Faith Angle Miami 2026 Forum

John Inazu is Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and an affiliate faculty member of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. Professor Inazu’s scholarship focuses on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, and related questions of legal and political theory. His first book, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012), seeks to recover the role of assembly in American political and constitutional thought. He is the special editor of a volume on law and theology published in Law and Contemporary Problems. Professor Inazu’s work is also published in the Cornell Law Review, Southern California Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Illinois Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, and a number of other law reviews and specialty journals.

Professor Inazu is the chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ section on law and religion. In 2014, he was named the law school’s David M. Becker Professor of the Year. In 2014-2015, he will be a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the law faculty, Professor Inazu was a visiting assistant professor at Duke University School of Law and a Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served for four years as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon. He received his JD from Duke University and his PhD in Political Science from UNC Chapel Hill.

Asma T. Uddin is an Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law, where she teaches Constitutional Law II and International Human Rights. Her scholarship focuses on religious liberty, constitutional theory, and judicial rhetoric, with particular attention to how courts can use opinion writing to foster depolarization and inclusive constitutional cultures.

Professor Uddin’s publications include When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, 2019), The Politics of Vulnerability: Today’s Threat to Religion and Religious Freedom (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, 2021), and numerous law review articles that apply social science theories to constitutional interpretation and judicial communication. Her recent work has appeared in the William & Mary Law Review, BYU Law Review, Wayne Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review Reflections, and Michigan Journal of Race & Law, among others.

Before joining MSU Law, Professor Uddin was a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for the Constitution and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America. She has also taught the religious liberty clinic at Harvard Law School. Earlier in her career, she served as Legal Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where she litigated domestic and international cases, including before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Indonesian Constitutional Court.

In addition to her academic work, Professor Uddin is a Fellow with the Aspen Institutes Religion & Society Program and the Freedom Forum Institute. Her research on religious liberty and depolarization has been supported by the Lilly Endowment, Fetzer Institute, Pew Charitable Trusts, and Templeton Religion Trust. She serves on the Board of Advisors for the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative, was a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served two terms as an expert advisor on international religious freedom to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Professor Uddin also writes widely for public audiences. Her opinion pieces and essays on religion, rights, and political polarization have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Refinery29, Teen Vogue, The Dispatch, and other outlets.

Professor Uddin is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where she was on The University of Chicago Law Review.

Sunita has worked for over 30 years in women’s rights and human rights organizations. Sunita co-founded Hindus for Human Rights in June 2019.

In 2001, Sunita co-founded the international women’s human rights organization, Women for Afghan Women (WAW), and served as Board Chair of WAW until January 2022. She has been an advisory board member to Unfreeze Afghanistan since its inception in September 2021, and cofounded Abaad: Afghan Women Forward in August 2022. Sunita has edited “Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future” (Palgrave McMillan, 2003), a book of essays. For her work with WAW, Sunita was awarded the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Global Women’s Rights Award in 2011. Sunita co-founded Sadhana in 2011 in order to mobilize Hindu Americans to connect their faith to social justice and human rights, and serves on Sadhana’s Advisory Board. She was honored by President Obama at the White House in 2015 as a “Champion of Change” for her work with Sadhana. In 2021, Sunita was recognized by Center for American Progress as one of 21 “faith leaders to watch.” Previously, Sunita worked with The Sister Fund and Funders Concerned About AIDS, as well as serving as a board member of Amnesty International-USA. She is an advisory board member of Population Media Center, which uses entertainment-education and mass media to promote social and cultural change. Sunita is a board member of Dalit Solidarity Forum. Sunita served on faith advisory committees during the tenures of both NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and Mayor Eric Adams. Sunita lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Tim Alberta is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. Hailing from Brighton, Michigan, he attended Schoolcraft College and later Michigan State University, where his plans to become a baseball writer were altered by a serendipitous stint covering the legislature in Lansing.

He went on to spend more than a decade in Washington, reporting for publications such as the Wall Street Journal, National Journal and National Review. Tim would ultimately serve as chief political correspondent for POLITICO before moving back to Michigan and joining The Atlantic in 2021.

In 2019 he released his first book, “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump,” and co-moderated the year’s final Democratic presidential debate. In 2023 he followed up with, “The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” and in 2024 he won a National Magazine Award for his profile of Chris Licht, the chairman of CNN Worldwide.

Tim’s work has been featured in dozens of other publications, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair. He appears regularly as a commentator on American television programs and speaks on politics, culture, and religion at forums around the world. He lives in southeast Michigan with his wife and three sons.

Michael Balboni, Ph.D., Th.M., M.Div, is a congregational pastor and theologian. He has served both as a congregational minister in Boston and an intentional Christian community of healthcare students and professionals. He holds a Ph.D. in practical theology from Boston University and completed post-doctoral training at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Divinity School. As an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and a palliative care researcher he has published approximately fifty articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. As a theologian, his focus has included the development of a theology of medicine and a concentration in the theological underpinnings related spiritual care in a pluralistic, secular medical context. With Tracy Balboni, he has co-authored “Hostility to Hospitality: Spirituality and Professional Socialization in Medicine” (Oxford University Press). The book explores a theology of medicine, including its decline through secularization, and hope for renewal through faith communities. He is also the co-editor of “Spirituality and Religion Within the Culture of Medicine” (Oxford University Press). His current book project, also with Tracy Balboni, entitled “Dancing with Lois”, focuses on Jesus’ call for spiritual leadership and sacrifice in the accompaniment and care for the seriously ill a dying.

Ph.D., Boston University (2011) Th.M., Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (2002) M.Div. Westminster Theological Seminary (1999) BA. Pillsbury Bible College (1995)

Dr. Rachael Bedard is an internist, geriatrician and palliative care physician. She doctors, teaches, writes and advocates at the intersections between health, ideas, politics and human rights. Her clinical work is primarily with homeless and justice-involved elders, especially people who are recurrently incarcerated in the final decades of their lives. From 2016-2022 she was a physician on Rikers Island. She currently sees patients at a safety net clinic in Brooklyn. From 2023-2024, she sat on the New York City Board of Correction.

She also does some work in politics. From 2022-2024 she founded and ran an organization that supported the pro-choice side of state ballot initiatives. Rachael grew up in Toronto and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two kids. She studied History at Brown University and completed medical training at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts.