White House Faith-based Official to speak at Convocation

Melissa Rogers, Special Assistant to the President and Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, will deliver the Wake Forest University School of Divinity’s fall convocation address on Thursday, September 5, 2013.

“The chance to hear from Melissa Rogers gives our students and friends an inside view into the many ways in which religion impinges on national public policy conversations,” said Gail R. O’Day, dean of the School of Divinity. “Melissa’s experience and depth of knowledge in these areas is unparalleled.”

Rogers formerly served as Director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at the School of Divinity and as a nonresident Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies program of The Brookings Institution.

Prior to her time with Wake Forest and Brookings, Rogers was the Executive Director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and General Counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Before her current appointment as Executive Director of  the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Rogers served as the Chair of the inaugural Advisory Council for the office in 2009. She was also named to a subgroup of the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group in 2011.

Rogers co-authored Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court (Baylor University Press, 2009) and led the drafting of Religious Expression in American Life: A Joint Statement of Current Law (published by the School of Divinity in 2010).

Fall Convocation is open to the public and will begin at 11:00am in Wait Chapel on the Wake Forest campus.

Read more about the work of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships at http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ofbnp.

Media Contact: Mark Batten