Jean Bethke Elshtain - Topic of lecture will be "The Sovereign Self" on March 10, 2009 at 7:30 PM in the Stetson Room, located in the Carlton Union Building.  Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School and author of Sovereignty: God, State and Self (The Gifford Lectures), (Basic Books, 2008).  Elshtain is a political philosopher whose task has been to show the connections between political thought and ethical and religious convictions.

Roger Kimball – Topic of lecture was “Faith Enlightenment and Utopia” on February 21, 2005.  Kimball is Managing Editor of The New Criterion, an art critic for the London Spectator and National Review, and a book and  cultural critic for Bloomberg Muse, an online service of Bloomberg News.  His most recent published work is entitled Lengthened  Shadows:     America and its Institutions in the Twenty-first Century, which he       co-edited.  His latest major books are The Rape of the Masters: How    Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Encounter Books , 2004) and Lives of The Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).

Jewel Spears Brooker – Topic for lecture was “Boredom and Violence in Modern Literature” on October 18, 2006.  Brooker is a Professor  of English Literature at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg and has received awards for     teaching, scholarship, and campus leadership.  Dr. Brooker has held visiting professorships at Columbia   University,  Doshisha University (Kyoto), and Colorado School of Mines, and research appointments at Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities.  Prof. Brooker is the       author and editor of  several books and has published scores of essays    on modern writers.  In 2003, she was  approved by the United States Senate for a six-year term as a member of the National Humanities Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Michael Novak- Topic for lecture was “Discovering Washington’s God” on February 8, 2007.  Novak received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (a million-dollar purse awarded at Buckingham Palace) in 1994, and delivered the Templeton address in Westminster Abbey. Theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador, Michael Novak          currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is Director of Social and Political Studies.  Mr. Novak's latest book,   Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country,   co-authored with his daughter Jana Novak, was released in March 2006 by Basic Books

Richard Swinburne – Topic for lectures was “The Problem of Evil” on February 13, 2008.  The question posed by evil is whether the world contains undesirable states of affairs that provide the basis for an argument that makes it unreasonable for anyone to believe in the existence of God.  Professor Richard Swinburne is Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford. He is one of the foremost Christian apologists in the world today. He has published many articles and books in which he defends Christian faith as rational and coherent. His vigorous defense of the rationality Christian belief however does not deny the passionate nature of faith, a theme he has developed in his most recent book, Faith and Reason.