First Freedom Awards

2012 INTERNATIONAL RECIPIENT
Canon Andrew White

Dubbed the "Vicar of Baghdad," The Reverend Canon Andrew White is Vicar of St. George's Church, the only Anglican Church in Iraq. White is also President of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

Canon Andrew White has built an extraordinary ministry of reconciliation and conflict mediation in the Middle East. In 1998, he was installed as the Director of International Ministry for the Diocese and Cathedral of Coventry. Soon after, White became the Archbishop of Canterbury's Special Envoy to the Middle East, a very dangerous position in which White's predecessor, Terry Waite, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and held hostage for over four years.

White was actively involved in the Middle East helping to lead the negotiations during the Siege of the Church of the Nativity in 2002 and helping draft the First Alexandria Declaration of the Religious Leaders of the Holy Land, and the Baghdad Religious Accord, both of which were instrumental in bringing together key religious leaders of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths. Since 2005, White has worked almost exclusively as the pastor of St. George's Church in Iraq, and continues his pioneering reconciliation efforts through The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East.

In Iraq, Canon White joins his responsibilities of pastoral care with an aggressive interfaith mission to reduce conflict in an insecure environment. The clinic that White's church sponsors has medical staff from all sects in Iraq and delivers humanitarian relief without regard for the religious or ethnic backgrounds of patients.

White's standing and reputation with the most senior religious leaders in Iraq has helped him reduce not only violence against Iraq's increasingly small Christian community, but reduce violence against all Iraqis as well. White uses interfaith dialogue as part of a conflict arbitration strategy in Iraq, trying to gain the trust of key Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim religious leaders as grounds for mediating and re-establishing political dialogue. Through creating relationships of trust and confidence, White has brought together the leaders of the opposing sectarian factions, and his foundation has sponsored a number of high-level peace talks between them. Meetings chaired by White produced the first ever joint Sunni and Shi'ite religious opinion against violence in Iraq, which was read out in at least 80% of the mosques in Iraq.

2012 NATIONAL RECIPIENT
Marc D. Stern

Associate General Legal Counsel for Legal Advocacy at the American Jewish Committee, Mr. Stern is one of the country's foremost experts on the law of church and state. Throughout his distinguished career, Mr. Stern has demonstrated an unswerving commitment to the democratic and multicultural values foundational to the country's vision and essential to the protection of minority rights. He is a strong supporter of the separation of church and state in public schools, the religious rights of students, and of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act.

During his 33-year tenure at the American Jewish Congress, at which he has served as Acting Co-Executive Director and General Counsel, Mr. Stern prepared amicus curiae briefs and conducted litigation, chiefly in the areas of religious liberty, civil rights and civil liberties, law of war and international human rights. He drafted legislation and gave public testimony on the full range of church-state issues. Under his leadership, the AJCongress produced guidelines used by the Clinton Administration to clarify church-state issues. These guidelines included briefs on religion in the public schools, religion in the federal workplace, and a First Amendment guide to public schools and religious communities.

Stern has published many articles on civil rights and civil liberties, including: Is Religion Compatible With Liberal Democracy? (Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, 1999); The Right to Religious Liberty, Second Edition: The Basic ACLU Guide to Religious Rights (with Barry Lynn and Oliver S. Thomas, 1995); and The Jewish Community and Church-State Litigation (Cardozo School of Law, forthcoming).

A graduate of Yeshiva University and the Columbia University School of Law, he has taught at Yeshiva University and Long Island University.

2012 VIRGINIA RECIPIENT
Robert M. O'Neill

Throughout his career, Robert O 'Neil has demonstrated a distinguished legal and scholarly interest in upholding religious freedom in Virginia and the United States. A prominent scholar of the First Amendment, O 'Neil has argued cases before a number of Federal Courts of Appeals and has testified before Congressional committees and state legislatures on First Amendment issues, including on issues of religious freedom or belief.

After serving for five years as the President of the University of Virginia, O 'Neil founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, a nonpartisan institution created to resist threats to free expression from all sides of the political spectrum. An authority on the First Amendment, O 'Neil has taught courses on the First Amendment and the Arts, Speech and Press, Church and State, and Free Speech in Cyberspace at the University of Virginia Law School, and is a frequently sought after visiting professor and speaker on First Amendment law. O 'Neil currently serves as Chair of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and as a Senior Fellow at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges in Washington, DC.

During his tenure as director at the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, O 'Neil oversaw a variety of projects and programs, including the Ford Foundation s Difficult Dialogues Initiative: a training and resource project to help college faculty, staff and students more effectively promote civic engagement, academic freedom and pluralism in higher education.

O 'Neil is the author of numerous books and articles, including Classrooms in the Crossfire (Indiana University Press, 1981); Free Speech in the College Community (Indiana University Press, 1997); The Rights of Public Employees (second edition, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), The First Amendment and Civil Liability (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Academic Freedom in the Wired World (Harvard University Press, 2007).

2012 DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD
Bishop Peter James Lee

The Right Reverend Peter James Lee is the retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, and currently serves as Interim Dean of The General Theological Seminary in New York City.

Ordained deacon in 1967 and priest in 1968, Bishop Lee served at St. John's Cathedral, Jacksonville, FL, St. John's Church Lafayette Square, across from the White House in Washington, D.C., and at The Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, N.C. In 1984, he was elected and consecrated a bishop for the Diocese of Virginia, the largest diocese in the continental United States and one of the oldest. He served as diocesan bishop from 1985-2009, and was prominent in church and ecumenical relations locally, nationally, and internationally.

In the service of peace, reconciliation, and justice, Bishop Lee has undertaken many significant responsibilities. In 1987, he was appointed by the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church as part of a team to visit the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem during the first Intifada. While there, Lee made fact-finding trips to Jerusalem, Gaza, and Nablus on the West Bank. Subsequent to that trip, Bishop Lee was the founding President of the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. At the same time, he was a board member of the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief (now Episcopal Relief and Development) and Chair of its grants committee. On sabbatical leave in 1993, Lee studied how Anglican churches ministered in contexts of protracted conflict and visited Johannesburg, Jerusalem, and Belfast. While in Johannesburg, he and his wife were received by Nelson Mandela shortly after his release from prison.

Bishop Lee served on the advisory committee to the Anglican Observer at the United Nations, and promoted peace in the Southern Sudan. He was instrumental in establishing the "Triangle of Hope", a cooperative ministry among the Diocese of Liverpool in the Church of England, The Diocese of Kumasi in Ghana and the Diocese of Virginia to create healing and reconciliation in the centuries-old aftermath of the slave trade. Upon his retirement as Bishop of Virginia, Lee served for one year as Interim Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and took an active role in that city's dynamic interfaith and ecumenical relations.

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