RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Steven D. Smith is Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego. He is Co-Executive Director of the Institute for Law & Religion, and Co-Executive Director for the Institute for Law & Philosophy. He writes widely in the areas of religious freedom, constitutional law, and legal philosophy. His books that deal most directly with religious freedom include Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Eerdmans 2018), The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Harvard 2014), and Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom (Oxford 1995). Professor Smith has taught at the University of San Diego since 2002. Before coming to San Diego he was the Robert and Marion Short Professor at Notre Dame Law School and the Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado. Professor Smith earned his J.D. from Yale in 1979 and his B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1976. He and his wife Merina have five children.

Timothy Samuel Shah serves as Vice President for Strategy and International Research and the Director of the South and Southeast Asia Action Team of the Religious Freedom Institute. He serves as non-resident Research Professor of Government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. Until mid-2018, he served as Director for International Research at the Religious Freedom Research Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He has directed or co-directed numerous grant-funded collaborative research initiatives, including a Pew-funded study of evangelical Protestantism and politics that generated three volumes with Oxford University Press; a Harvard University-based study of religion and global politics; a study supported by the Templeton-funded Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs research initiative on Christianity and freedom; a multi-year standing seminar on religion and religious freedom and their relationship to human nature and human experience, which led to a volume published by Cambridge; and a study he co-directed with Daniel Philpott on contemporary Christian responses to persecution, which also led to a volume published by Cambridge. Shah is author of Even if There is No God: Hugo Grotius and the Secular Foundations of Modern Political Liberalism (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2021); Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right (Witherspoon Institute, 2012); and, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011). He is also editor of numerous volumes, including, with Daniel Philpott, Under Caesar’s Sword: Christian Responses to Persecution (Cambridge University Press, 2018); with Jack Friedman, Homo Religiosus?: Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2018); with Allen Hertzke, Christianity and Freedom: Historical Perspectives and Christianity and Freedom: Contemporary Perspectives (both with Cambridge University Press, 2016); with Thomas Farr and Jack Friedman, Religious Freedom and Gay Rights (Oxford University Press, 2016); and with Alfred Stepan and Monica Duffy Toft, Rethinking Religion and World Affairs (Oxford University Press, 2012). His articles on religion, religious freedom, and global politics, in history and in the contemporary world, have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Law and Religion, the Journal of Democracy, the Review of Politics, Fides et Historia, and elsewhere.