Westminster Town Hall Forum

Clint Watts is a former FBI agent with expertise in electronic espionage operations, misinformation campaigns, fake news, and the manipulation of social media. In 2017 and 2018, he testified before four Senate committees on Russia’s information warfare campaign in advance of the 2016 presidential election. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Center for...

Richard Stengel is a journalist, author, and former managing editor of Time. He has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, New Republic, Spy, and The New York Times, and he appears regularly on television as a political commentator. In 2013, he accepted the position of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Obama administration. He served as t...

Honey Thaljieh is known internationally for promoting the role of sports in empowering women and girls in the Arab world and beyond. She is a co-founder of women’s football (soccer) in Palestine, and she served as the first captain of the Palestinian national football team. Following her career in football, she joined FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football, where she leads its...

Steve Schmidt is a political strategist, public relations executive, and a political analyst on MSNBC. He was an advisor in the George W. Bush administration and served as the top strategist for the president’s re-election campaign. In 2008, he was the senior advisor to the John McCain presidential campaign. He is a vice president at Edelman, a global communications marketing firm, where he advise...

Nadine Burke Harris is a pediatrician and advocate for children’s health. She is the founder of the Center for Youth Wellness, which researches the impact of adverse childhood experiences on long-term health, behavior, and learning. She has shared her findings at the Mayo Clinic, American Academy of Pediatrics, Google Zeitgeist, and Dreamforce. An advisor to the Too Small to Fail initiative, which...

Suzy Hansen is an American journalist and editor. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she moved to Istanbul in 2007 after receiving a journalism fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to write on Turkish politics and foreign affairs. Since then, she has traveled to Libya, Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Kuwait, India, Kenya, and beyond to study and reflect on socio-political...

Crime and Punishment in Black America. James Forman Jr. is a professor of law at Yale Law School, teaching and writing on criminal procedure, constitutional law, juvenile justice, and education law and policy. He is the author of the book "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America." A graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, he served as a law clerk for Judge William Norri...

Ari Melber is Chief Legal Correspondent for MSNBC, covering the U. S. Supreme Court, Justice Department, and FBI, and the host of the political news program The Beat. He has written on law and politics for The Nation, The Atlantic, Reuters, Salon, and Politico. Raised in Seattle, he earned a BA in political science from the University of Michigan and a JD from Cornell Law School where he was an ed...

Carl Pope is the former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club and a veteran leader in the environmental movement. He is now a senior climate advisor to former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the principal advisor at Inside Straight Strategies, where he focuses on the links between sustainability and economic development. A graduate of Harvard College, he is the author of thr...

Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan think-tank and an educational institution seeking better understanding of global issues facing the U. S. and other countries. He was chair of the multiparty negotiations in Northern Ireland in 2013, and he served as a principal advisor and director of policy planning under Secretary of State Colin Powell. H...

Otis Moss III is the senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, former church-home for then-Senator Barack Obama. Since coming to Trinity in 2008, Moss has focused his ministerial work on community advancement, civil rights advocacy, and social justice activism, calling attention to the problems of mass incarceration, environmental justice, and economic inequality. Committed to p...

Frank Bruni is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Since joining the paper in 1995, he has covered a broad range of topics, including American politics, higher education, travel, the arts, gay rights, and more. As a political columnist, he has focused on the nation’s divisiveness and what each citizen can do to seek common ground. He is the author of three bestselling books, including Ambli...

Irshad Manji is the founder of the Moral Courage Project, headquartered at the University of Southern California and committed to helping people identify, express, and act according to their values. In 2013, MCP launched its award-winning You-Tube channel, which features stories of people taking action in pursuit of the common good. MCP’s founder first came to prominence for her work as an Islamic...

Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly columnist for The New York Times, focusing on foreign affairs, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues. He is the author of seven bestselling books, including The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization; The World Is Flat: A Brief History of theTwenty-first Century; and the winner of the National Book Award, From Bei...

Timothy Naftali is associate clinical professor of history and public service at NYU. He was the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum where he curated its nationally acclaimed exhibit on Watergate, and founding director of the Presidential Recording Project at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. An award-winning author, his writings focus on national security, in...

Gene Robinson is a retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. In 2003, he received national attention as the first priest in an openly gay relationship to be consecrated a bishop in a major Christian denomination. Since his retirement in 2013, he has served as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, speaking and writing on the issues of race, poverty, immigration reform...

Glennon Doyle Melton is the founder of the online community Momastery, which draws hundreds of thousands of readers daily to her writings on marriage, motherhood, faith, addiction, and recovery. She is the author of The New York Times bestselling book Carry On, Warrior, and the newly released memoir, Love Warrior. In her books and blog posts, she shares poignant and candid observations about life’...

Rodian Shchedrin - 10/31/91 by westminsterforum

Michael Dorris - 12/03/92 by westminsterforum

Julian Bond - 01/01/91 by westminsterforum

Jessie Allen - 04/02/93 by westminsterforum

Faith Daniels - 07/11/92 by westminsterforum

Eddie Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and Chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America and co-editor with Cornel West of African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. His latest book is Democracy in Black...

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Annenberg Center runs FactCheck, which is committed to examining the accuracy of U. S. political campaign advertisements. She is the author or co-author of fifteen books, including Preside...

Jacob Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is co-author of the bestselling book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. He is a developer of the Economic Security Index (ESI), which measures the share of Americans who experience at least a 25 per...