Berkley Center

Shaun Casey is a senior fellow with the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics at the University of Virginia and a Pulaski Institution non-resident fellow. He served as director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and professor of the practice in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2017 to 2021. He previously was U.S. special representative for religion and global affairs and director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He has also served as professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and held positions at the Center for American Progress and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Casey has written on the ethics of the war in Iraq, as well the role of religion in American presidential politics. He is the author of The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (2009) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology (forthcoming, with Michael Kessler); he is writing a book on ethics and international politics tentatively titled Niebuhr’s Children. Casey holds a B.A. from Abilene Christian University, MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and M.Div. and Th.D. in religion and society from Harvard Divinity School.

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, an associate professor of the practice of moral and political theory in the Department of Government, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law. Kessler’s research and writing focus on theology, philosophical and religious ethics, and social, political, and legal theory. He is interested in problems of law and religion, both globally and in the U.S. constitutional context. Kessler is the author of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology, co-edited with Shaun Casey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mystics: Presence and Aporia, co-edited with Christian Sheppard (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He also wrote “Engaging Religion in U.S. Foreign Affairs,” a chapter in the Companion to Religion and Politics in the United States (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Kessler is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

John P. Langan, S.J. was the Cardinal Bernardin Chair in Catholic Social Thought in the Department of Philosophy, Rose Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and a faculty fellow at the Berkley Center at Georgetown University until his death in March 2020. He also taught at Yale Divinity School, Drew University, and Loyola University Chicago. Langan's research interests included ethics and international affairs, especially applications of just war theory; human rights in theory and practice; capital punishment; Catholic social teaching; the place of religion in liberal political thought; and the ethical theories of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. He edited Catholic Universities in Church and Society (1993) and A Moral Vision for America (1998). Langan held an A.B., M.A., and Ph.L. from Loyola University, as well as a B.D. from Woodstock College and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Barbara McGraw is professor of Social Ethics, Law, and Public Life and Director of the Center for Engaged Religious Pluralism at St. Mary’s College of California. Her research interests include religion, moral values, and pluralism in American public life; world religions; and religious pluralism, public policy, and social ethics issues. McGraw is also an advocate for prison inmates of minority faiths and is an Affiliate at the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Her publications include (as editor) Religion and Politics in the United States, Companion Series Volume (forthcoming), as (co-author) Many Peoples, Many Faiths: Women and Men in the World Religions (2013) , and (as author) Rediscovering America's Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America (2003). McGraw earned a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and worked as an attorney in private practice from 1984-91 and is a member of the Bar of the United States Supreme Court.