Faith Angle West 2026 Forum

David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy and the director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with particular attention to religion and young people. Campbell’s most recent book is See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People (with Christina Wolbrecht). Among his other books are Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (with Geoff Layman and John Green) and American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (with Robert Putnam). In addition, he has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and—every political scientist’s dream—Cosmopolitan.

Lauren Jackson is the host of Believing at The New York Times. She writes and reports on contemporary religion and spirituality each week. She is also an editor for The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter. She previously worked on The Daily podcast.

Diane Winston, the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School of the University of Southern California, is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, author, and columnist. She has authored and edited numerous books on the connection between religion, media, American history, and politics, including Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision, Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army, Religion and Reality TV: Faith in Late Capitalism, and The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the News Media. Between 1983 and 1995, Winston covered religion for the Raleigh News and Observer, Dallas Times Herald, and Baltimore Sun. Diane holds a Master of Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School, an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, and a PhD in Religion from Princeton University.

Richard Parker is an Oxford-trained economist who has taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government since 1993. His most recent book is an award-winning intellectual biography of John Kenneth Galbraith. He co-founded the magazine Mother Jones and sits on the board of The Nation and the Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics.  He created for Sen. Edward Kennedy the country’s first major liberal PAC, The Fund for a Democratic Majority; served as president of Americans for Democratic Action; built Greenpeace USA from 2,000 to 600,000 members; and with Norman Lear created People for the American Way. His interest in religion stems from his upbringing as the son of an Episcopal clergyman, his 19th century abolitionist ancestor the Rev. Theodore Parker, and his personal and intellectual navigation of not just contemporary American politics and religion but marriage to a Jewish-Catholic wife.  He has taught for many years an award-winning Harvard course, “Religion and Politics in America”, and served as advisor to the Episcopal House of Bishops on the Millennium Development Goals.

Lydia Dugdale, MD, MAR (ethics), is the Dorothy L. and Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She also serves as Co-Director of Clinical Ethics at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. A practicing internist, she moved to Columbia in 2019 from Yale University, where she previously served as Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics. Her scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, the role of aesthetics in teaching ethics, moral injury, and the doctor-patient relationship. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century (MIT Press, 2015) and is author of The Lost Art of Dying (HarperOne, 2020), a popular press book on the preparation for death. Lydia attended medical school at the University of Chicago, completed residency training at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and holds a MAR in ethics from Yale Divinity School.