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. Elaine Howard Ecklund is an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, where she is also a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and director of the Program on Religion and Public Life at the Institute for Urban Research. Her work focuses on the ways science and religion intersect with other life spheres, such as public life, immigration and gender. She is the author, most recently, of Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (2010).

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).

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.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. A resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is also a Fox News contributor and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, a reference work concerning U.S. governors and federal politicians published biennially by National Journal since 1971. He was a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report for 18 years and a member of the Editorial Board of The Washington Post for 7 years. He has traveled to all 50 states, all 435 congressional districts, and to 37 foreign countries. Barone is a graduate of Harvard University, Yale Law School, and the author of four books, including Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (1990).

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. Weigel is the author of the best-selling Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, published in 1999 to international acclaim. He is also the author of Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism (2007), Letters to a Young Catholic (2005), The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (2005), and The Courage To Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church (2002). He has written fifteen other books, including most recently The End and the Beginning: John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010). Weigel is a contributor to Newsweek and also Vatican analyst for NBC News.

John Allen, Jr. is the prize-winning associate editor of The Boston Globe and the senior Vatican analyst for CNN. He is the author of six best-selling books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs, and writes frequently on the Church for major national and international publications.

The Tablet has called Allen “the most authoritative writer on Vatican affairs in the English language,” and papal biographer George Weigel has called him “the best Anglophone Vatican reporter ever.” Veteran religion writer Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek described Allen as “the journalist other reporters—and not a few cardinals—look to for the inside story on how all the pope’s men direct the world’s largest church.”

Two of Allen’s most recent books are The Catholic Church: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) and The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution (2013).