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Andrew is an award-winning editor, author, and blogger. He is the author of the books Virtually Normal, a case for marriage equality; Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival; and The Conservative Soul, a critique of the direction of the American right in the new millennium. He also edited the anthology Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con.
In 1989, Sullivan wrote the first national cover story in favor of marriage equality, and in 1993 wrote a subsequent essay, “The Politics of Homosexuality,” an article The Nation called the most influential of the decade in the gay rights movement. In 2007, he was one of the first political writers to champion the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, and his cover story for The Atlantic, “Why Obama Matters,” was regarded as a milestone in that campaign’s messaging.
From 1991 to 1996, he was the editor of The New Republic, which won three National Magazine Awards in his tenure (two of the awards overlapped with the tenure of Sullivan’s predecessor at the magazine). Sullivan was named editor of the year by Adweek in 1996. From 1996 to 2000 he devoted his time to writing for The New York Times Magazine, penning a weekly column for The Sunday Times in London, and campaigning for marriage equality for gay couples.
He launched his pioneering blog, The Dish, in 2000, and produced more than 115,000 posts over 15 years before ending the site in 2015. In 2016, he joined New York magazine as a contributing editor, where he writes long-form essays and regular political commentary.
He attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a First in Modern History and Modern Languages, and was also President of the Oxford Union. He earned a Masters degree in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1986, and later earned a Ph.D. from Harvard with a doctorate on the work of Michael Oakeshott.
He lives with his husband and two hound dogs in Washington, D.C., and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Andy Crouch makes connections between culture, creativity, and Christian faith. His two most recent books—2017’s The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place and 2016’s Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing—build on the compelling vision of faith, culture, and the image of God laid out in his previous books Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power and Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.
Andy serves on the governing boards of Fuller Theological Seminary and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. For more than ten years he was an editor and producer at Christianity Today, including serving as executive editor from 2012 to 2016. His work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and several editions of Best Christian Writing and Best Spiritual Writing—and, most importantly, received a shout-out in Lecrae’s 2014 single “Non-Fiction.”
From 1998 to 2003, Andy was the editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly, a magazine for an emerging generation of culturally creative Christians. For ten years he was a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard University. He studied classics at Cornell University and received an M.Div. summa cum laude from Boston University School of Theology. A classically trained musician who draws on pop, folk, rock, jazz, and gospel, he has led musical worship for congregations of 5 to 20,000. He lives with his family in Pennsylvania.
Dr. Andrew Steer is the President and CEO of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization that works in more than 50 countries, with offices in the Brazil, China, Europe, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. WRI’s more than 500 experts work with leaders to address six urgent global challenges at the intersection of economic development and the natural environment: food, forests, water, climate, energy and cities.
Dr. Steer joined WRI from the World Bank, where he served as Special Envoy for Climate Change from 2010 – 2012. From 2007 to 2010, he served as Director General at the UK Department of International Development (DFID) in London.
Dr. Steer is a Global Agenda Trustee for the World Economic Forum, and is a member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), the Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the Energy Transitions Commission, the Champions 12.3 Coalition to reduce food loss and waste, the Sustainable Advisory Groups of both IKEA and the Bank of America, and he serves on the Executive Board of the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy For All Initiative.
In earlier years, Andrew held several senior posts at the World Bank, including Director of the Environment Department. He also has directed World Bank operations in Vietnam and Indonesia and served as Chief of the Country Risk Division and Director and Chief Author of the 1992 World Development Report on Environment and Development.
Andrew was educated at St Andrews University, Scotland, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cambridge University. He has a PhD in economics.
Dr. Molly Worthen is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history, particularly the ideas and culture of conservative Christianity. Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, examines American Evangelical intellectual life since 1945.
Dr. Worthen teaches courses in global Christianity, North American religious and intellectual culture, and the history of politics and ideology. In 2017 she received the Manekin Family Award for Teaching Excellence in Honors Carolina. She is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has written about religion and politics for the New Yorker, Slate, the American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications.
Worthen earned her Ph.D. in American Religious History from Yale University.
Dr. Jeff Schloss holds the T. B. Walker Chair of Natural and Behavioral Sciences at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and directs Westmont’s Center for Faith, Ethics, and the Life Sciences. He is also a senior scholar with the BioLogos Foundation. Schloss, whose Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology is from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, often speaks to audiences on the intersection of evolutionary science and theology. Among his many academic publications are The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion (Oxford University Press), which he edited with philosopher Michael Murray.
Schloss has also participated in a number of invitational collaborations on topics in evolutionary biology, emphasizing various aspects of what it means to be human, hosted by several universities, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Emory, Harvard, Heidelberg, Oxford, and Stanford. He has held fellowships at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, St. Anne’s College Oxford, and Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry.
Catherine Brekus is Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School and in the Department of American Studies. She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in the history and literature of England and America, and she holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. Before coming to Harvard she taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she was Professor of the History of Christianity and Religions in America.
Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and American culture, with particular emphasis on the history of women, gender, Christianity, and the evangelical movement. Her current interests include the religious history of American exceptionalism and the relationship of Christianity, capitalism, and consumerism in the United States.
Brekus is currently completing a new book titled Chosen Nation: Christianity, Politics, and American Destiny. She is the author of Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845, which explores the rise of female preaching during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America, which argues that the evangelical movement emerged in dialogue with the Enlightenment. Strangers and Pilgrims won the Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History, and Sarah Osborn’s World won the Aldersgate Prize from Indiana Wesleyan University and the Albert C. Outler Prize from the American Society of Church History. Brekus is also the editor of The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, a collection of essays that asks how women’s history changes our understanding of American religion.
In 2014–15 she was named the Harvard Divinity School Outstanding Teacher of the Year.
Kate Bowler is assistant professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke University Divinity School. Her first book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford, 2013), traced the rise of Christian belief in divine promises of health, wealth, and happiness. She researched and traveled Canada and the United States interviewing megachurch leaders and everyday believers about how they make spiritual meaning of the good or bad in their lives.
She has written widely in scholarly journals such as Religion and American Culture and popular venues such as CNN, The Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail on topics ranging from the prosperity gospel’s music, gender politics, economics, political theologies, to its racial and denominational differences.
She recently received a sabbatical grant for researchers from The Louisville Institute to write a book tentatively entitled Co-Pastor: Women and Power in American Megaministry. It follows the rise of celebrity women who go by many names: pastors, co-pastors, executive directors, or, more commonly, pastor’s wives. They pitch their expertise in any number of ways, from women’s ministry directors to singers, bloggers, parenting experts, sex therapists, prophetesses, life coaches, and television hosts.
Bowler received her Ph.D. from Duke University in American religious history.
