of Muslims toward politics, religion, and gender issues. Her 2008 book with John Esposito, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, outlines these surprising findings.
Philip S. Gorski (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley 1996) is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. Among his recent publications are The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003); Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford, 2004); “The Poverty of Deductivism: A Constructive Realist Model of Sociological Explanation,” Sociological Methodology, 2004; American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2017); and The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022), which he co-authored with Samuel Perry.
Philip Gorski is Co-Director (with Julia Adams) of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research (CCR), and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center.
Author of the New York Times bestseller The Color of Compromise, president and cofounder of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, and cohost of the podcast Pass the Mic, Jemar Tisby studies race, religion, and social movements in the 20th century. His dissertation, “Soul Liberation: Black Christian Intellectual Engagement with Black Power,” offers a comparative intellectual history of Christianity and the Black Power movement.
Tisby’s scholarship and social justice work have positioned him as a public-facing historian providing expert commentary on numerous TV news outlets such as CNN, NPR, and MSNBC in addition to academic conference presentations and keynote addresses at Notre Dame, Baylor, and Washington University in St. Louis. His second book, How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice, was released in January 2021.
Philip Yancey is the author of twenty-five books, including The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. Yancey’s books have garnered thirteen Gold Medallion Book Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than seventeen million books in print and has been published in over fifty languages worldwide. Yancey worked as a journalist in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Christianity Today. In 1992, he and his wife, Janet, moved to the foothills of Colorado, where they live now.
Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump. His other books include City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, which he co-wrote with Michael J. Gerson, and Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism. He was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and currently serves as a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and his work also appears in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Affairs.
