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.

Dr. Alan Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. Wolfe attended Temple University as an undergraduate and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He has honorary degrees from Loyola College in Maryland and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He is a Senior Fellow with the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York. In the fall of 2004, Professor Wolfe was the George H. W. Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

A contributing editor of The Wilson Quarterly, Commonwealth Magazine, and In Character, Professor Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor to President Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union address and has lectured widely at American and European universities.

Wolfe has been the recipient of grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lilly Endowment. He has twice conducted programs under the auspices of the U.S. State Department that bring Muslim scholars to the United States to learn about separation of church and state. He is listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America and Contemporary Authors.

Michael Cook is a British historian and a scholar of Islamic history. He is the author of many books, including Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 1977, with Patricia Crone, Muhammad (Past Masters), 1983, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, 2001, which won him the Albert Hourani Book Award, and A Brief History of the Human Race, 2005. He is the recipient of the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton in 2006, the Farabi Award in the Humanities and Islamic Studies in 2008, and the Holberg Prize in 2014.

Dr. William Galston holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program. A former policy advisor to President Clinton and presidential candidates, Galston is an expert on domestic policy, political campaigns, and elections. His current research focuses on designing a new social contract and the implications of political polarization.

Dr. Galston is the author of eight books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics.  His books include The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (2004), and Public Matters (2005).  A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. Additionally, Dr. Galston is a frequent commentator on NPR and writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal.