Visiting Speakers
The initiative in Religion, Journalism and Democracy hosts national journalists and editors whose work in covering religion and its relationship to contemporary social and political movements is exemplary. Visiting speakers will deliver lectures, meet with faculty and students at Cronkite and the Tempe campus, and confer with scholars with overlapping researching interests.
Rozina Ali is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker and a contributing editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, where she served as senior editor from 2013 to 2015. From 2010 to 2013, she was deputy editor for management thinking at the Economist Intelligence Unit in New York. Her work focuses on how counterterrorism policies have affected Muslim Americans, national security, and Middle East and South Asia, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera America, Foreign Policy, Salon, and others.
Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently serves as the Chair of the Council of Graduate Studies in Religion, and in 2005 was the President for the Society of Pentecostal Studies. Butler is the author of Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making A Sanctified World on The University of North Carolina Press. She has contributed opinion pieces on contemporary politics, religion, and race to The Guardian, Washington Post, and the New York Times, as well as offered media commentary on the BBC, MSNC, CNN, and ABC.
Amy Sullivan is a Chicago-based journalist who has covered religion and politics as an editor at TIME, Yahoo, the Washington Monthly and National Journal. She currently co-hosts the podcast, “Impolite Company,” and contributes opinion and news analysis to outlets including NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic. Her first book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (2008), was recognized for seeing long before others had that “what was happening in the religious world mattered enormously to the political world.” She holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School, and has done advanced graduate work in religious studies at Princeton.
Daniel Burke is CNN Religion Editor, where he writes in-depth news and analysis pieces while editing its award-winning religion section, CNN Belief. Known for his unusually in-depth and nuanced reporting on moral and ethical questions, his work also covers a wide variety of topics from how religion affects everyday life to understanding the relationship of religion and politics. With a dual master’s degree in journalism and comparative religion from Columbia University, Burke has been a reporter and editor for Religion News Service and been honored multiple times by the American Academy of Religion for best in-depth reporting on religion.
Peter Beinart is professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and contributing editor to The Atlantic. He is also a senior columnist at The Forward, political commentator at CNN, and a non-resident fellow at The Foundation for Middle East Peace. Beinart is the author of two books on the history of American foreign policy, The Good Fight(2006) and The Icarus Syndrome (2010) that have been lauded by critics and foreign policy experts including Fareed Zakaria, Jon Meacham, and Steven Coll. His third book, The Crisis of Zionism (2012), was called “brave and important” by Anne Marie Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation. In addition to The Atlantic, Beinart has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Die Zeit, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He lectures frequently around the country and has appeared on a variety of news and commentary shows, including “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and “Meet the Press.”
