Contact: Jessica Prol, John Jay Institute, 202-420-0554

PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 6, 2012 /Christian Newswire/ -- Douglas C. Minson has been named Vice President for Academic Affairs and Programs at the John Jay Institute. In this capacity he will serve as chief academic officer directing all planning, development, and operations related to educational programs.

A non-profit, intercollegiate organization recently relocated to Philadelphia from Colorado, the Institute’s primary program offerings are tuition-free, residential academic fellowships for college graduates pursuing public service careers. In addition, the Institute provides lectures, executive leadership seminars, and various educational resources.

President and founder Alan R. Crippen II warmly welcomed his friend and former colleague to the Institute, noting that he could "think of no better suited or qualified person for the job."

"I've known Douglas Minson for more than a decade," Crippen said. "For four of those years we worked closely together day to day at the Witherspoon Fellowship in Washington, D.C. His joining the John Jay Institute today feels surreal to me. It's like putting the band back together again."

Prior to joining the John Jay Institute, Minson worked as executive director of academic affairs at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., overseeing and directing national core educational programming and ISI's student journalism initiative.

"My abiding vocational passion is to communicate to a rising generation of leaders an appreciation for the relationship of religion and the free society," said Minson. "The work of the John Jay Institute is invaluable precisely because it not only imparts to students a deeper understanding of the way that religion shapes and informs culture, but because it gives careful consideration to the antecedent conditions that animate and sustain our traditions of liberty and Western Civilization itself."

Minson's professional experience includes positions in para-academic educational program administration and college-level teaching, editing of a public policy journal, and writing for public discourse. He served as the associate rector of the Witherspoon Fellowship and has held editorial management and research positions at Prison Fellowship Ministries in northern Virginia.

Mr. Minson is an alumnus of the College of William and Mary in the Commonwealth of Virginia and received his M.A. and doctoral studies in Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.

He and his wife Jennifer make their home with their four children in historic New Castle, Delaware, where they are active parishioners in St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church.