Berkley Center

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies in American University's School of International Service and a trustee for the World Faiths Development Dialogue. Ahmed belonged to Pakistan's senior civil service and was Pakistan's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Ireland. Ahmed is a member of the Washington Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council and is a member of the International Advisory Board for The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at The Queen’s University of Belfast. Ahmed consistently writes for a number of popular news publications around the globe, including a weekly column in the Daily Times, a leading English-language Pakistani newspaper.

Karen Armstrong is a leading expert on the Abrahamic religions and author on comparative religion. In 2008, Armstrong developed the “Charter for Compassion,” an interfaith initiative that seeks to apply shared moral principles to foster global interreligious understanding, and she has participated in the Alliance of Civilizations High-level Group.

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.

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.

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.

John J. DeGioia is the forty-eighth president of Georgetown University. For nearly four decades, DeGioia has worked to define and strengthen Georgetown University as a premier institution for education and research. As the first lay president of a Jesuit university he places emphasis on sustaining and strengthening Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit identity and its responsibility to serve as a voice and an instrument for justice. He has also been an advocate for interreligious dialogue. He continues to teach an Ignatius Seminar each fall, part of a program offering first year students the opportunity to encounter unique courses of study inspired by the Jesuit educational theme of cura personalis (“care for the whole person”). He is a member of the Order of Malta, a lay religious order of the Roman Catholic Church dedicated to serving the sick and the poor. Before becoming president, DeGioia served at Georgetown as senior vice president, responsible for university-wide operations, and dean of student affairs. DeGioia earned his B.A. and Ph.D at Georgetown University.

Michael J. Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post. He is also a policy fellow at ONE, a bipartisan organization fighting against extreme poverty and preventable diseases, and a visiting fellow with the Center for Public Justice. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a speechwriter and advisor to President George W. Bush.

Father J. Bryan Hehir is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government; he is also the secretary of health and social services in the Archdiocese of Boston. His teaching and research focus on ethics and foreign policy and the role of religion in world politics and in American society.