Helen M. Alvaré is a Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where she teaches Family Law, Law and Religion, and Property Law. She publishes on matters concerning marriage, parenting, non-marital households, abortion, and the First Amendment religion clauses.  She is faculty advisor to the law school’s Civil Rights Law Journal and the Latina/o Law Students Association,  a member of Pope Francis’s Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life (Vatican City), a board member of Catholic Relief Services, an advisor to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (Washington, D.C.), and a consultant for ABC News. She cooperates with the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations as a speaker and a delegate to various United Nations conferences concerning women and the family. 

Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches Constitutional Law. At Notre Dame he directs (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute. He co-edited The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum for legal philosophy, form 1996 – 2019. Bradley has been a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and, in 2009, was Visiting Professor of Politics at Princeton University.

Bradley is on the International Advisory Board of Campion College, Parametta, AU. He served for many years as President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.

Bradley received his B.A and J.D. degrees from Cornell University, graduating Summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. After serving in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office he joined the law faculty at the University of Illinois. He moved to Notre Dame in 1992. Bradley has published more than one hundred and fifty scholarly articles and reviews. His most recent books, both published in 2019, are Catholic Social Teaching: A Collection of Scholarly Essays, which he edited with Christian Brugger (Cambridge University Press), and Unquiet Americans: U.S. Catholics, Moral Truth, and the Preservation of our Civil Liberties (Saint Augustine’s Press).

Bradley is currently working on a book about regulating obscenity in the Internet Age.

Thomas D. D’Andrea is a Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK, and Director of the Institute for the Study of Philosophy, Politics, and Religion (ISPPR). In 2001 he was a Visiting Fellow at the James Madison Program of Princeton University, and he has lectured with the Politics Department at Princeton and in the Department of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. His research interests include the moral and political thought of the Aristotelian tradition. He has published articles and reviews in ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.

Thomas Farr is President of the Religious Freedom Institute. A leading authority on international religious freedom, Dr. Farr served for 28 years in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1999 he became the founding director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF). He subsequently directed the Witherspoon Institute’s IRF Task Force, was a member of the Chicago World Affairs Council’s Task Force on Religion and Foreign Policy, taught at the National Defense University, and served on the Secretary of State’s IRF working group. From 2007 – 2018, Dr. Farr was Associate Professor of the Practice of Religion and International Affairs at Georgetown University. He also directed Georgetown’s Religious Freedom Project, the precursor to the Religious Freedom Institute. A PhD in History from the University of North Carolina, Farr is senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, a consultant to the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, and a member of the International Advisory Council for Alliance Defending Freedom. His many published works include World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security (Oxford University Press).

Robert P. George is the Herbert W. Vaughan Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. He is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is frequently a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.

Professor George has served as Chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. He has also been a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He has also served on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), of which he continues to be a corresponding member.

Professor George is the author or co-author of seven books and the editor of several more. His articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Review of Politics, the Review of Metaphysics, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence. He is a frequent contributor to Public Discourse and to First Things magazine, where he is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, Touchstone, the Boston Review, City Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Among his awards and prizes are the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Sidney Hook Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Paul Bator Award of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, a Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He has given the John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard, the Guido Calabresi Lecture in Law and Religion at Yale, the Sir Malcolm Knox Lecture in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, the Elizabeth Anscombe Lecture in Bioethics at Oxford University, and the Frank Irvine Lecture in Law at Cornell University.

Professor George serves on the boards of directors of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for Individual Rights. He serves on editorial boards of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Journal of American Political Thought, the Journal of International Biotechnology Law, and Touchstone and First Things magazines. Professor George is general editor of New Forum Books, a Princeton University Press series of interdisciplinary works in law, culture, and politics.

In addition to his academic work, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson and McElwee.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, Professor George holds the degrees of M.T.S. and J.D. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt from Oxford University. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore, and received a Knox Fellowship from Harvard for graduate study in law and philosophy at Oxford. He holds twenty-one honorary degrees, including doctorates of law, letters, ethics, science, divinity, civil law, humane letters, and juridical science.

Sherif Girgis earned his JD at Yale Law School and is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Princeton University.

Chen Guangcheng is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Human Rights at the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution. He is also a member of the the faculty of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America and Senior Distinguished Advisor to the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice.

Mr. Chen is a Chinese civil rights lawyer and activist who has been a persistent voice for freedom, human dignity, and the rule of law in his native country.  Working in rural communities in China, where he was known as the “barefoot lawyer,” Chen advocated the rights of disabled people, and organized class-action litigation against the government’s violent enforcement of its one-child policy.  Blind since his childhood, Chen is self-taught in the law.  His human rights activism resulted in his imprisonment by the Chinese government for four years and three months, beginning in 2006; after his release he remained under house arrest, until his escape from confinement in 2012, whereupon he came to the United States where he was a fellow at NYU School of Law in 2012-13.

Kevin Jackson, J.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Law and Ethics at the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, in New York City. Professor Jackson has served on the faculties of Université Libre de Bruxelles, Georgetown University, Princeton University, École des Ponts (Paris), and Peking University (China). Dr. Jackson is a Senior Fellow at The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, and a Fellow of the European SPES Institute, Leuven, Belgium. He has authored several books, including Virtuosity in Business (University of Pennsylvania Press), Building Reputational Capital (Oxford University Press), , Charting Global Responsibilities: Legal Philosophy and Human Rights (University Press of America), and publishes scholarly articles in top-tier academic journals. Much loved by students for his interactive and high-energy teaching style, he performs and composes classical and jazz music.

Harold James, the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University, is Professor of History and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, and Director of the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society. He studies economic and financial history, business history, and modern European history.

After graduating from Cambridge University, he was a Fellow of Peterhouse before going to Princeton in 1986. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate.

His books include a study of the interwar depression in Germany, The German Slump (1986); an analysis of the changing character of national identity in Germany, A German Identity 1770-1990 (1989); International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1996), and the widely translated The End of Globalization (2001). He was also coauthor of a history of Deutsche Bank (1995), which won the Financial Times Global Business Book Award in 1996. His most recent books include The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle, 2009; Making the European Monetary Union, 2012; The Euro and the Battle of Economic Ideas (with Markus K. Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau), 2016.

William H. Jeynes is a Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach. He has more than 175 academic publications, including 110+ articles, 16 books, and 49 book chapters. His articles have appeared in journals published by Columbia University, Harvard University (two Harvard journals), the University of Chicago, Cambridge University, University of Notre Dame, the London School of Economics, and other prestigious academic journals.

He is a well-known public speaker having spoken in 49 states in the country and in every inhabited continent. He has spoken for the White House, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Education, the US Department of Health & Human Services, the National Press Club, UN delegates, members of Congress, the Acting President of South Korea, Harvard University, Cambridge University, Oxford University, Columbia University, Duke University, University of Notre Dame, Peking University, Moscow State University, and many other well-known universities. He has spoken for both the G. W. Bush and Obama administrations and interacted with each of these presidents. He has also spoken for former members of the Clinton administration.

He has been a consultant for the U.S., the E.U., the U.N., and several G20 governments. His four-point plan presented to the Acting President of South Korea became the core of that nation’s 1998 economic stimulus legislation, which helped it emerge from the greatest Asian economic crisis since World War II. Jeynes has been interviewed by the London Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post,U.S. News & World Report, the Associated Press and many other major newspapers and media outlets. His work has been cited and quoted numerous times by the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, the EU, and many State Supreme Courts from across the United States. Jeynes has worked with and spoken for the Harvard Family Research Project. He received the “Distinguished Scholar Award” from the California State Senate and the California State Assembly. He was given the “Distinguished Achievement Award” from an arm of the American Educational Research Association. Dr. Jeynes wrote the no. 1 and no. 2 all-time most cited articles in the over half-century history of the journal Urban Education. He also wrote the no. 1 all-time most cited article in the 50-year history of the journal Education & Urban Society. He periodically writes columns in the Orange County Register, the nation’s 14th largest newspaper. Dr. Jeynes also gained admission in Who’s Who in the World for the last 11 consecutive years. He holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Byron Johnson is Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. He is the founding director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) as well as director of the Program on Prosocial Behavior. He is a leading authority on the scientific study of religion, the efficacy of faith-based organizations, and criminal justice. Recent publications have examined the impact of faith-based programs on recidivism reduction and prisoner reentry. Before joining the faculty at Baylor University, Johnson directed research centers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania. He has been the principal investigator on grants from private foundations as well as the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and the United States Institute for Peace. He is the author of more than 200 articles and a number of books including More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How it Could Matter More (2011), The Angola Prison Seminary: Effects of Faith-Based Ministry on Identity Transformation, Desistance, and Rehabilitation (2016), and The Quest for Purpose: The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life (2017). He was the 2013 Big Brother of the Year for Texas Lone Star.

Joshua T. Katz has taught at Princeton University since 1998, where he is Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics. A linguist by training (B.A. Yale, M.Phil. Oxford, Ph.D. Harvard) and comparative philologist at heart, he has received numerous prizes for his scholarship and pedagogy, including the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (Princeton, 2003), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2010), and one of two inaugural Dorothy Tarrant Fellowships (Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2018); he has also held visiting professorships in Paris and Berlin. In addition to his many publications on the languages, literatures, and cultures of the ancient and medieval world from India to Ireland via Greece, Rome, and the Near East, he finds himself wading every more into contemporary hot-button sociopolitical issues. Recent contributions have appeared in First Things, Law & Liberty, the National Review, the New Criterion, Public Discourse, Quillette, the Spectator, and the Wall Street Journal. Named a Hero of Intellectual Freedom by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in 2020, he is the Chair of the Academic Committee for the John & Daria Barry Scholarships and a Trustee of the Canterbury Institute.

Robert C. Koons is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where he has been since 1987. His areas of specialization include metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical logic and philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of religion. He is currently working on the logic of causation and the metaphysics of life and the mind. He holds bachelor’s degrees in philosophy from Michigan State University and in philosophy and theology from Oxford University. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from UCLA.

Daniel Mark is an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. He served for four years on the nine-member, bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom, most recently as chairman. He was appointed to the commission by then-Speaker of the House John Boehner in May, 2014, and reappointed in May, 2016, by Speaker Paul Ryan.

At Villanova, Dr. Mark is a faculty associate of the Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good, and he holds the rank of battalion professor in Villanova’s Navy Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit.

Dr. Mark is a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ, and an affiliated scholar of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding in Washington, DC. He also works with the Tikvah Fund in New York. Dr. Mark is a member: of the board of directors of the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty; of the advisory council of CanaVox; and of the board of advisors of the Blackstone and Burke Center for Law and Liberty at Faulker University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law.

Before graduate school, Dr. Mark spent four years as a high school teacher in New York City.

Margarita Mooney Suarez is Associate Professor of Congregational Studies in the Department of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her MA and PhD in sociology from Princeton University, and her BA in psychology at Yale University. She has also been on the faculty of Yale University, Princeton University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Pepperdine University. At Princeton Theological Seminary, she teaches classes such as philosophy of social science, Christianity and the liberals arts tradition, aesthetics, research methods for congregational leaders, intentional communities, and sociology of religion. Her research has received approximately $3 million in funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

Margarita’s most recent book with Cluny Media, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts (2021), grew out of her decades of experience as a teacher and scholar. Her book Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009) demonstrated how religious communities support the successful adaptation of Haitian immigrants in the U.S., Canada and France, and she’s the co-author (with Camille Z. Charles, Mary S. Fischer,  and Douglas S. Massey) of Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton University Press, 2009).

In addition to her scholarly books and articles, Professor Mooney Suarez has written for publications that reach wide audiences both inside and outside academia such as  Real Clear Policy, Scientific American, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Miami Herald, Plough Magazine, America Magazine, First Things, Hedgehog Review, Public Discourse, Church Life Journal and the National Catholic Register. Professor Mooney Suarez is a frequent speaker to women’s organizations, think tanks, schools, church groups and a variety of other nonprofits as well as businesses about faith and values. Her research has been cited by David Brooks in the New York Times, and she has been interviewed by organizations such as the Duke Divinity School and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Professor Mooney Suarez founded Scala Foundation in 2016 and continues to serve as Scala’s Executive Director. Scala’s mission is to infuse meaning and purpose into American education by restoring a classical liberal arts education. At Scala’s conferences, reading groups, seminars, webinars, student trips, intellectual retreats, and intensive summer program, Scala equips students, writers, artists, intellectuals and teachers with the ideas and networks needed to revitalize culture.

Michael New is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Research at The Busch School off Business at The Catholic University of America (CUA). Prior to coming to CUA, Professor New held full time faculty positions at Ave Maria University, The University of Michigan – Dearborn, and The University of Alabama.  Dr. New also served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-MIT data center. His research interests include the social science of sanctity of life issues. Dr. New frequently writes about abortion trends, the impact of pro-life laws, public attitudes toward abortion and the effect of contraception programs. He received his PhD in Political Science and Masters Degree in Statistics from Stanford University.

Ana Samuel, Ph.D is a graduate of Princeton University and The University of Notre Dame, where she completed doctoral work on the political theory and sexual ethics of Montesquieu. She was the first executive director of the Witherspoon Institute at its foundation in 2003, and subsequently transitioned to a research and teaching role in 2010, focusing on projects about family structure studies. She edited No Differences? How Children in Same-Sex Households Fare and directed the development of the Family Structures Studies website. In 2013, she helped to launch CanaVox, a marriage and sexual-integrity movement that promotes reading and discussion groups around the world to inform discerning men and women with up-to-date research drawn from the social sciences, natural-law reasoning and personal stories. Every summer, she enjoys teaching the dialogues of Plato and Aristotle’s moral philosophy to high school students for the Witherspoon Institute’s summer seminars.

David Sperling is currently Research Professor in the Institute of Public Policy and Governance of Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. Before joining Strathmore, he taught in the Department of History of the University of Nairobi. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Harry Truman Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University. His current research interests relate to governance in the public sector of developing countries. He is the founding Director of the Utawala Applied Research Institute which undertakes extensive research on the governance practices of sub-national governments and on the impact of law on development in Africa. Dr. Sperling received his BA from Yale University, his MA from Harvard, and his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a naturalized Kenya citizen.

James R. Stoner, Jr. is the Hermann Moyse, Jr., Professor and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University.  He is the author of Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism (Kansas, 2003) and Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism (Kansas, 1992), and co-editor of The Political Thought of the Civil War (Kansas 2018), with Alan Levine and Thomas W. Merrill, and three books published by the Witherspoon Institute: The Thriving Society: On the Social Conditions of Human Flourishing (2015), with Harold James; The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers (2010), with Donna M. Hughes; and Rethinking Business Management: Examining the Foundations of Business Education (2008), with Samuel Gregg. He earned his A.B. from Middlebury College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and has been a visiting professor and fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. His areas of specialization include moral philosophy and practical ethics. Currently he is doing work in natural law ethics, liberal perfectionism, medical ethics, the ethics and politics of inquiry, philosophical embryology, the nature of human action, end of life issues, and ethics and education. He has published extensively in academic journals on topics of bioethics, meta-ethics, and the New Natural Law Theory. A graduate of Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, he holds a doctorate in philosophy from Emory University.

David L. Tubbs is an Associate Professor of Politics at The King’s College in New York City, where he has been teaching since 2005. He was previously Visiting Faculty Fellow at Irkutsk State University in Irkutsk, Russia, and the W.H. Brady Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2017-18, he was the James Madison Program’s Ann and Herbert W. Vaughan Visiting Fellow. His scholarship focuses on topics in constitutional law, political theory, and public policy. He is the author of Freedom’s Orphans (Princeton University Press, 2007), and several scholarly articles, including a 2018 article written with Jacqueline S. Smith in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy on the regulation of pornography under the Constitution. His shorter articles and reviews have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, First Things, City Journal, The New Criterion, The American Spectator, and Public Discourse. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2001.

Graham Walker is Executive Director of the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. He has served as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and The Catholic University of America, as an NEH Fellow and Olin Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and more recently as Academic Vice President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and President of Patrick Henry College. He earned the PhD from the University of Notre Dame (Indiana) and the Diplôme from the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Switzerland).

Bradford P. Wilson is Executive Director, Outgoing, of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Lecturer in Politics, and Faculty Fellow of Butler College at Princeton University.  His interests include American constitutional law, American political thought, and Western political thought.  Wilson is the author of Enforcing the Fourth Amendment: A Jurisprudential History and co-editor of three books: American Political Parties & Constitutional Politics, Separation of Powers and Good Government, and The Supreme Court and American Constitutionalism.  He is also the editor of The Constitutional Legacy of William H. Rehnquist(link is external), published in 2015 by West Academic Publishing.  He has coedited a two-volume edition of The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton(link is external), published by Cambridge University Press in November 2017.  His writings have appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, the American Political Science Review, Academic Questions, and law reviews, and as chapters in edited volumes.  Wilson has served as President of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions since 2006.  He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Moscow State University and Moscow’s International Juridical Institute in 1994-95, and, from 1984 to 1987, served as Research Associate to two Chief Justices of the United States, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist.  From 1996 to 2004, he served as Acting President and then Executive Director of the National Association of Scholars and was Editor of the journal Academic Questions.  He has been an editor of Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy since 1982.  He received his B.A. from North Carolina State University, his M.A. from Northern Illinois University, and his Ph.D. in Politics from The Catholic University of America.

Photo courtesy of Sameer Khan/Fotobuddy.