Walker will receive award at Jan. 13 event in Richmond, Va.

December 8, 2010

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Baptist Joint Committee Executive Director J. Brent Walker will receive an award from the Richmond, Va.-based First Freedom Center for his work advancing freedom of conscience and basic human rights for people of all faiths, traditions and cultures.

Walker was named the winner of the Virginia First Freedom Award, one of the three awards given annually by the education organization to recognize extraordinary advocates of religious freedom who have made remarkable contributions. The First Freedom Center also bestows International and National First Freedom Awards.

Walker is both a member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar and an ordained minister. As executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, he works to uphold the historic Baptist principle of religious liberty, striving both to defend the free exercise of religion and to protect against its establishment by government. Walker has been published widely and routinely provides commentary on church-state issues in the national media.

Walker began his tenure at the Baptist Joint Committee in 1989 and became executive director in 1999.  Before joining the BJC, Walker was a partner in the law firm of Carlton, Fields in Tampa, Fla. He left the firm in 1986 to enter Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., where he earned a Master of Divinity degree and was named the most outstanding graduate. Having taught 10 years as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, Walker now serves as an adjunct professor at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.

Previous recipients of the Virginia award include Melissa Rogers of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity Center for Religion and Public Affairs, First Amendment Center Senior Scholar Charles C. Haynes, the Most Rev. Walter F. Sullivan of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, former B’nai B’rith International President Tommy P. Baer and civic leaders James E. Ukrop and Robert S. Ukrop. Other past recipients of First Freedom Awards include former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards and award-winning television documentary producers Bill and Judith Moyers.

The First Freedom Center, whose mission is to advance the basic human rights of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience, will present Walker with the Virginia First Freedom Award on January 13, 2011.

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The Baptist Joint Committee is a nearly 75-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based religious liberty organization that works to defend and extend God-given religious liberty for all, bringing a uniquely Baptist witness to the principle that religion must be freely exercised, neither advanced nor inhibited by government.