American Solidarity Party?

Dr. George Yancey is a Professor at the Institute for Studies of Religion and Sociology at Baylor University. He has published several research articles on the topics of institutional racial diversity, racial identity, atheists, cultural progressives, academic bias, and anti-Christian hostility. His books include Compromising Scholarship (Baylor University Press) a book that explores religious and political biases in academia, So Many Christians, So Few Lions (Rowman and Littlefield) a book that assesses Christianophobia in the United States, Beyond Racial Gridlock (Intervarsity Press) a Christian book which articulates a mutual obligations approach to racial issues, and, with Michael Emerson, Transcending Racial Barriers (Oxford University Press) an academic book that also articulates a mutual obligations approach. He has a forthcoming book, One Faith No More: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America (New York University Press) which examines the schism between conservative and progressive Christians. He is currently studying the effectiveness of homeless programs and exploring the role collaborative communication can play in dealing with the racial divide in the United States.

Charles Marohn – known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues – is the Founder and President of Strong Towns and the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, along with multiple other books. He is a civil engineer and a land use planner with two decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota. Marohn advises the American Solidarity Party on issues of land use, transportation, infrastructure, and public investment.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of two books: Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. She has worked a pretty wide range of jobs, from data journalism to consumer banking policy to remittances to Catholic campus ministry. She lives with her husband in New Jersey.

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012), Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014), and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Relevant, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, Religion News Service, Books and Culture, and other places. She is a founding member of The Pelican Project, a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum, a Senior Fellow at the International Alliance for Christian Education, a Senior Fellow at the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture, and is a former member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. She and her husband live on a 100-year old homestead in central Virginia with sundry horses, dogs, and chickens. And lots of books.

Dr. Camosy teaches Christian ethics at Fordham University. He is a member of Equal Rights Institute’s Board of Advisors, a columnist for Religion News Service, and author of five books. Dr. Camosy’s early work, and the focus of his first book on the treatment of critically ill newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit, has focused on how traditional questions in bioethics should not be artificially distinguished from questions of social and distributive justice. His second book engages the first sustained and fruitful conversation between Peter Singer and Christian ethics—and once again considers a wide variety of bioethical and social issues. His fourth book argues that our polarized public discourse hides the fact that most Americans actually agree on the major issues at stake in abortion morality and law. And his most recent book tries to bridge the gap between “social justice liberals” and “pro-life conservatives” by thinking about how we might support the most vulnerable via a new understanding of the “Consistent Ethic of Life” for the 21st Century.

Susannah Black is an editor at New Polity, Mere Orthodoxy, Plough Quarterly, The Davenant Institute’s journal Ad Fontes, and Fare Forward. She’s a founding editor of Solidarity Hall and is on the boards of the Distributist Review, The Davenant Institute, and The Simone Weil Center. Her writing has appeared in First Things, The Distributist Review, Solidarity Hall, Providence, Amherst Magazine, Front Porch Republic, Ethika Politika, The Human Life Review, The American Conservative, Mere Orthodoxy, Fare Forward, and elsewhere.

A Co-founder of Democrats for Life of America, Lois coordinated the activities of the Texas state chapter for more than two decades. She is also on the Board of the Consistent Life Network and has served several terms on the Choose Life license plate grants committee for the office of the Texas Attorney General. A long-time member of Feminists for Life, she is the author of American Proverbs About Women (her doctoral dissertation), which examines how words and expressions impact our culture, particularly in terms of sexist attitudes. A retired educator, Lois taught or was an administrator at both the high school and college levels. Married, with a daughter and two step-sons, she continues occasional work as a writer and editor while staying active as a volunteer for her church and community.

Patrick Deneen is the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches political and constitutional theory, and is the Director of the University’s Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life. He has previously held teaching and research positions at Princeton University and Georgetown University and served as Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018.

As Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, Daniel Philpott is a scholar of religion and global politics and of Christian ethics. Major themes in Philpott’s work include reconciliation in global politics, religious freedom, the role of the Catholic Church in global politics, sovereignty, and the justice of self-determination. He is currently writing a Christian theory of justice. His books include Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today and Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame, the Hertie School of Governance, and the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin, with the latter two on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Amb. Oscar de Rojas has had a 40-year-long public-service career in the area of global affairs. He served for 27 years in the Venezuelan Civil and Foreign Services, first working on national development projects and moving on to hold senior-level posts in the diplomatic service, including France, Switzerland, and the missions to the United Nations in New York and Geneva. In 1999 he joined the United Nations and worked for ten years as Director of the Financing for Development Office in the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs. This office was responsible for putting together two major summit-level world conferences on issues related to international cooperation and development. In 2009 Mr. de Rojas joined academia, taking the position of Director of Global Partnerships at Long Island University in Brookville, New York, where he concurrently taught courses in Development Economics and International Studies. In 2000 Pope John Paul II awarded Amb. de Rojas the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great and, in 2003, appointed him as an Advisor to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, an entity devoted to the study, development and application of the Social Teachings of the Church, where he served two 4-year terms. Mr. de Rojas also is a Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, an organization dedicated to assisting to poor and sick people around the world, to which he volunteers a lot of his time. Mr. de Rojas has been active in Christian Democratic political organizations all of his life and, upon becoming a U.S. citizen in 2006, was a founding member of the “Christian Democratic Union” of the United States. In 2018 CDU-USA took the decision to discontinue its activities, encouraging its members to join the American Solidarity Party. Amb. de Rojas has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Master’s degrees in Economics and in International Affairs from Columbia University, and is fluent in English, Spanish and French. He is now retired and lives with his wife Patricia in Miami.

Erick Schenkel, Ph.D., serves as Executive Director of Jesus Film Project®. He has been working in ministry since he graduated from Harvard College in 1974 and subsequently led a team that established a church and elementary school in Massachusetts. During his time leading this church, Dr. Schenkel returned to Harvard and obtained two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in the Study of Religion. After 25 years of pastoral ministry, Dr. Schenkel and his wife Elizabeth sensed God’s calling to plant churches overseas. With four of their five children, they moved to Central Asia, built relationships and showed the JESUS film hundreds of times in their home. While in Central Asia, Dr. Schenkel served in the fields of education and economic development for 11 years, working as a church planter from 1996 to 2007 and then served for 5 years in Central Asia as a Strategy Director for Campus Crusade for Christ working alongside Jesus Film Project teams. Dr. Schenkel’s works include The Joys and the Hopes: An American Evangelical Discovers Catholic Social Teaching and Everyone, Everywhere: Glimpses of God’s Global Work Through People Like You.

Joe Grabowski is the Vice-President of Evangelization and Mission for the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He formerly served as Executive Director of the International Organization for the Family and Director of Communications for the National Organization for Marriage. Joseph has a B.A. in Philosophy from Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, and an M.A. in English from Marquette University. Joe’s writings on traditional marriage and family, as well as on Catholic Social Teaching and the writings of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, have appeared in The Catholic Herald, Our Sunday Visitor, The Stream, Gilbert Magazine, Ethika Politika, The Distributist Review, and elsewhere. He lives outside of Philadelphia.

Stephen M. Bainbridge is the William D. Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses in corporate law. He has also taught at the University of Illinois College of Law, Harvard Law School, LaTrobe University in Melbourne, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

Bainbridge’s work focuses on the law and economics of public corporations, but he has also written extensively on the intersection of Catholic Social Thought, corporate governance, law, and economics. He has written over 100 law review articles and 20 books (some in multiple editions).

In 2008, 2011, and 2012, Bainbridge was named by the National Association of Corporate Directors' Directorship magazine to its list of the 100 most influential people in the field of corporate governance. According to Gregory Sisk and Brian Leiter’s rankings of law professors by scholarly impact, Professor Bainbridge was the third most-frequently cited scholar in corporate and securities law for the period 2013-2017. In SSRN.com’s ranking of the top 3000 legal authors by all-time downloads, Bainbridge is ranked 10th.

Dr. C.C. Pecknold is an internationally recognized scholar of Augustine’s theological and political thought, a professor of theology at The Catholic University of America, and Resident Theologian at The Basilica of Saint Mary in Alexandria, the oldest Catholic parish in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

An internationally recognized scholar of Augustine’s theological and political thought, Pecknold has authored or edited five books — including “Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History” and “The T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology” —and authored dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. He edits the Sacra Doctrina series for CUA Press with Fr. Thomas Joseph White O.P.

Chris Butler is a pastor and organizer from the Southside of Chicago where he lives with his wife, Aziza and six wonderful children. Pastor Chris leads Chicago Embassy Church Network, a mission-based network church in America’s third largest city and is an experienced organization builder. Pastor Chris got a very early start in community organizing when he joined a small neighborhood organization in Chicago’s South Austin community at age 12. By age 18, Chris had completed two organizing internships and launched his first advocacy organization, organizing students to improve their schools.

Pastor Chris has organized in several locations and situations. He organized youth and young adults in Chicago’s Southland for then State Senator Barack Obama’s 2004 Senate Campaign, led the Field Operations for A+ Illinois (the organization blazed a trail for school funding reform in the state) and spearheaded organizing efforts to improve school choice in Chicago through New Schools Chicago. In 2013, Chris founded Citizen Consulting Group, an organizing and communications consulting firm where he helped launch organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington State.

In 2016, Pastor Chris was installed as the Senior Leader at Chicago Embassy Church. Under his leadership, the congregation relocated to the Hyde Park community where it had been established in 1985. In just over 5 years under Pastor Chris’ leadership, CEC completed its first missional church plant - The Gathering at McDonalds (in Jackson Park) - and established a campus in suburban South Holland.

Having worked across the spectrum of organizations and types of engagement, Chris often lends insight and leadership on organization building and civic engagement to elected officials, organization leaders, community organizers, and other leaders in the faith community. Pastor Chris co-authored “Compassion and Conviction: The AND Campaigns Guide To Faithful Civic Engagement” with Justin Giboney and Micheal Wear.

Rachel MacNair is vice-president of the Consistent Life Network (CLN). She served as president of Feminists for Life of America from 1984-1994. Among the many books she’s authored are Achieving Peace in the Abortion War and Peace Psychology: An Introduction. She has also co-edited the books ProLife Feminism: Yesterday and Today, Consistently Opposing Killing, and Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion. She’s the Project Coordinator for CLN’s campaign -- Grassroots Defunding: Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood and for Peace and Life Referendums.