SPEAKERS

Former Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams was confirmed in 2002 as the 104th bishop of the See of Canterbury: the first Welsh successor to St. Augustine of Canterbury and the first archbishop since the mid-thirteenth century to be appointed from beyond the English Church. He received his DPhil from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1975. From 1977, he spent nine years in academic and parish work in Cambridge. In 1986, he returned to Oxford as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church. He became a fellow of the British Academy in 1990. His numerous books include On Christian Theology (2000), Being Human (2018), Christ the Heart of Creation (2018), The Collected Poems (2021), and Passions of the Soul (2024).

Associate Prof. of Theological Ethics,
Duke Divinity School

Wylin Wilson

Dr. Wylin Wilson is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School. Professor Wilson’s work lies at the intersection of religion, gender, and bioethics. Her academic interests also include rural bioethics and Black church studies. Prior to joining Duke Divinity School in 2020, she was a teaching faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, the former associate director of Education at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, and a former faculty member in the College of Agriculture, Environment, and Nutrition Sciences at Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama. She is the theologian-in-residence for the Children's Defense Fund and is a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Bioethics and Religion Program Unit Steering Committee. Among her publications are her books, Economic Ethics and the Black Church and Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health.

Jonathan A. Anderson is the Eugene and Jan Peterson Associate Professor of Theology and the Arts at Regent College. His scholarship explores the interrelations of art history, theology, and religious studies, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary art. He is the author of The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (2025), Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (with William Dyrness, 2016), and many articles and book chapters on related topics, including “Modern Art” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2021). Trained as an artist, art critic, and theologian, Anderson has a PhD from King’s College London and an MFA from California State University Long Beach. Prior to his chair at Regent College, he was the postdoctoral associate of theology and the visual arts at Duke University and an associate professor of art at Biola University.

Eugene and Jan Peterson Associate Professor of Theology and the Arts, Regent College

Jonathan A. Anderson

Singer-Songwriter and Christianity Today columnist

Sandra McCracken

Sandra McCracken is a singer-songwriter and hymn writer from Nashville, Tennessee. A prolific recording artist, McCracken has produced 14 solo albums over two decades. Her best-selling release, Psalms (2015), received critical acclaim, followed by God’s Highway (2017) which made the top 50 on Billboard Heatseekers chart without a major label. She has had songs featured on TV, including “Ten Thousand Angels” on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, and has over 15 million streams. Her thoughtful lyrics and gospel melodies in songs like “We Will Feast in the House Of Zion,” “Steadfast,” and “Thy Mercy My God” have become staple anthems in churches across the U.S. As a published writer, she contributes a regular column in Christianity Today and released her first book “Send Out Your Light” in September 2021.

Poet, Writer, &
Editor in Chief, Image journal

Molly McCully Brown

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded, which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In the Field Between Us, which has been selected as a 2025-26 NEA Big Reads title. Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is currently the director of creative writing at the University of Wyoming and the editor in chief of Image Journal.

Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Orchestra of Minorities

Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), were shortlisted for The Booker Prize. He is also the author of The Road to the Country (2024) released in June 2024. His novels have been translated into more than 29 languages. They have won awards including the inaugural FT/Oppenheimer Award for Fiction, the NAACP Image Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the LA Times Book Prize, and been nominated for many others. He is the Helen S. Lanier Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Georgia and the program director of the Oxbelly Fiction Writers retreat. He splits his time between Nigeria and the U.S.

Professor, Priest, and Author of Women and the Gender of God

Amy Peeler

Amy Peeler is the Kenneth T. Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies and Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. She serves as Associate Priest at St. Mark’s Episcopal in Illinois. She is the author of Hebrews: A Commentary for Christian Formation (Eerdmans 2024),Women and the Gender of God (Eerdmans 2022), and The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (ed.). She is currently finishing the second volume of Women and the Gender of God and beginning to work on a commentary on the Pastoral Epistles in the NICNT series, for which she serves as Associate Editor. Peeler holds a Ph.D. in New Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary and has served as a Senior Research Fellow with the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews.

Distinguished Artist in Residence, Muscarelle Museum at William & Mary

Steve A. Prince

Steve A. Prince is a mixed-media artist, master printmaker, lecturer, educator, and art evangelist. Prince received his BFA from Xavier University of Louisiana and his MFA in Printmaking and Sculpture from Michigan State University. He has taught middle school, high school, and community college, and has conducted workshops internationally in various media. Prince has shown his art internationally in various solo, group, and juried exhibitions and has participated in several residencies including artist in residence at Segura Arts Center at Notre Dame University, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, the Atlanta Printmakers Studio, and the University of Iowa to name a few. Prince is the recipient of the 2010 Teacher of the Year award from the City of Hampton, and he is a 2020 recipient of a VMFA (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) Grant. A native of New Orleans, LA, he currently resides in Williamsburg, VA. He is the director of engagement and distinguished artist in residence at the Muscarelle Museum at William and Mary. 

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James K. A. Smith

Award-Winning Author of You Are What You Love

James K. A. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University where he holds the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair. As a scholar, Smith has embraced the vocation of being a “translator” of philosophy for wider audiences. As a cultural critic and commentator, he explores the tensions of modern life, inviting readers and audiences to more intentional practices of faith and flourishing. He is the award-winning author of a number of influential books including How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (2014), You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (2016), The Nicene Option: An Incarnational Phenomenology (2021), and most recently, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (2022). Smith served as editor in chief of Comment magazine (2013–2018) and Image journal (2019–2024).

Professor of Theology,Fuller Theological Seminary

W. David O. Taylor

W. David O. Taylor is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of several books, including Prayers for the Pilgrimage (IVP, 2024), A Body of Praise (Baker Academic, 2023), Open and Unafraid (Thomas Nelson, 2020), Glimpses of the New Creation (Eerdmans, 2019), and The Theater of God’s Glory (Eerdmans, 2017). He is also editor of Naming the Spirit: Pneumatology through the Arts (IVP Academic, 2025), with Dan Train; The Art of New Creation (IVP Academic, 2022), with Jeremy Begbie and Dan Train; Contemporary Art and the Church (IVP Academic, 2017), with Taylor Worley; and For the Beauty of the Church (Baker Books, 2010). Taylor has also published articles in the Calvin Theological Journal, Christian Scholars Review, Worship, Theology Today, and Image journal. He is also an ordained Anglican priest and lectures widely on theology and the arts and liturgical practice.

Director, Leighton Ford Initiative in Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness

Wesley Vander Lugt

Dr. Wesley Vander Lugt is director of the Leighton Ford Initiative in Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he teaches theology and the arts. He is also the co-founder of Kinship Plot, a community of learning and practice in Charlotte, NC, that cultivates resonant relationships of every kind. Previous to these roles, Wesley served with a variety of ministry teams in Saint Louis, Mexico City, St. Andrews, and Charlotte, including eight years as lead pastor of Warehouse 242. He is the author of several books, including Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breathes, and editor of A Prophet in the Darkness: Exploring Theology in the Art of Georges Rouault. He holds a PhD in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts, University of St. Andrews, and lectures widely on beauty, slowness, cultivation, kinship, and theodramatics.

McDonald Professor of Christian Thelogy, St. Mellitus College

Jane Williams

Dr. Jane Williams is McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College, England. Jane is a founding member of St. Mellitus, which is an Anglican seminary that trains people for ordained and other ministries. She teaches doctrine and systematic theology in the college. She is also the author of a number of books, including The Art of Christmas (SPCK, 2021), Lectionary Reflections (SPCK, 2011), The Sacraments: Responding to God’s Loving Invitation (SPCK, 2024); and Giver of Life: The Holy Spirit in The Creed and the Christian Life Today (SPCK, 2025).

Malcolm Guite

Poet-Priest and Author of The Singing Bowl

Malcolm Guite is the former chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, and an award-winning poet. He is the author of various books on contemporary spirituality, including Faith, Hope, and Poetry (2010) and What Do Christians Believe? (2009), as well as literary criticism, including the volume Mariner: A Theological Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2018). His poems have appeared in numerous outlets and in the collected volumes Sounding the Seasons (2012),The Singing Bowl (2013), Parable and Paradox (2016), and David’s Crown (2021), among others. He is also a singer-songwriter and founder of the Cambridge-based blues band Mystery Train, and has collaborated with Andrew Peterson and the Rabbit Room since 2013. In 2023, he was awarded the Lanfranc Award for Education and Scholarship.

Author of Attunement: The Art and Politics of Feminist Theology and Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School

Natalie Carnes

Natalie Carnes is a constructive theologian invested in questions that cross the fields of aesthetics, feminism, and systematics. She has published several books, including Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa (Cascade 2014), Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconcoclasm and Iconophilia (Stanford 2017), Motherhood: A Confession (Stanford 2017), and most recently Attunement: The Art and Politics of Feminist Theology (OUP 2024). She is currently at work on a co-authored volume with Matthew Whelan on art and poverty, beginning a project on creativity that draws from psychological literature, and guest editing a special edition of Modern Theology. She is Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School beginning in fall 2025.

Award-Winning Composer of When Stone Becomes Forest

Josh Rodriguez

Josh Rodriguez is an award-winning composer known for his energetic rhythms, rich harmonic language, and striking colors. Born in Argentina and raised in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States, Rodriguez’s musical imagination has been formed by this bilingual and multicultural heritage. He collaborates regularly with theatre and film directors and has received several notable concert commissions in a wide range of musical genres. His works include Dos Palabras, When Stone Becomes Forest, Partita Picosa, Contra Spem Spero, and That Crazed Girl Improvising, all of which were finalists for the American Prize. Rodriguez serves as Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Elmhurst University. His music can be found on YouTube, Bandcamp, Instagram, Spotify, and at joshrodriguezmusic.com.

Reed & Martha Rice Distinguished Professor of Radiology, Duke University

Ehsan Samei

Dr. Ehsan Samei is a Persian-American Medical Physicist. With 25 years of tenure at Duke University, he directs two national research centers and serves as the chief physicist for Duke University Health System. His expertise encompasses clinical physics, quantitative imaging, and the clinically relevant application of AI in medicine. His passion is to position medical physics and in silico methods to generate and accelerate patient-centric care, doing so through innovative design and compassionate practice. He has authored over 400 refereed papers and four books, is a fellow of five professional societies, was the recipient of the 2022 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award by the International Organization of Medical Physics, and is ranked 11th among over 56,000 medical physicists worldwide for his lifetime contribution to medical physics. Ehsan is also a classical musician and has an active interest in epistemology and exploring the commonalities and interactions between science, art, and faith.