Kristin Gilger is Emerita Professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, where she served as interim dean, senior associate dean, associate dean, and assistant dean over a 16-year period.

At Cronkite, she also served as director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and led the National Center on Disability and Journalism.

Prior to joining the Cronkite School, she had a 20-year career in newspapers. She was deputy managing editor for news at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, Arizona; managing editor of the Statesman-Journal newspaper in Salem, Oregon; and suburban editor at the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans. She began her career as the farm reporter at the St. Cloud Daily Times in St. Cloud, Minn.

She is the co-author of the book, “There’s No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned About What it Takes to Lead,” published by Rowman & Littlefield. Articles she has written have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, America Magazine, and The Arizona Republic, among others.

She was awarded the Order of the Silver Key for outstanding service to journalism by the Society of Professional Journalists  and the Most Distinguished Alumnae Award from the journalism faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Nebraska.

Patrick Gilger, S.J., a sociologist of religion, studies the way religious practices shape people and how those people shape democratic politics. He is a Jesuit priest and a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago, where he also directs the McNamara Center for the Social Study of Religion.

In 2021 Gilger was awarded the Alfred Schutz Prize in Philosophy and Sociology for his dissertation, which was granted by the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Religion and Society and the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, and he has chapters forthcoming in a number of collected volumes, including A Quarter Century of Public Religions: The Sociology of Jose Casanova. 

A frequent media commentator and contributor in the popular press, Gilger has appeared on NPR, CNN, and Fox, and his writing has appeared in Vox, The Dispatch, and America Magazine, where he serves as Contributing Editor for Culture. In 2021, his essay “Litany for a Pandemic” received a New York Press Club Award.

He holds graduate degrees in philosophy and theology and served as a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.