April 7-8, 2006
MSU Kellogg Center
East Lansing, MI

The Conference will be held at the Kellogg Center Auditorium,
Michigan State University, South Harrison Road, East Lansing, Michigan.

The keynote speaker will be Dr. Randall Balmer, Ann Whitney Olin Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University.

Dr. Balmer will be giving a lecture and a panel discussion on the topic of his upcoming book Taking the Country Back: How the Religious Right is Winning the Culture Wars.

Randall Balmer has been teaching at Columbia since earning the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985. A specialist in American religious history, his ten books include A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (1989); Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (1993); and Religion in American Life: A Short History, cowritten with Jon Butler of Yale and Grant Wacker of Duke University.

Professor Balmer has been a visiting professor at Rutgers, Yale, Princeton, Drew, and Northwestern universities and at Union Theological Seminary, where he is an adjunct professor of church history. He has also taught in Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. His commentaries on religion in America have appeared in newspapers across the country, including New York Newsday, the San Diego Times-Union, the Des Moines Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Dallas Morning News, The Nation, and the New York Times. He has written and hosted three documentaries for PBS, one of which earned him an Emmy nomination.

On Saturday, the panel discussion will include Dr. Balmer, as well as Dr. Corwin Smidt and Robert Moore.

Dr. Smidt serves as Professor of Political Science and as Director of the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College.  He is the author, editor, or co-author of 10 books including: Religion as Social Capital: Producing the Common Good; Evangelicalism: The Next Generation; Sojourners in the Wilderness: The Christian Right in Comparative Perspective; The Bully Pulpit: The Politics of Protestant Clergy, and In God We Trust : Religion in American Political Life. Prof. Smidt has served as Executive Director of the Religion and Politics section of the American Political Science Association, as President of Christians in Political Science, and as President of the Michigan Conference of Political Scientists.

Robert Moore is an Instructor in Political Science at Delta College and a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Michigan State University. His dissertation focuses on changes in the political conceptualization of American Evangelicals. He is the author of a forthcoming article on the effects of race, religion and gender on political ambition.

Note: This free conference is open to the public.