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Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science. He is a member of the Human Rights Watch Childrens' Rights Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and many other non-governmental organization (NGO) panels on children affected by the war. His work has appeared in Vespertine Press and LIT magazine. He lives in New York City.

Jennifer Gonnerman is the author of *Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett*, which was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. She is a contributing writer at *Mother Jones and New York *magazine. Previously, she was a staff writer at *The Village Voice*, where she covered the criminal justice system for seven years. Her article on which this book is based won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Meyer Berger Award from the Columbia University School of Journalism.

H Bruce Franklin is a cultural historian and the author or editor of nineteen books and more than 300 articles on culture and history published in more than a hundred major magazines and newspapers, academic journals, and reference works. He has given over five hundred addresses on college campuses, on radio and TV shows, and at academic conferences, museums, and libraries, and he has participated in making four films. He has taught at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, and Yale and currently is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark. Before becoming an academic, Franklin worked in factories, was a tugboat mate and deckhand, and flew for three years in the United States Air Force as a Strategic Air Command navigator and intelligence officer. Franklin has published continually on the history and literature of the Vietnam War since 1966, when he became widely known for his activist opposition to the war. His pioneering course on the war and his book MIA Or Mythmaking in America have had a major national impact, and he is co-editor of the widely adopted history text Vietnam and America: A Documented History.

Dwayne Betts is graduate student at Warren Wilson College, where he has been awarded the Holden Fellowship. Shortly after his release from prison, *The Washington Post* published a feature article about him and a book club he founded for at-risk young men called YoungMenRead. He teaches poetry at several public schools in the D.C. metro area, and has had his poetry published in many national literary journals, and contributed an essay to the anthology *It's All Love*.

Professor Hauerwas has sought to recover the significance of the virtues for understanding the nature of the Christian life. This search has led him to emphasize the importance of the church, as well as narrative for understanding Christian existence. His work cuts across disciplinary lines as he is in conversation with systematic theology, philosophical theology and ethics, political theory, as well as the philosophy of social science and medical ethics. He was named "America's Best Theologian" by *Time* magazine in 2001. Dr. Hauerwas, who holds a joint appointment in Duke Law School, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectureship at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland in 2001. His book, *A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic*, was selected as one of the 100 most important books on religion of the 20th century.

Lisa Sowle Cahill grew up primarily in northern Virginia, was educated in California and Chicago, and has taught at Boston College since 1976. She has also been a visiting professor at Georgetown and Yale Universities. She and her husband Larry are the parents of five children.

The Rev. Paul Locatelli, S.J. (born 1938) is a former president and professor of accounting at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. He is a Jesuit priest and a Certified Public Accountant, earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Santa Clara, now Santa Clara University, in 1960 and his doctorate in business at the University of Southern California. On January 16, 2002 he was awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice from Bishop Patrick J. McGrath. During Locatelli's tenure as president, beginning in 1988, academic excellence, admissions standards, endowment funding,have increased substantially. Most notably was Father Locatelli's cutting of the Division 1 football program. Perhaps most importantly, Santa Clara has become a more outward-looking institution. Through the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education, the University has expanded its ability to connect students to communities in Silicon Valley and throughout the world. Locatelli is known affectionately by the students at SCU through a variety of nicknames; such as; "Papa Loc", "Big Poppa P", "P. Loc", and the "Big P". On March 1, 2008, Locatelli announced his intention to resign during the 2008-2009 academic year, after 20 years as university president, in order to take on additional responsibilities in Rome as Secretary for Jesuit Higher Education to promote cooperation among Jesuit higher education institutions.

David McMenamin has been the Director of the PULSE Program and one of its faculty for almost fifteen years. Because they were and are his own questions, the questions "Who am I?" "For what can I hope?" and "How should I live?" have animated his teaching of philosophy since his first days in a classroom. They have especially shaped his teaching in the seminar offered to the PULSE Council, a course which has inspired his current Capstone course. Prior to coming to Boston College twenty years ago, he worked and taught at Villanova University where he was one of the co-founders of their Center for Peace and Justice Education, an interest that has never faded and has led him to his additional "part-time job" here at BC working on conferences and programs connected to the ten-year-old national effort to examine the Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education.

Dwayne Carpenter is a professor of Hispanic studies at Boston College, specializing in medieval Spanish literature and in interreligious relations of that time period. His lecture about the blurring of social and religious boundaries between Sephardic Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain is part of a series of inaugural events for the Jewish studies program at Boston College, of which Carpenter is a founding codirector.