Berkley Center

Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and serves as vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he is a professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE). His newest books are Degenerations of Democracy (2022, with Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor) and The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (2022, edited with Benjamin Fong).

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.

Daniel Deckers is a journalist and editor in the politics section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a leading German daily, where he directs the essay section “Die Gegenwart” (“The Present”). He writes widely on topics ranging from the Catholic Church, society and politics in Latin America, and national and international drug policy. Deckers studied Catholic theology at the University of Freiberg, Switzerland, and at the University of Bonn. He continued his theological studies in Bogota, Colombia, where he also worked on social development projects, and received his PhD from the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy in Frankfurt in 1991. He has worked at the FAZ since 1993.

Peter Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. His research and teaching cover a wide range of topics relating to political economy, security, and culture in world politics. Katzenstein has authored and edited more than thirty books, including most recently: Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in World Politics (2010) and Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives (2008). He served as the President of the American Political Science Association from 2008-09 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin.

Dr. Roland Loeffler is the head of the Herbert Quandt Foundation’s “Trialog der Kulturen” program. Established in 1996, the program seeks to understand and advance intercultural dialogue between the three Abrahamic faiths. Since its inception, the program has supported a variety of projects in education, media, and interreligious cooperation. Under Loeffler’s direction, the Quandt Foundation’s Israel-Palestine scholarship program has successfully built bridges between Germany and the Middle East. In his book Protestants in Palestine (2008), he dealt with Protestant institutions in Palestine in the context of the cultural foreign policy of Germany and Britain during the interwar period. Loeffler studied theology and philosophy in Tubingen, Berlin, Cambridge, and Marburg and has also worked as a freelance journalist since 1997.

Mary Ann Meyers is a writer and Senior Fellow at the John Templeton Foundation, where she heads the Humble Approach Initiative, a program that brings together scientists, philosophers, and theologians in international symposia. She is also a secretary and a director of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Before coming to Templeton, she served as a Secretary of the University of Pennsylvania for more than a decade and taught American religious history. She subsequently served as the President of the Annenberg Foundation, and earlier in her career, she taught at Haverford College. Her books include Art, Education and African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy (2004) and A New World Jerusalem: The Swedenborgian Experience in Community Construction (1983). Meyers graduated magna cum laude from Syracuse University and holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Minkenberg is the professor of comparative political science at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). He has taught at the universities of Gottingen and Heidelberg as well as Cornell University and Columbia and was the 2007-2010 Max Weber Chair for German and European Studies at New York University. Minkenberg’s research has focused on the contemporary radical right in Western Europe and the United States, as well as religion and politics in Western democracies, issues of migration, and xenophobia. He has been a member of the American Political Science Association since 1984 and is a member of the Standing Group “Extremism and Democracy” in the European Consortium of Political Research. He also serves on the editorial board of the journal Comparative European Politics.