Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security.

Martha C. Nussbaum holds appointments in law, divinity and philosophy at the University of Chicago, where she is the Ernest Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics. Her wide-ranging interests include contemporary moral and political philosophy, the history of Western philosophy and the nature of emotions. She is the author of Liberty of Conscience: The Attack […]

David B. Kopel is an associate policy analyst and expert on firearms issues with the Cato Institute. He has written several books on gun control, including Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present and Future of Freedom and Self-Defense. Kopel’s personal website includes a page of links about religious writings on self-defense and gun control.

Amy Laura Hall is an associate professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C. She teaches courses on Christian love and has written extensively on reproductive ethics.

Stephen A. Kent is a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and an expert on religions and their views on crime and responses to violence.

Robert P. Jones is president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI. He has written several books, including White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.

Sarah Coakley researches the evolution of altruistic behavior, forgiveness and unselfish love at Harvard University. She is a professor of divinity at the University of Cambridge. She is the co-editor of “Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation” (2013), which examines the evolution of cultural structures like religion.

The St. Gabriel Possenti Society, a Catholic group based in Arlington, Va., promotes self-defense through gun ownership and is named after a Catholic seminarian in Italy whose “marksmanship and proficiency with handguns single-handedly saved the village of Isola” from a band of Garibaldi’s nationalist soldiers in 1860. The group claims Possenti as the patron saint of […]

Bernard V. Brady is a professor and chairman of the theology department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. He wrote Christian Love: How Christians Through the Ages Have Understood Love.