Berkley Center

Dr. Andrew P.W. Bennett is a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute and program director for Cardus Law at Cardus, Canada’s faith-based think-tank, where he also serves as chair of the Cabinet of Canadians, a body of eminent Canadian lay and clerical leaders committed to reaffirming the role of religious faith within Canadian society. He is also an ordained deacon in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Bennett was a senior research fellow with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Research Project during 2017 and 2018. He served as Canada's first ambassador for religious freedom and head of the Office of Religious Freedom in the Department of Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2016, during which time he led in defending and championing religious freedom internationally as a core element of Canada's principled foreign policy. At the same time, he served as Canada's head of delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a 31-country body that leads international efforts in Holocaust education, research, and remembrance. Bennett holds a B.A. (Hons.) in history from Dalhousie University, an M.A. in history from McGill University, and a Ph.D. in politics from the University of Edinburgh.

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.

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.