Berkley Center

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.

Abdolkarim Soroush is a researcher at the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies in Iran. One of the Muslim world's most influential thinkers for his analysis of the relationship between religious and secular knowledge and authority, Soroush has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. In 2005, Time listed him as one of the world’s 100 most influential individuals. A good introduction to his numerous publications is Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writing of Abdolkarim Soroush (2000, translated and edited by Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri). Born in Tehran in 1945, Soroush studied pharmacy in Iran before moving to the United Kingdom to continue his studies in the philosophy of science and history at Chelsea College. Soroush returned to Iran after the fall of the shah and published Knowledge and Value (Danesh va Arzesh), the first of many books relating Islam to the challenges of democracy and modernity. He was appointed director of the Islamic Culture Group at Tehran’s Teacher Training College. In 1983, disillusioned with the course of the Iranian revolution, Soroush resigned from the Culture Revolution Council and moved to the Institute for Cultural Research and Studies, with which he remains affiliated. He was a visiting fellow and scholar in residence with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs during the spring 2008 semester.