Westminster Town Hall Forum

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 the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, which was established by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution. He collaborated with Nelson Mandela on Mandela’s autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, and he was a producer of the documentary film Mandela. He is the author of the book Mandela’s Way.

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 promotes the importance of early brain and language development in children, she is the author of the new book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. She is the recipient of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation’s Humanism in Medicine Award and the Heinz Award for the Human Condition.

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 Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. After clerking, he worked for six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C., where he founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school serving at-risk youth who have been incarcerated or have dropped out of school. The school now provides education for young people inside the District of Columbia’s juvenile prison.

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 preaching a message of love and justice, he developed a curriculum for young people entitled My Life Matters in the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. A graduate of Morehouse College, he holds a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School and a Doctor of Ministry from Chicago Theological Seminary. His books include, among others, Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair.

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 reformer, and her book The Trouble with Islam was an international bestseller. A graduate of the University of British Columbia with a degree in the history of ideas, she describes herself as African by birth, Canadian by citizenship, and American by immersion. She is an advocate for human rights, social justice, diversity, and inclusion.