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.

Rev. Andrew (Drew) Christiansen, S.J., was Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs from 2013 until his death in April 2022. His areas of research included nuclear disarmament, nonviolence and just peacemaking, Catholic social teaching, and ecumenical public advocacy. He was a frequent consultant to the Holy See and a member of the steering committee of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. He also served on the Atlantic Council's Middle East Task Force and on the Holy See delegation that participated in the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons during summer 2017.

From 1978 through 2007, Etienne De Jonghe was secretary-general of Pax Christi International, which deals with conflict transformation, reconciliation, and peace. He has previously been a Berkley Center research fellow. During his time at Pax Christi, first as a grassroots level member, later as an international board member, and finally as secretary-general, De Jonghe was involved with and co-organized campaigns and fact finding missions. Over the years he has substantially contributed to the development of a global network and a set of strategies for advocacy on both national and international scales. Throughout his work, De Jonghe has been engaged in bridge-building with various faith communities, including the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. He has also done human rights work and conflict resolution in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. De Jonghe retired in 2008 and now researches issues related to peace and conflict transformation work, as well as the role of religion and civil society in peacemaking.

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is a professor of ecclesiology, international relations, and ecumenism at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm, and a director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Theological Academy in Kyiv and National University in Athens, he completed his doctoral studies at Durham University under the supervision of Fr. Andrew Louth. He was a chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, first deputy chairman of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church, and later a research fellow at Yale and Columbia Universities, visiting professor at the University of Münster in Germany. He is an international fellow at Chester Ronning Centre for the study of religion and public life at the University of Alberta in Canada and an invited professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Hovorun is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

David Little, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, is a leading authority on the history of religious freedom, ethics and human rights, and religion and conflict resolution. Little retired in 2009 as T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at Harvard Divinity School and as an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Until summer 1999, he was senior scholar in religion, ethics, and human rights at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). From 1996 to 1998, he was member of the Advisory Committee to the State Department on Religious Freedom Abroad. Little’s publications include several volumes in the USIP series on religion, nationalism, and intolerance, as well Religion and Nationalism in Iraq: A Comparative Perspective (2007, with Donald K. Swearer), and Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution (2007). Little was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

Volodymyr Turchynovskyy is dean of faculty of social sciences at Ukrainian Catholic University. Since 2013 he has also served as a director of the International Institute for Ethics and Contemporary Issues (IIECI, UCU). His research interests include ethics and anthropology, phenomenology, and university governance. He is the editor of Ethics in the Global World:Reflections on Civic Virtues (2013) and has also published numerous articles and book chapters in both Ukrainian and English.

Ambassador Melanne Verveer is the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. She most recently served as the first US Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues. In this position, she coordinated foreign policy issues and activities relating to the political, economic and social advancement of women, traveling to nearly sixty countries. She worked to ensure that women’s participation and rights are fully integrated into US foreign policy, and she played a leadership role in the Obama administration’s development of the US National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. From 2000 to 2008, she was the chair and co-CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international NGO that she co-founded to invest in emerging women leaders. During the Clinton administration, she served as assistant to the president and chief of staff to first lady Hillary Clinton. She received a B.S. and M.S. from Georgetown University and holds several honorary degrees.