Speakers

Colin Duriez is a well-known Tolkien and Inklings scholar. In 1994, he won the Clyde S. Kilby Award for his research on the Inklings. He has authored numerous articles and books including The C. S. Lewis Encyclopedia, Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings: A Guide to Middle Earth, and The Inklings Handbook. Duriez was featured discussing Tolkien on the Lord of the Rings extended DVD edition. A former editor for InterVarsity, he now devotes his time to speaking and writing.

For more than forty years, Nigel Goodwin has ministered internationally to Christians in the arts through Genesis Arts Trust, a ministry he originally established in London. Trained as an actor in the Royal Academy, Nigel lived and studied with Francis Schaeffer following his conversion. He has touched untold thousands through his unfathomable gift of love.

Joshua Hays is a Research Associate for Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He holds a bachelor's degree in Christian ethics from Union University and a Master of Divinity from Samford University. Hays is the author of A True Hope: Jedi Perils and the Way of Jesus (Smyth & Helwys, 2015), co-author of The Angola Prison Seminary: Effects of Faith-Based Ministry on Identity Transformation, Desistance, and Rehabilitation (Routledge, forthcoming), and the co-editor of the annual Proceedings of the Christianity in the Academy Conference.

Rebecca Poe Hays is a Conyers Scholar at Baylor University where she is completing a PhD in Hebrew and Hebrew Bible. A graduate of Union University with an MDiv degree from Beeson Divinity School of Samford University, Hays has published a number of articles and chapters that deal with the significance of stories in the Bible. She has co-edited C. S. Lewis Remembered and The Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Walter Hooper served as private secretary to C. S. Lewis in the final year of his life and, since Lewis's death, has served as the Literary Advisor to the C. S. Lewis Estate. In this capacity, he has edited dozens of Lewis's essays, poems, articles, and lectures. Among other notable works, Hooper is the editor of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis and the author of C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor, and serves as Co-Director for the Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published twenty-four books, which have been translated into ten languages. Some recent titles include The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity (2002), The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (2006), The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia - and How It Died (2008), and The Great and Holy War: How World War I became a Religious Crusade.

Professor of English and former dean of Montreat College, Don King edits the Christian Scholar's Review. He has written several important critical works on C. S. Lewis and the important women in his life; including C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse, Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter, and Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman.

C. Ben Mitchell, PhD, serves as provost and holds the Graves Chair of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Tennessee. He also serves as the editor of Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics and of Renewing Minds: A Journal of Faith, Learning, and Culture. He is the co-author of Biotechnology and the Human Good, Ethics and Moral Reasoning: A Student's Guide, and Does God Need Our Help?: Cloning, Assisted Suicide, & Other Challenges.

Holly Ordway is a poet, academic, and Christian apologist. She is the chair of the Department of Apologetics and director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. Her work focuses on imaginative and literary apologetics, with special attention to C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Ordway is the author of Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms and is a published poet. She is the Charles Williams Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies, and is currently working on a book on Tolkien and modern fantasy.

Hal Poe serves as Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University. He has published sixteen books on how the gospel intersects with culture; including The Gospel and Its Meaning, Christianity in the Academy, and Christian Witness in a Postmodern World. He is the author of numerous articles on C. S. Lewis and co-edited with Rebecca Poe Hays C. S. Lewis Remembered. Founder of The Inklings Fellowship, Poe also wrote The Inklings of Oxford.

Craig Stewart has served as CEO of The Warehouse in Cape Town, South Africa since 2002. This ministry works among the poor of Cape Town and the surrounding area in a variety of ways that moves beyond mere acts charity to sustainable community development by working through the churches and its leaders. Craig is a popular speaker in Africa and the United States and is in demand as a visiting professor at a number of universities.

Michael Ward is a Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall in the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Narnia Code and Planet Narnia and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Ward has served as the Warden of the Kilns, Lewis' home in Oxford, and currently serves on the faculty of Houston Baptist University in their MA in Apologetics program.

Ashley Zauderer serves as the Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the John Templeton Foundation. She holds the Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland where she specialized in the study of merging galaxies. Before joining Templeton, she held an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and worked as part of the Berger Time Domain Research Group. Her current research focus is observational radio astronomy applied to explosive astrophysical transients including supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and tidal disruption flares, co-authoring 45 publications to-date. Her interest in science-faith topics has led her to involvement in curriculum development and as a member of Executive Council of the American Scientific Affiliation.

Cindy Zudys comes from a long family tradition of story tellers and has been telling stories herself all her life. She believes that even in the twenty-first century with its high dependence on technology, we are unavoidably connected to the Earth, the natural world, and our corporate past. This is reflected in her stories. Many of her tales evoke an affinity with writers who have a strong feeling for places, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth.