John Alexander Forrest is a former Australian politician who served as a National Party member of the Australian House of Representatives from March 1993 until August 2013, representing the Division of Mallee in Victoria. He was born in Mildura, and was educated at University of Melbourne and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Before entering politics he was a design engineer with the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, a lecturer at Ballarat College of Advanced Education, and a member of the Rural City of Swan Hill council.
David Ewan Marr FAHA is an Australian journalist, author and progressive political and social commentator. His areas of expertise include the law, Australian politics, censorship, the media and the arts. He writes for The Monthly, The Saturday Paper and Guardian Australia. He also appears as a semi-regular panellist on the ABC television programs Q&A and Insiders.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include, 'The Hindus: an alternative history'; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.
David Israel Kertzer is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic, specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. His book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. From July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2011, Kertzer served as Provost at Brown.
The National Prayer Breakfast is a yearly event held in Washington, D.C., usually on the first Thursday in February. The founder of this event was Abraham Vereide. The event—which is actually a series of meetings, luncheons, and dinners—has taken place since 1953 and has been held at least since the 1980s at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue NW.
William D. Rubinstein is a historian and author. His best-known work, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution, charts the rise of the 'super rich', a class he sees as expanding exponentially.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Diane Robin (Di) Bell is an Australian feminist anthropologist, author and activist. She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C, USA and Distinguished Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her work focuses on the Aboriginal people of Australia, Indigenous land rights, human rights, Indigenous religions, violence against women, and on environmental issues.
Paul Morris, MA McM, PhD Lanc, is a religious studies scholar and an Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He was the Programme Director for Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and provides regular comment to the media on matters of religious diversity. He is the author of the New Zealand National Statement on Religious Diversity.
Alan Glyndwr Cadman is an Australian politician who served as a Liberal member of the Australian House of Representatives from 18 May 1974 to 17 October 2007, representing the Division of Mitchell, New South Wales.
Mark Juergensmeyer is an American sociologist and scholar specialized in global studies and religious studies, and a writer on comparative religion, religious violence, and global religion. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
John Walter Bradford is a former Australian politician.
Christopher Gordon Miles is a former Australian politician. He was a member of the House of Representatives from 1984 to 1998, representing the Tasmanian seat of Braddon. He served as parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister John Howard and was a prominent social conservative within the Liberal Party, chairing the conservative Lyons Forum ginger group. Prior to entering politics he worked as a schoolteacher.
God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics is a 2005 book by Marion Maddox. Maddox argues that, from 1996, John Howard's Liberal Party slowly imported US Christian right values and that the Australian media reported little about this shift in social and public policy. Maddox suggests that the line between church and state became blurred, as happened in America.
The Lyons Forum was a ginger group or informal political faction comprising some federal members of conservative Australian parliamentary parties. It was formed in the early 1990s and was active both in Liberal Party of Australia parliamentary leadership conflict and on family policy issues. The faction was sometimes disparagingly called "The God Squad". By 2004 it was described as "defunct" by Michelle Grattan.
The Council for Christian Education in Schools is an Australian religious organisation which also operates under the name of Access Ministries, as an inter-denominational body providing Christian education and chaplaincy services in state schools in Victoria.
Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard is a Professor of History and the Humanities at Valparaiso University, Indiana. He formerly directed the Center for Faith and Inquiry and was Professor of History at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. He completed his MA (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) at the University of Virginia, concentrating in modern European intellectual and religious history. He is founding director of Gordon College's honors program, the Jerusalem and Athens Forum, a one-year, great-books course of study in the history of Christian thought and literature. He served as principal grant writer and project director of a multimillion-dollar project funded by the Lilly Endowment, entitled "Critical Loyalty: Christian Vocation at Gordon College."
Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington (2020-present). He was the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at University of Auckland (2018-2020). He previously served as a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past President of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a 20-year longitudinal study tracking over 15,000 New Zealanders each year. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.
Gregory Price Grieve is an American historian of religions, academic and researcher. He is a Professor and Head of the Religious Studies Department at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Julia Kindt is an academic and author who specializes in ancient Greek history and religion. She is a professor at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, Australia.
