Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the religion correspondent for NPR, reporting on the intersection of faith and politics, law, science and culture since 2003. Her New York Times best-selling book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality was published by Riverhead/Penguin Group in May 2009. She also received the American Women in Radio and Television award in 2009 and 2010, the Religion Newswriters award and the National Headliner award.

Dr. Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. is the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In that role he oversees the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research.

Dr. Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993-2008.

Before coming to NIH, Dr. Collins was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Michigan. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007, and received the National Medal of Science in 2009.

E.J. Dionne is a twice-weekly columnist for The Washington Post, writing on national policy and politics. Before joining the Post in 1990 as a political reporter, he spent fourteen years at The New York Times, covering local, state, and national politics, also serving as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Rome, and Beirut. He is currently a University Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996), and most recently Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008).

Wilfred M. McClay is SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina, 1994) won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history published in the years 1993 and 1994. Among his other books are The Student’s Guide to U.S. History (ISI Books, 2001), and Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America(Woodrow Wilson Center/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He is currently at work on a biographical study of the American sociologist David Riesman under contract to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and is editing two collection of essays, one called Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, which features sixteen essays by American historians on changing American understandings of self and person, and a collection of his own essays entitled Pieces of a Dream: Historical and Critical Essays.

He held the Royden B. Davis Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University for the academic year 1998-99. Among his other awards, McClay was selected for inclusion on the 1997-98 Templeton Honor Rolls, awarded by the John Templeton Foundation for distinguished teaching and scholarship in American higher education. In addition, he has been the recipient of fellowship awards from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, the Howard Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Danforth Foundation. He is coeditor of Rowman and Littlefield’s book series entitled American Intellectual Culture, serves on the editorial boards of First Things, The Wilson Quarterly, The Public Interest,Society, Touchstone, Historically Speaking, and University Bookman, and is a member of the Board of Governors of The Historical Society. He was educated at St. John’s College (Annapolis) and the Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1987.