Berkley Center

Marshall Breger is a professor of law at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. During the George H.W. Bush administration, he served as solicitor of labor, and from 1982 to 1989 he was a special assistant to President Reagan and his liaison to the Jewish community.  Recent books include The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality (2022, ed. with Herbert Reginbogin) and The Contest and Control of Jerusalem’s Holy Sites (2023, with Leonard M. Hammer).

Ed Husain is a British writer and political advisor. Currently, he is a senior fellow and Andrew H. Siegal Professor in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. In addition to publishing three books, Husain served as a senior advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Husain has a B.A. in history from the University of North London and an M.A. in Middle East studies from SOAS, University of London.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is the founder and president of Cordoba House, which aims to establish a compassionate, forward-thinking, and pluralistic American Muslim identity. He has engaged in outreach to moderates of all faith traditions, participating in interfaith dialogue and forging connections of trust and mutual support. He is the author of several books on Islam, including Defining Islamic Statehood: Measuring and Indexing Contemporary Muslim States (2015) and Moving the Mountain: A New Vision of Islam in America (2012).

David Saperstein was the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from January 2015 to January 2017. He is currently is an adjunct professor with the Center for Jewish Civilization in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and previously was a senior research fellow of the Religious Freedom Research Project at the Berkley Center. An ordained rabbi, he served for several decades as the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism representing the public policy positions of the Reform Jewish Movement, the largest segment of American Jewry, to the government and leading the movement’s efforts to strengthen social justice programming in synagogues across North America. Over the years, he headed several national religious coalitions, including co-chairing the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, and served on various national boards, among them the NAACP, People for the American Way, and the World Faiths Development Dialogue. In 1999 and 2000, Saperstein served as the first chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was a crucial part of the faith-based movement that supported passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. A frequent media commentator on religion and public life, Saperstein is also an attorney and taught, for over 30 years, seminars on First Amendment law and Jewish law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Asma T. Uddin is currently an expert advisor on religious liberty to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Inclusive America Project Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and senior scholar at the Freedom Forum Institute. She is also a Berkley Center research fellow. A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Uddin subsequently served as counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty; director of strategy for the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom in Washington, DC; and as a fellow with the Initiative on Security and Religious Freedom at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. In addition to her expertise in religious liberty, Uddin writes and speaks on gender and Islam, and she is the founding editor-in-chief of altmuslimah.com. She can be reached at asmauddin@gmail.com.

Reverend Jim Wallis is a bestselling author, public theologian, and commentator on religion and public life, faith, and politics who serves as the inaugural Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice and leader of the Center on Faith and Justice in the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy; he has been a research fellow at the Berkley Center since 2010. Wallis is the founder and ambassador of Sojourners, a progressive Christian grassroots movement that advocates spirituality and social change in America. His publications include Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus (2019); America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America (2016); The (Un)Common Good: How the Gospel Brings Hope to a World Divided (2014); On God's Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn't Learned about Serving the Common Good (2013); and Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy (2010).

John Witte, Jr. is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law, Alonzo L. McDonald Distinguished Professor, and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. His research focuses on religious liberty, marriage and family law, human rights, and legal history. He was part of the Christianity and Freedom Project with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Research Project.