Berkley Center

Gregg Bloche is a professor of law at Georgetown University. He also currently serves as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. Bloche was Barack Obama's health care advisor during the 2008 presidential campaign. He is also the author of The Hippocratic Myth: Why Doctors Are Under Pressure to Ration Care, Practice Politics, and Compromise Their Promise to Heal (2011). Bloche received his B.A. from Columbia University and his M.D. and J.D. from Yale University. 

Lisa Cahill is the J. Donald Monan Professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College. She previously served as president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Society of Christian Ethics. Cahill has written a number of books including Global Justice, Christology, and Christian Ethics (2013), Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change (2005), and Bioethics and the Common Good (2004). 

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. 

Tracy Fessenden is a professor of religious studies at Arizona State University, where she has also served as associate director and faculty head. Much of her work is centered on the relationships between religion and art, literature, gender, sexuality, secularism, and race. Fessenden is the author of Culture and Redemption (2007) in which she discusses the role of church and state in America. She earned her Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia.

M. Cathleen Kaveny is the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College, with appointments in both the Department of Theology and Law School. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of law, religion, ethics, and morality. She serves on the masthead of Commonweal as a regular columnist.

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, a 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.

Martin S. Lederman is a Professor from Practice at the Georgetown University Law Center. He worked on issues related to religious liberty as deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010, and as an attorney advisor in OLC from 1994-2002. He is a regular contributor to several blogs and web sites, including Balkinization, SCOTUSblog, Opinio Juris, and Slate, writing principally on issues relating to separation of powers, war powers, torture, detention, interrogation, international law, treaties, executive branch lawyering, statutory interpretation, and the First Amendment.