Berkley Center

Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.

Elizabeth M. Bucar is an associate professor of philosophy and religion and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University. She is a religious ethicist who studies sexuality, gender, and moral transformation within Islamic and Christian traditions and communities. Bucar's publications include, among others, Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (2017), The Islamic Veil: A Beginner's Guide (2012), and Creative Conformity: the Feminist Politics of U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shi'i Women (2011). She has also written for popular media outlets such as the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and Teen Vogue. She previously served as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and as a Berkley Center postdoctoral fellow in 2006. She holds a B.A. in government from Harvard University, M.A. in religious studies from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. in religious ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

José Casanova is one of the world's leading scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. He is also professor emeritus at Georgetown University, where he previously taught in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. During 2017 he was the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the U.S. Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, where he worked on a book manuscript on Early Modern Globalization through a Jesuit Prism. He has published works on a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology. Casanova is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Jocelyne Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics and is director of research at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where she previously was an associate professor of the practice of religion, peace, and conflict resolution in the Department of Government. She is the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School. Former president of the European Academy of Religion, her work on religion, political violence, and conflict resolution has garnered recognition and awards from numerous international organizations such as the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs and the Royal Society for Arts in the United Kingdom. She is a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University's Institute for Religion, Politics and Society. She teaches on contemporary Islam and politics at Harvard Divinity School and directs the Islam in the West program. Cesari is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Jerome Copulsky, a Berkley Center research fellow, specializes in modern Western religious thought, political theory, and church/state issues. He co-directed Uncivil Religion: January 6, 2021, a digital resource created through a collaboration of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and the University of Alabama's Department of Religious Studies. From 2016 to 2017, he was the American Academy of Religion/Luce Fellow and senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State's Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He is the author of American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024). His scholarly work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, Political Theology, and Perspectives on Political Science, with essays in Political Theology for a Plural Age (2013) and Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (2013). His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, Washingtonian, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Review of Books, and Religion Dispatches. Copulsky earned a B.A from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Patrick J. Deneen is the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. From 2005 to 2012 he was an associate professor of government and held the Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. 

Jean Bethke Elshtain was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago from 1996 until her death in August 2013. She also had appointments at Chicago in political science and the Committee on International Relations. Her works have focused on the intersections of religious ethics, war, the family, feminist theory, democracy, and modern political thought. Elshtain had taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Vanderbilt University, with visiting professor positions at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University; she also held the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University. Among her hundreds of publications are Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003) and Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (2000); her 2006 Gifford lectures were published under the title Sovereignties: God, State, and Self (2008). She was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. Elshtain earned her B.A. and M.A. from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973.

Eric Gregory is Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where he joined the faculty in 2001. His teaching and research interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, bioethics, and the role of religion in public life.  In 2007 he was awarded Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.  After graduating from Harvard, Gregory studied theology at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate in religious studies from Yale University.  He is author of the book Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago, 2008), as well as articles on religion and social ethics including “Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls” (Journal of Religious Ethics, 2007).