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.

Adam Seligman is a professor of religion at Boston University and research associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. He is also the founding director of CEDAR – Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion. His publications include The Idea of Civil Society (1992), The Problem of Trust (1997), and a trilogy with co-author Robert Weller: Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008); Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience and Ambiguity (2012); and How Things Count as the Same: Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor (2018).