Senior Fellow Thomas F. Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, presents Pope Francis with a copy of Libertad Religiosa, a Spanish translation of the Witherspoon Institute’s Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right, at the Vatican, on December 14, 2013. The pope gave a private audience to the sixty participants in a conference held in Rome titled “Christianity and Freedom: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” hosted by the Religious Freedom Project and co-sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute. Matthew J. Franck, director of the Institute’s William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution, is on the steering committee of the Christianity and Freedom initiative, and was present at the conference to give a paper and moderate one of the panels. Religious Freedom: Why Now?—published by the Witherspoon Institute in 2012—resulted from the work of the Institute’s Task Force on International Religious Freedom, chaired by Farr. Timothy Shah of Georgetown, who now co-chairs the Christianity and Freedom initiative, wrote the monograph, and Franck edited it.
