Meet the Experts
William B. Allen
William B. Allen is Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. Allen served as Director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia from June 1998 through August 1999, while on leave from Michigan State. Previously, he served as Dean and Professor at James Madison College at Michigan State University. He is the author of The Federalist Papers: A Commentary and Let the Advice Be Good: A Defense of Madison's Democratic Nationalism. He also has edited several collections, including George Washington: A Collection, The Works of Fisher Ames and The Essential Antifederalist. Allen has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Kellogg National Fellow, and has received the international Prix Montesquieu.
Susan Wise Bauer
Susan Wise Bauer teaches English at the College of William & Mary and is currently working on a four volume series about the history of the world for W. W. Norton. The first book in the series, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, appeared in 2007 and was described by Publisher's Weekly as "a wonderful starting point for the study of the ancient world." Bauer has published numerous books, including The Well-Educated Mind, The Well-Trained Mind and The Story of the World series. Bauer is also a contributing editor to Books & Culture and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today. She lives in Virginia with her husband and four children.
Alan R. Crippen II
Rev. Alan R. Crippen II is founder and president of the John Jay Institute for Faith, Society and Law. Previously Crippen served for nine years as founding rector of the Witherspoon Fellowship, a leading civic and cultural leadership development program based in Washington, D.C. for college-age students. He also as served as vice-president for policy and academic affairs at Family Research Council, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and director of development at International Students, Inc. both in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His military service includes platoon and battery command as well as various battalion staff operations and planning positions in the U.S. Army Field Artillery. Crippen is an ordained presbyter in the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) and lives with his wife and five children in Colorado Springs.
Robert P. George
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He specializes in constitutional law, philosophy of law and political philosophy. George is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and formerly served as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He was Judicial Fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis. He has published numerous scholarly articles and book reviews and has received many honors and awards, including a 2005 Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement and the Stanley Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award from Princeton's Department of Politics.
Samuel Gregg
Samuel Gregg is Director of Research at Acton Institute, an Adjunct Professor at the Pontifical Lateran University and a consultant for Oxford Analytica Ltd. He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, ethics in finance and natural law theory. His books include Morality, Law, and Public Policy, Economic Thinking for the Theologically Minded, On Ordered Liberty, Ethics and Economics: The Quarrel and the Dialogue, Morality, Law, and Public Policy, A Theory of Corruption and Banking, Justice, and the Common Good. Several of these works have been translated into a variety of languages, and his book The Commercial Society received the Templeton Enterprise Award in 2007. His essays have appeared in Law and Investment Management, Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, The Journal of Markets & Morality, Economic Affairs, Evidence, Oxford Analytica, and Policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Washington Times, The Australian Financial Review, and Business Review Weekly, as well as in newspapers throughout Europe and Latin America. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, the Philadelphia Society and the Royal Economic Society.
Rodney Stark
Rodney Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, and began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He later became Professor of Sociology and Comparative Religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he joined the faculty of Baylor University. He has published 27 books and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide and city life in ancient Rome. However, the greater part of his work has been on religion. He is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. He has won several national and international awards for distinguished scholarship, and many of his books and articles have been translated and published in foreign languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Slovene, and Turkish. His book What Americans Really Believe, published in September 2008, looks at religious life in America, including the question of religion in the public square.
Glenn S. Sunshine
Glenn Sunshine is a professor of history at the Central Connecticut State University where he has served as department chair since fall 2006. His areas of research include the Renaissance and Reformation Europe as well as the history of plagues and church, economic and military history. Before his arrival at CCSU in 1994, he taught at Calvin College. In the fall of 1999, he was a visiting professor at the Universitaet der Bundeswehr-Hamburg (now Helmut Schmidt University) in Germany. He has published numerous books, including The Reformation for Armchair Theologians, Reforming French Protestantism: The Development of Huguenot Ecclesiastical Institutions 1557-1572 and Pastoral Oversight in the French Reformed Churches: The Evolution of the Colloquy. His 2003 book Reforming French Protestantism won the Bi-Annual Huguenot Society Award. Sunshine's current research focuses on the development of worldviews in the West from the Roman Empire to the postmodern era, supported by a grant from the Acton Institute. The resulting book, Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home, is scheduled for publication in 2009 by Zondervan.
George Weigel
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America's leading public intellectuals. In 1975, Weigel moved to Seattle where he was Assistant Professor of Theology and Assistant (later Acting) Dean of Studies at the St. Thomas Seminary School of Theology in Kenmore. In 1977, Weigel became Scholar-in-Residence at the World Without War Council of Greater Seattle, a position he held until 1984. In 1984-85 Weigel was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. There he wrote Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace. Weigel is the author or editor of nineteen other books, including The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, Letters to a Young Catholic, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, and Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace. Weigel has written essays and reviews for various major opinion journals and newspapers in the United States and is a contributor to Newsweek. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is also Vatican analyst for NBC News. His scholarly work and his journalism are regularly translated into the major European languages. From 1989 through June 1996, Weigel was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he led a wide-ranging, ecumenical and inter-religious program of research and publication on foreign and domestic policy issues. From June 1996, as a Senior Fellow of the Center, Weigel wrote Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II. The book was published to international acclaim in the Fall of 1999 and has been translated into numerous languages. A documentary based on the book was released in the fall of 2001 and won numerous prizes. Weigel has been awarded ten honorary doctorates, the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice and the Gloria Artis Gold Medal by the Republic of Poland. He serves on the boards of directors of several organizations dedicated to human rights and the cause of religious freedom and is a member of the editorial board of First Things. Weigel and his wife, Joan, have three children and one grandchild, and live in North Bethesda, Maryland.
John Witte, Jr.
John Witte Jr., Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law, is Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He specializes in legal history, religious liberty, marriage law and human rights. Witte has lectured and convened major conferences throughout Western Europe, Israel, Japan and South Africa and has been selected ten times by the Emory law students as the Most Outstanding Professor. He has won numerous other awards for his teaching and research from universities and learned societies throughout North America and Europe. Witte has published 150 articles, ten journal symposia, and 22 books, and his writings have appeared in ten languages. With more than $10 million of funding from the Ford, Luce, Lilly, McDonald and Pew foundations, Witte has directed two dozen major projects on issues of democracy; human rights and religious freedom; sex, marriage, family and children; and Christian jurisprudence. These projects have collectively yielded 150 volumes of new scholarship and more than 250 public forums. Witte also edits two book series: Emory University Studies in Law and Religion and the Religion, Marriage and Family Series. Among his publications are Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, Sex, Marriage and Family Life in John Calvin's Geneva, The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics and Human Nature and The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism.
