Jon Meacham’s book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, has become a bestseller since its publication in early 2006.

Newsweek’s managing editor since 1998, Meacham was named editor of the weekly newsmagazine in October 2006. In this position, he oversees all day-to-day editorial operations of Newsweek and Newsweek.com.

Meacham began his journalism career as a reporter with The Chattanooga Times from 1991-1992. He was an editor for two years at The Washington Monthly. After arriving at Newsweek in January 1995, he became National Affairs editor in June of that year, supervising coverage of politics and breaking news. In 1998, he edited Newsweek’s coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. That coverage was honored with a 1999 National Magazine Award for Reporting.

Meacham also has written cover stories on politics, religion, guns in America, race, and President Ronald Reagan’s death. He played a key role in editing coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks, for which Newsweek received a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. The magazine won the same award again in 2003 for coverage of President Bush and the war in Iraq.

His books also include Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, published in 2003, a chronicle of the wartime relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill. In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement, a literary anthology of the most important non-fiction accounts of the 20th century battle against Jim Crow. He is working on a biography of Andrew Jackson and his White House circle.

Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham is a graduate of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. He is a communicant of St. Thomas Episcopal Church Fifth Avenue and serves on the Vestry of the 180-year-old parish. He also is a member of the Vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street and, in 2005, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Yale University’s Berkeley Divinity School. Meacham lives in New York City with his wife, Keith, director of development at Harlem Day Charter School, and their two children.

Washington Post journalist, author and Washington DC insider, Sally Quinn founded and co-moderates On Faith, a blog from the Washington Post and Newsweek. Co-moderated by Newsweek editor and bestselling author Jon Meacham and hosted by a panel of renowned religious scholars of all denominations, On Faith is the first worldwide, interactive discussion about religion and its impact on global life. While researching an article about religion in Washington prior to the 2000 presidential campaign, Quinn noticed that while religion had an enormous influence on worldwide politics, it was a taboo subject in our nation’s capital. Following 9/11, Quinn’s interest in religion grew and her passion to understand it from a personal and political perspective took on new urgency and focus. Over the past decade, Quinn has pursued a religious education with the same drive and rigor she once gave to politics. Leveraging her rolodex from 30 years as a columnist, she sought out spiritual mentorship from religious leaders and scholars such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Reverend Jim Anderson, Father Bryan Hehir and John Esposito. To gain emotional and spiritual perspective, she traveled to many of the world’s holy sites in Rome, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Tibet, Delhi, Cairo, Ethiopia and Istanbul, and began attending several religious services and ceremonies a week at churches, temples and mosques. Quinn has written four books: “We’re Going to Make You a Star,” about her short-lived experience as a co-anchor for “CBS Morning News”; “Regrets Only,” her first novel; “Happy Endings,” its sequel, and “The Party,” in which Quinn offers an insider’s look at Washington entertaining and a personal view of the value of friendship. She is currently working on a book about religion in Washington.

Susan Jacoby is the author of The Age of American Unreason. She began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post, and has been a contributor to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers for more than 25 years on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union and Russian literature. Jacoby has been the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Jacoby’s other books include Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004); Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. She is working on a book about the relationship between American anti-intellectualism and political polarization, to be published by Pantheon in 2008. Her photo is by Chris Ramir.

The Reverend Gardner Calvin Taylor is senior pastor emeritus of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, N.Y. The “On Faith” panelist led the congregation from 1948 to 1990, as church membership grew by 9,000 and through a 1952 fire that necessitated a $1.7 million rebuilding effort. His role as pastor included oversight of the Concord Baptist Church Elementary School, Concord Nursing Home, Concord Clothing exchange, Concord Federal Credit Union, Concord Seniors Residence and Concord Baptist Christfund. Beyond Brooklyn, Taylor has taken the pulpit from London’s Westminster Hall to China to Copenhagen to Zambia. His publications include How Shall They Preach, The Scarlet Thread, Chariots Aflame and Wisdom. Among his awards and honorary degrees are doctorates from Oberlin College, Leland College, Wake Forest University and Howard University; a Star of Africa, conferred by Liberian President William Tubman; and the rank of Knight Commander, Order of African Redemption, conferred by President William Tolbert of Liberia. President Clinton awarded Taylor the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. Born in Baton Rouge, La., he now resides in North Carolina.