James Byrd Jr. is an associate professor of American religious history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where he has taught a class in religion and war in American history. He is also an expert on this story of Baptists and Methodists in the U.S. He has written two books about religion in early American […]

William Lee Miller is author of 2002’s Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography. He is a scholar at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Robert Kraynak is a political science professor at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. He is the author of Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, which examines America’s civil religion and its government.

Julie Roy Jeffrey is a history professor at Goucher College in Baltimore. She has written about the religious landscape of the mid-19th century in relation to Lincoln’s presidency.

Gary Zola is an associate professor of the American Jewish experience at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. As part of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s celebration, Zola offers a lecture on Lincoln and the Jews that examines how he helped expand their civil rights.

Douglas Wilson is a co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.

Ronald D. Rietveld is professor of history emeritus at California State University at Fullerton. He has written extensively on Lincoln, the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the history of religion in America. He was a historical consultant for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and is known as the only person who found […]

Lucas Morel is an associate professor of politics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. He is the author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government.

Allen Guelzo wrote Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, a 1999 book that challenged the reigning thought about Lincoln’s faith – basically, that he had little, if any. He is a professor of Civil War era history at Gettysburg College.