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"I'd attribute to Nina the perseverance to keep pulling people together until we could get things passed," McDonnell says. "Nina is very driving, very focused," Marshall adds. "This is a person who wants to get something done and is going to push and shove and make sure it does get done."

Shea spent her early years in Yardley, a small Pennsylvania town on the Delaware River. Her father, a dentist, was Catholic; her mother, Presbyterian. Asked if her driven personality was evident then, Shea chuckles: "My mother tells me I was docile as a child."

Shea first became interested in human rights while attending Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, a community service-oriented high school in Princeton, New Jersey. One early inspiration was one of her teachers: Barbara Boggs Sigmund—daughter of the powerful Democratic Louisiana Representatives Hale and "Lindy" Boggs.

During her student days at Smith College, Shea says she was a "lapsed Catholic" and "moderate liberal." She majored in economics, then obtained her law degree from American University in Washington, D.C. She then headed to New York to work as program director for the International League for Human Rights, established by ACLU founder Roger Baldwin.

In the early 1980s, the League sent her to El Salvador, where clandestine death squads were abducting and killing people by the thousands. "I was investigating disappearances and talking to families whose loved ones were being tortured and killed," Shea says. "It was a very intimidating environment." On one prison visit, a notorious police official told Shea and her delegation to step inside a dark cell. He locked the door, then after an appropriate pause, jokingly opened it. The experience impressed upon Shea the protections her American citizenship afforded. "We could speak out when the locals could not," she says. But she still recognized what she was doing was risky: When she then went to Nicaragua to talk to civic leaders to uncover human-rights abuses, she knew she was followed by the secret police.

In Latin America, she started to become disillusioned with what she calls her colleagues' "double standard on human rights."

"In my secular days, I really believed that the human-rights movement was altruistic," says Shea, a liberal Democrat when she joined the League. "Then I saw that when governments on the Left started abusing human rights, human rights were no longer important." The last straw came when superiors began pressuring her to suppress her report on Sandinista atrocities. "I decided to dig in," Shea says. "Somebody had to stand up for these principles."

During these years, her spiritual life began to blossom. For a long period of about 15 years during college, law school, and at her job with the International League for Human Rights, she "really did not know any believing Christians," Shea says.

During her work in the '80s for the League, Shea began meeting Christians whose lives she describes as "a great witness." Shea recalls one Pentecostal preacher in the Dominican Republic living in a shack next to a garbage dump. "He was there, in the garbage dump, amidst the open sewers, trying to give dignity to people's lives," Shea says.

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September 2005, Vol. 49, No. 9