Philip Jenkins is the Distinguished Professor of History and Co-Director, Program on Historical Studies of Religion at Baylor University. Dr. Jenkins’ major current interests include the study of global Christianity; of new and emerging religious movements; and of twentieth century US history, chiefly post-1970. He has published twenty-two books, which have been translated into ten languages. His most recent book is Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval.

Dr. David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, a contributing editor to The Weekly  Standard, and a member of the National Council of the Arts. The author of eight books on topics ranging from poetry and artificial intelligence to aesthetics, technology, and computer science, Mr. Gelernter is also a widely published essayist on art, culture, politics, and Jewish thought and the author of a number of books, among them: Mirror Worlds(1992),  The Muse in the Machine  (1994), 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (1995),  Drawing Life : Surviving the Unabomber (1997), and, most recently,  Judaism: A Way of Being (2009).

Rabbi David Saperstein represents the national Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the Administration as the Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. During his more than three-decade tenure, Rabbi Saperstein has headed several national religious coalitions and in 2009 was appointed by President Obama as a member of the first White House Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Also an attorney, Rabbi Saperstein teaches seminars in both First Amendment Church-State Law and in Jewish Law at Georgetown University Law School.

James Davison Hunter is LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia. Mr. Hunter has written eight books, including The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (2000) and Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life, (with Alan Wolfe, 2006). In 1991 he was the recipient of the Gustavus Myers Award for the Study of Human Rights for Articles of Faith; Articles of Peace. The Los Angeles Times named Mr. Hunter as a finalist for their 1992 Book Prize for Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. In 1988 he received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. In 2004, he was appointed by the White House to a six-year term to the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2005, he won the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters.

Since 1995, Professor Hunter has served as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, a university-based, interdisciplinary research center concerned with understanding contemporary cultural change and its implications for individuals, institutions, and society.  The Institute publishes an award-winning journal, The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture.

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is also the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008). He is also the film critic for National Review.

His newest book is titled Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. He charts institutional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day.

Amy Sullivan is a contributing writer at TIME magazine, and author of the book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap. A Michigan native, she holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School.