Making Men Moral Conference in Malibu

Paul J. Contino is Distinguished Professor in Great Books at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, where he has been twice granted the Howard A. White Award for Teaching Excellence.  In 2001 he co-edited and introduced Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (Northwestern UP).  He has published a number of essays on Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as essays on Zhuangzi, Dante Alighieri, and Jane Austen as well as a number of contemporary Catholic authors such as Andre Dubus, Tobias Wolff, and Alice McDermott.  His book Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism: Finding Christ among the Karamazovs (Cascade, 2020) has been published in Russian translation (Academic Studies Press 2023), and was named a finalist for both the Lilly Fellows and Christianity and Literature book awards.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde is the Howard Marks Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets and co-director of the Business, Economic, and Financial History Project. He is also a visiting professor at Cambridge University a fellow at Collegium Institute, a non-resident fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research. He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society.

He is editor of the International Economic Review. In the past, he has served on the editorial board of several other learned journals, and he currently serves as an officer in several academic societies.

He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, including American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies, and edited and co-authored several books.

His research focuses on macroeconomics, econometrics, and economic history. Among other topics, he is interested in the role of monetary and fiscal policy, the sources of economic growth, the importance of the rule of law, and the foundations of market economies.

Dr. Christina Hinton leads the Human Flourishing Program’s work in education. At Harvard, she leads research on character skills, loving relationships, and flourishing among children, adolescents, educators and parents internationally. In addition, she leads the Evidence-Based Parenting for Flourishing Families initiative. Dr. Hinton is also the founder and CEO of Research Schools International (RSI), which has carried out over 50 research and professional development projects to promote character skills and flourishing in schools across 70 countries. She lectures internationally and has delivered keynotes in over 35 countries. Prior to her current roles, Dr. Hinton was a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Education, lecturing on neuroscience and education and social-emotional learning. In addition, she worked in multilateral diplomacy and international policymaking at the OECD’s Center for Educational Research and Innovation and UNICEF’s Early Childhood Development unit. She was also a research fellow at Sesame Workshop. Dr. Hinton completed her doctorate and master’s at Harvard in education, neuroscience, and child development, and her bachelors at Swarthmore in neuroscience and education.

J. A. T. Smith (PhD, UCLA) is associate provost, associate professor of english, and associate director of the Center for Faith and Learning

Smith works on the intersection of language and learning in late medieval England with an emphasis on the theological writings of the reformist educator, Bishop Reginald Pecock. She most recently published The Book of Faith: A Modern English Translation (UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020). She is currently working on a manuscript entitled, The Book of Reginald Pecock, which seeks to reconstruct Pecock's corpus (even those texts that were burnt in the aftermath of his conviction of heresy). 

When not working on medieval manuscripts, Professor Smith also researches in the areas of digital pedagogy and rhetoric and is developing a Christian pedagogical app called The Vineyard. Since 2021, she has served as the Media Officer for the Medieval Association of the Pacific. She is also the founding convener for the Pepperdine Dialogue Dinners, a program intended to foster intellectual friendship among faculty through close reading and robust conversations. 

Byron Johnson is the founding director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion and a faculty affiliate of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. He is a faculty scholar in the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University; senior fellow with the Witherspoon Institute (Princeton, NJ); senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute (Indianapolis, IN); and a senior advisor at the Religious Freedom Institute (Washington, DC). 

Johnson is a former member of the Coordinating Council for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (Presidential Appointment). He has been the principal investigator on grants from private foundations as well as the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and the United States Institute for Peace, totaling more than $80 million. He is the author of more than 200 journal articles, monographs, and books. He is recognized as a leading authority on the scientific study of religion, the efficacy of faith-based organizations, and criminal justice. Recent publications have examined the impact of faith-based programs on offender treatment, drug addiction, recidivism reduction and prisoner reentry. These topics are the focus of his book More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How It Could (2011).

Johnson directs the Program on Prosocial Behavior, which examines the ways in which religion impacts key behaviors like volunteerism, generosity, and purpose. These topics are covered in four recent books, The Angola Prison Seminary (2016), which evaluates the influence of a Bible College and inmate-led congregations on prisoners serving life sentences; The Quest for Purpose: The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life (2017), which examines the link between religion and finding purpose and meaning, and the subsequent link to academic integrity; The Restorative Prison: Essays on Inmate Peer Ministry and Prosocial Corrections (2021), which looks at the empirical evidence in support of the link between religion and the emerging subfield of positive criminology; and Objective Religion: Competition, Tension, Perseverance (2021), which examines the factors related to the resilience of religion. 

Micah Watson is the Paul Henry Chair for Christianity and Politics at Calvin University. He is the co-author of C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (Cambridge), and Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics (IVP Academic). He is a native of the great golden state of California, but is happy to call Grand Rapids, Michigan home along with his wife Julie and their five children.

Andrew M. Yuengert is a professor of economics and the Blanche Seaver Chair of Social Science at Pepperdine University. His research crosses the boundaries between economics, moral philosophy, and Catholic theology. His latest book is Catholic Social Teaching in Practice: Exploring Practical Wisdom and the Virtues Tradition (Cambridge, 2023). Previous books include The Boundaries of Technique (2004) and Approximating Prudence (2012). He has been a fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and a professor at the Catholic University of America. He current co-directs a monthly international online seminar on Economics and Catholic Social Thought for the Catholic Research Economist Discussion Organization (CREDO) and the Lumen Christi Institute. He holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University.