James W. Skillen, PhD

Senior Fellow

Jim Skillen directed the Center for Public Justice from July 1981 through September 2009 (serving as president since January 2000).

As Senior Fellow, he will carry forward his research, writing, and mentoring on political thought, statecraft, and public policy. His major writing project for the next number of years focuses on the biblical story as foundation for the human responsibility of governance in God's world, the challenge that story presents to the ways Christians have exercised political responsibility from earliest times to the present, and the profound resources of that story for the continuing work of governance, citizenship, and statecraft in our day.

Among the books he has written or edited are the following:

• The Prospects and Ambiguities of Globalization: Critical Assessment at a Time of Growing Turmoil, editor (Lexington Books, 2009).
• With or Against the World?: America's Role Among the Nations (Rowman & Littlefield and Center for Public Justice, 2005).
• In Pursuit of Justice: Christian-Democratic Explorations (Rowman & Littlefield and Center for Public Justice, 2004).
• A Covenant to Keep: Meditations on the Biblical Theme of Justice (Grand Rapids: CRC Publications and Center for Public Justice, 2000).
• Recharging the American Experiment: Principled Pluralism for Genuine Civic Community (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994).
• The Scattered Voice: Christians at Odds in the Public Square (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990).
• Co-editor with Rockne M. McCarthy, Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), No. 2 in Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, ed. by John Witte, Jr.
• For a bibliography of Skillen's published writings, view Skillen Bibliography.

Skillen received his B.A. from Wheaton College in philosophy and a B.D. from Westminster Theological Seminary. After graduate study in philosophy at the Free University of Amsterdam, he completed his M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, both in political science. He is married to Doreen Skillen, the Center's administrator. They have two children, Jeanene and James.

Email: jim@cpjustice.org
Phone: 410.571.6300, ext. 11