Melissa Rogers To Be Appointed To Head President's Faith-Based Office

Melissa Rogers will be appointed to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, according to a press release today from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Rogers is Director, of the Wake Forest University Center for Religion and Public Affairs and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.  She previously served as executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and as general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.  Rogers served as chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships in 2009-10 and was part of a task force that that in March 2010 issued a report on Reform of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that dealt with a number of the difficult church-state issues involved in government funding of faith-based social services. Rogers will succeed Joshua DuBois who resigned as director of the faith-based office last month. (See prior posting.)