Harvard University’s Islam in the West Program is a project of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It focuses on the relationship between Islam and democracy in North America. Among the goals is to compare the attitudes of Muslims in Europe and Muslims in America. It conducts seminars, student workshops and surveys of Muslims and produces publications.

Jonathan Shay is a Boston psychiatrist who specializes in combat trauma and is the author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. He won a 2007 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for his work.

Carol Steiker is a professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on the death penalty and criminal law.

Erik C. Owens is an associate professor of the practice in theology at Boston College, where he also directs the international studies program. He is the co-editor of three books, including Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning and Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape.

Kenneth R. Himes is a professor of theology at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. His specialties include the ethics of warfare, and he has written extensively on just war and peace.

Susan Hayward is associate director of the Religious Literacy and the Professions Initiative at Harvard University, teaching quarterly workshops to all incoming foreign service officers at the U.S. State Department on religious literacy for diplomacy and development. Formerly, she was the program officer of the Religion and Peacemaking program at the United States Institute of Peace, […]

Cynthia Lynn Lyerly is associate professor of history at Boston College in Massachusetts. She has written about women in Southern churches.

Sister Mary Ann Hinsdale is associate professor of theology at Boston College in Massachusetts. She is author of Women Shaping Theology.

Judy Norsigian, co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and co-author of the classic feminist book Our Bodies, Ourselves (Touchstone, 2005) and its updates, testified in 2004 in favor of the House ban on therapeutic cloning, saying it takes advantage of women’s bodies to harvest their eggs.