Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for the White House. Mr. Abrams was educated at Harvard College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. After serving on the staffs of Sen. Henry M. Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, he was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and received the secretary of state’s Distinguished Service Award from Secretary George P. Shultz. In 2012, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy gave him its Scholar-Statesman Award. He is the author of four books, Undue Process (1993), Security and Sacrifice (1995), Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America (1997), and Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2013); and the editor of three more, Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense and “Just War” Today; Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy; and The Influence of Faith: Religion and American Foreign Policy. 

Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post and a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary. From 2023 to 2024, he was a member of the Post’s Editorial Board. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Hamid is the author of several books, including most recently The Problem of Democracy. His previous book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for best book on foreign affairs. His forthcoming book The Case for American Power will be published in 2025 by Simon & Schuster. In 2019, Hamid was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine. He is also the co-founder of Wisdom of Crowds, a podcast, newsletter, and debate platform. Hamid received his B.S. and M.A. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and his Ph.D. in political science from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Jeff Hardin is a professor and chair of the department of zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hardin holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. His numerous research articles focus on the genetic regulation of cell movement and cell adhesion during embryonic development, which has broad implications for understanding human birth defects and cancer.  He is also a nationally and internationally recognized biology educator, and the senior author of a widely used cell biology textbook, The World of the Cell (Pearson). Hardin is the only scientist in the Religious Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madision, where he is the director of the Isthmus Society, which is committed to promoting dialogue between science and religion.

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).