Luis CdeBaca is ambassador-at-large for the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. He is a former prosecutor and received an award for his work as lead trial counsel in the largest slavery prosecution in U.S. history, in a case involving a garment factory in American Samoa.

Read an Oct. 28, 2005, Associated Press article about Pope Benedict XVI condemning human trafficking for sex and calling for the humane treatment of women migrants.

Read a Dec. 15, 2005, Washington Post article about a focus on johns and pimps in the battle against prostitution.

Read a May 22, 2013, article in The Guardian about the Catholic Church’s fight against proposed budget cuts in the United Kingdom’s legal aid system. The church says the cuts would limit assistance for victims of human trafficking.

Read a May 23, 2013, article about the human trafficking problem in Wisconsin and commentary on the film, Not Today, that portrays the violence and devastation of the lives of those forced into the slavery.

Mark Driscoll is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church, a fast-growing, nondenominational, theologically conservative congregation in Seattle’s urban Ballard neighborhood. He was named one of the 25 most influential pastors of the past 25 years by Preaching magazine in 2010.

Andrew Jones, a New Zealander and a pivotal emerging thinker, has been blogging tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com since 2001 – a long time as these things go. He is project director for the Boaz Project, based in the Czech Republic and developing “a support structure for church in the emerging culture.”

Pope Benedict’s first encyclical. An encyclical is considered one of the most authoritative documents from the pen of the pope, and a new pontiff’s first encyclical is considered something of a “mission statement” for the rest of the pontificate. Benedict’s first, Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love, was considered surprising by some in that […]

Robert Wineburg is the Jefferson Pilot Excellence Professor of social work at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro who has looked at IRS investigations of churches for political activities related to elections. He is the author of the Faith-Based Inefficiency: The Follies of Bush’s Initiatives, and he has been writing comprehensively about faith-based politics and social services […]