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Eugene Carson Blake (1906-85), an American Protestant leader, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Princeton University. He has taught at Forman Christian College, Lahore (then in India, now in Pakistan). Blake also served as a minister of Presbyterian churches in Albany, New York, from 1935 to 1940, and in Pasadena, California, from 1940 to 1951. He served as stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and later the United Presbyterian Church, a successor body. Blake also served as president of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America from 1954 to 1957. He was a delegate to the assemblies of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in 1954 and in New Delhi in 1961, and was secretary general of the council from 1966 until his retirement in 1972.

Munir Jiwa, director of the Center for Islamic Studies, and assistant professor of Islamic Studies, has a rich background in engaging difference. His research has addressed mass media portrayals of Islam and Muslims.

Scholar, author, former Tibetan Buddhist monk, co-founder with Richard Gere of Tibet House in New York City, a close personal friend of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, and father of five children including the actress, Uma Thurman, Robert Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. *Time* magazine named him one of the "25 Most Influential Americans." He has lectured all over the world; his charisma and enthusiasm draw packed audiences.

Larry Scripp, Ed.D., is an accomplished educator, researcher, and administrator in music. As a musician, Dr. Scripp has composed many works in the past for musical theater, modern dance, film, and children's animation, and directed a variety of community orchestras and contemporary performing groups in the Boston area. As a research scholar and consultant for arts in education in the past, he has investigated artistic development in children at Harvard Project Zero from 1982-1994 and assessment of arts and general education programs from 1985 to 1995. He has designed and carried out research studies investigating young children's symbolic development, musical perception, musical representation, giftedness, and the development of computer-supported curricula in the arts and humanities. Much of his past research focused on developing 'authentic' measures of students' learning and development in the arts. Since serving as a senior faculty member of undergraduate theoretical studies since 1985, Larry Scripp published several articles (with Lyle Davidson and Alan Fletcher) on the teaching of sight singing in the *Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy* and in books on music learning and giftedness.

Stephen Breyer, born in San Francisco in 1938, is a graduate of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. He taught law for many years at Harvard and has also worked as a Supreme Court law clerk, a Justice Department lawyer, an Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutor, and Chief Counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 1990 he was appointed an appellate court judge by President Carter. In 1994 he was appointed a Supreme Court Justice by President Clinton.

Patricia Hampls most recent book is *The Florists Daughter*, winner of numerous best and year end awards, including the *New York Times *100 Notable Books of the Year and the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. *Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime*, published in 2006 and now in paperback, was also one of the *Times* Notable Books; a portion was chosen for The Best Spiritual Writing 2005. Patricia Hampl first won recognition for *A Romantic Education*, her memoir about her Czech heritage, awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. This book and subsequent works have established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years.

Daniel J. Lasker is Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, where he teaches medieval Jewish philosophy in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought. Prof. Lasker holds three degrees from Brandeis University and also studied at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In addition to Ben-Gurion University, he has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, University of Toronto, Ohio State University, University of Texas, University of Washington, Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, Kirkland College and Gratz College. Professor Lasker is the author of four books and over a hundred other publications in the fields of Jewish philosophy and theology, the Jewish-Christian debate, Karaism, the Jewish calendar, and Judaism and modern medicine. He has also lectured widely at universities and synagogues throughout North America, as well as at professional conferences on five continents. He is a member of a number of professional organizations, including the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies, of which he is a board member. In February 2002, Prof. Lasker was scholar-in-residence for the Jewish community of Houston, Texas. In August, 2003, he will be on the faculty of an NEH summer seminar "Representations of the 'Other': Jews in Medieval Christendom" to be held in Oxford, England, and in Fall, 2004, Prof. Lasker will be the Dean Ernest Schwarcz Eminent Visiting Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Born in Santa Monica, CA, September 2, 1933, son of the late Carey and Dorothy Hedrick McWilliams, he had formerly resided in Berkeley, CA, Oberlin, OH, Brooklyn, NY and Highland Park, NJ before moving to Flemington in 1979. A 1st Lieutenant in the 11th Airborne Division of the United States Army from 1955-57, Professor McWilliams earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He was currently a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ where he had been teaching since 1970. His past academic appointments include Oberlin College 1961-67, Brooklyn College 1967-70, and visiting and summer appointments at Yale University, Harvard University, Haverford College, Lafayette College and Fordham University. Author of many books and articles in the field of Political Science, Professor McWilliams won the National Historical Society Prize in 1974 for his first book, 'The Idea of Fraternity in America'. In addition to his numerous honors and awards for his service in the field of Political Science, Professor McWilliams was active in many civic and community activities as well, including serving as a Councilman in the Borough of Flemington, a member of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee, a trustee of the Hunterdon County Historical Society and a former Elder of the Flemington Presbyterian Church.

Robin Becker was born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA and MA from Boston University and taught for 17 years at the MIT. She is the author of *Domain of Perfect Affection*, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); *The Horse Fair* (2000); *All-American Girl* (1996), which won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry; *Giacometti's Dog* (1990); Backtalk (1982); and *Personal Effects* (1977). Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications such as *American Poetry Review*, *the Boston Globe*, *Gettysburg Review*, and *Ploughshares*. Her honors include the 1997 Virginia Faulkner Prize for Excellence in Writing from *Prairie Schooner* magazine and fellowships from the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to serving as poetry editor for *The Women's Review of Books*, Becker writes a column for the WRB on poetry and the poetry scene called "Field Notes." She is a professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.