Faith Angle Miami 2025 Forum

Sarah Pulliam Bailey writes on religion for The New York Times and is a former religion reporter for The Washington Post. She writes about faith’s intersection with politics, culture, and education. Previously, she was a national correspondent for Religion News Service and an online editor for Christianity Today, where she co-founded Her.meneutics, an influential blog for women. She has interviewed hundreds of public figures, including Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Mike Huckabee, Billy Graham, and Desmond Tutu. Bailey is a graduate of Wheaton College and is based in New York City.

Alan Cooperman is the Director of Religion Research at the Pew Research Center, where his work focuses on religious change both in America and globally. Alan has co-authored or edited studies of America’s religious landscape, the experiences and attitudes of Jewish Americans, Muslims in the U.S., faith among Black Americans, the rise of religious “nones,” and other topics.  Previously, Alan worked as a national reporter and editor for The Washington Post, a foreign editor at U.S. News & World Report, and a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press.

Mark Chaves is Anne Firor Scott Distinguished Professor of Sociology, and Professor of Religious Studies and Divinity, at Duke University. He directs the National Congregations Study, a wide-ranging survey of a nationally representative sample of religious congregations, and the National Survey of Religious Leaders, a similarly wide-ranging and nationally representative survey of clergy. Professor Chaves is the author of American Religion: Contemporary Trends, Congregations in America, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations, and many articles, mainly on the social organization of religion in the United States.

Yonat Shimron is a national reporter and senior editor at Religion News Service. She covers religion in the South and American Judaism.  An award-winning journalist, she was the religion reporter for The News & Observer in Raleigh, NC from 1996 to 2011. She is a past president of the Religion Newswriters Association. Yonat is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. Smith’s research focuses primarily on religion in modernity, adolescents, American evangelicalism, and culture. Smith received his MA and PhD from Harvard University in 1990. Smith was a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 12 years before his move to Notre Dame. He is the author of several books including: What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago); The Secular Revolution (California); Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford); and Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (California). Smith has also co-authored several books including: Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford); Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford); and American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago).

Dr. Jason E. Shelton is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests concern the sociology of religion, as well as the intersections of race, class, and attitudes about various political and social issues in contemporary America. Dr. Shelton’s articles have appeared in Social Science Quarterly, Du Bois Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Perspectives, Journal of African American Studies, American Behavioral Scientist, and other respected publications. New York University Press published his first book, Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions, which won a major award sponsored by the Southern Conference on African American Studies and an “honorable mention” from the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Religion. NYU Press recently published his second book, The Contemporary Black Church: The New Dynamics of African American Religion.