Dr. Lewis Baldwin - Professor in Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee
“Bridging the Chasm Between Spirituality and Social Transformation: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Challenge to the Contemporary Church”

Dr. Lewis V.  Baldwin is a native of Camden, Alabama.  He received his early education in the public schools of Wilcox County, the heart of the so-called Alabama blackbelt, where he participated in student demonstrations in the 1960s.  He graduated from Camden Academy High School and enrolled at Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, from which he received the B.A. Degree in History.  He attended Colgate-Rochester/ Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminaries, receiving the Master of Arts Degree in Black Church Studies and the Master of Divinity Degree in Theology.  He earned his Ph.D. Degree Program in American Christianity at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. While pursuing the Ph.D., Dr. Baldwin was ordained into the Ministry at Pine Level No. 2 Baptist Church in Greenville, Alabama by his father, Pastor L. V. Baldwin, Sr.  He was also ordained a Deacon in the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church. 

Dr. Baldwin is the author of numerous articles, book reviews, and book chapters, and of several monographs and books.  Among his books and monographs are “Invisible” Strands in African Methodism: A History of the African Union Methodist Protestant and Union American Methodist Episcopal Churches, 1805-1980 (1983); The Mark of a Man: Peter Spencer and the African Union Methodist Tradition (1987); There is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1991); To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992); Freedom is Never Free: A Biographical Portrait of Edgar Daniel Nixon, Sr. (1992), with Aprille V. Woodson; Toward the Beloved Community: Martin Luther King, Jr. and South Africa (1995); The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Boundaries of Law, Politics, and Religion (2002), with Rufus Burrow, Jr., Barbara A. Holmes,  the Honorable Susan Holmes Winfield, and Roger D. Hatch; Between Cross and Crescent: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Malcolm and Martin (2002), with Amiri YaSin Al-Hadid; Plenty Good Room: A Bible Study Based on African American Spirituals (2002); Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010); and The Voice of Conscience: The Church in the Mind of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010).  Dr. Baldwin’s “Invisible” Strands in African Methodism won The American Theological Library Association Award, and his There is a Balm in Gilead was declared “Best All-Around Book” and the winner of the 1992 Midwest Book Achievement Award by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association.

Dr. Baldwin is currently a Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University, and he lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dr. John Dominic Crossan - Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religious Studies DePaul University, Chicago
"The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord's Prayer"

John Dominic Crossan was born in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, in 1934. He was educated in Ireland and the United States, received a Doctorate of Divinity from Maynooth College, Ireland, in 1959, and did post-doctoral research at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome from 1959 to 1961 and at the École Biblique in Jerusalem from 1965 to 1967. He was a member of a thirteenth-century Roman Catholic religious order, the Servites (Ordo Servorum Mariae), from 1950 to 1969 and an ordained priest from 1957 to 1969. He joined DePaul University, Chicago, in 1969 and remained there until 1995. He is now a Professor Emeritus in its Department of Religious Studies.

In the last forty-five years he has written twenty-seven books on the historical Jesus, the apostle Paul, and earliest Christianity. Five of them have been national religious bestsellers for a combined total of twenty-four months. The scholarly core of his work is the trilogy from The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) through The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998), to In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, co-authored with the archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed (2004).  Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan have co-authored a series of books with HarperOne, San Francisco:  The Last Week: A Day by Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem (2006);  The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach about the Birth of Jesus (2007); and The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (2009).

His most recent book, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer was published by HarperOne, San Francisco, on September 7, 2010. His next book is The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction about Jesus (publication by HarperOne on March 6, 2012). He has been elected Vice President of the Society of Biblical Literature for 2010-2011 and President for 2011-2012.

Dr. Anna Carter Florence - Peter Marshall Associate Professor of Preaching Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA
"Preaching, Testimony, and Living in the Word"

Anna Carter Florence is the Peter Marshall Associate Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.  She spends her days listening to student sermons, talking with pastors and churches about preaching, and thinking about exactly what it is we have all gotten ourselves into.  Her first book, Preaching as Testimony, was published in 2007 (WJKP); she is currently at work on another one.  Anna has degrees from Yale (B.A) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D.), and is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Dr. Miroslav Volf - Founder and Director of Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology, Yale University Divinity School, New Haven, CT.
"Christianity and Islam"

Dr. Moroslav Volf is the Founder and Director of Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology, Yale University Divinity School, New Haven, CT. Miroslav Volf was educated in his native Croatia, United States, and Germany. He earned doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He has written or edited 15 books and over 70 scholarly articles. His most significant books include Exclusion and Embrace (1996; winner of Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and one of Christianity Today’s  100 most important religious books of the 20^th century); After Our Likeness (1998) in which he explores the Trinitarian nature of ecclesial community; Allah: A Christian Response (2011), whether Muslims and Christians have a common God; and A Public Faith: On How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (2011). He is actively involved in many top-level initiatives concerning Christian-Muslim relations and is a member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum.