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Dr. Nathan Hatch grew up in Columbia, S.C., where his father was a Presbyterian minister. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, he received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. He joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 1975. He was named provost, the university’s second highest-ranking position, in 1996; a Presbyterian, he was the first Protestant to ever serve in that position at Notre Dame.
He is regularly cited as one of the most influential scholars in the study of the history of religion in America. He received national acclaim for his 1989 book, The Democratization of American Christianity, in which he examines how the rise of religious groups in the early 19th century helped shape American culture and foster democracy. The book was chosen in a survey of 2,000 historians and sociologists as one of the two most important books in the study of American religion. He is also the author or editor of seven other books on American history.
Dr. Grant Wacker is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Christian History at Duke Divinity School. He specializes in the history of Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, World Missions and American Protestant thought. Winner of two distinguished teaching awards, Dr. Wacker has authored more than thirty journal articles and book chapters, more than one hundred book reviews, op-eds and essays in magazines and newspapers. He is also the author of seven books, including Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (2001) and America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (2014). From 1997 to 2004, Dr. Wacker served as a senior editor of the quarterly journal, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. He is past president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies and of the American Society of Church History, and a trustee of Fuller Theological Seminary.