Berkley Center

Helen M. Alvaré is a professor of law at the George Mason University's Antonin Scalia School of Law, where she researches and writes about the intersection of law with marriage, parenting, non-marital households, and the First Amendment religion clauses. She previously worked in the Office of General Counsel and the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sister Deirdre Byrne (M'82) is a religious sister with Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts, an Italian order of sisters founded in 1894. Prior to joining the order, Sister Byrne attended Georgetown University Medical School. Sister Byrne is a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps and has served in Egypt, Korea, and Afghanistan.

Kyle Duncan was formerly general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was lead counsel representing Hobby Lobby Stores in its challenge to the HHS mandate. He is now a lawyer in private practice for the firm of Schaerr Duncan LLP in Washington, D.C. Kyle was also previously solicitor general of Louisiana from 2008 to 2011, where he argued numerous appeals in state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. From 2004 to 2008 Duncan was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he taught courses on constitutional law, church-state relations, and free speech. He was assistant solicitor general in the Texas Attorney General’s Office from 1999 to 2002. Duncan received a J.D. from Louisiana State University in 1997 and an LL.M. From Columbia Law School in 2004; he clerked under Judge John M. Duhe, Jr. at the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Anthony (Tony) Gill is a professor of political science and adjunct professor of sociology at the University of Washington and a distinguished senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He specializes in political economy and religion and politics, with an emphasis on church-state relations, religious liberty, and religious economies. Gill’s current research focuses on how governments regulate religious organizations and how this impacts the level of religiosity in society. He is author of The Political Origins of Religious Liberty (2007) and Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (1998). In addition to numerous other publications, he runs a weekly free podcast series that seeks to make social scientific studies of religion more accessible to the public. From 2014 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. Gill received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and B.A. from Marquette University.

Brian Grim is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and a leading expert on the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom and international religious demography. Grim served as 2015-2016 chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith and works closely with the Business for Peace platform of the United Nations Global Compact. From 2006 to 2014 Grim directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Price of Freedom Denied (2010), and writes the Weekly Number blog. He was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2014 to 2016. Grim holds a doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University.

Byron Johnson is the founding director of the Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) and Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at Baylor University. Johnson is a leading authority on the scientific study of religion, the efficacy of faith-based organizations, and criminal justice. Johnson previously directed research centers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of, among others, The Quest for Purpose: The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life (2017, with Perry L. Glanzer and Jonathan P. Hill), The Angola Prison Seminary (2016, with Michael Hallett, Joshua Hays, Sung Jang, and Grant Duwe), and More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More (2011). In 2012 and 2013, Johnson served as a member of the steering committee for the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project (RFP); ISR was a strategic RFP partner. He was also a senior research fellow of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Research Project from 2017 to 2018.

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, a professor of the practice of moral and political theory in the Department of Government, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law. Kessler’s research and writing focus on theology, philosophical and religious ethics, and social, political, and legal theory. He is interested in problems of law and religion, both globally and in the U.S. constitutional context. Kessler is the author of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology, co-edited with Shaun Casey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mystics: Presence and Aporia, co-edited with Christian Sheppard (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He also wrote “Engaging Religion in U.S. Foreign Affairs,” a chapter in the Companion to Religion and Politics in the United States (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Kessler is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Micah J. Schwartzman is the Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Schwartzman’s research focuses on issues of law and religion, jurisprudence, and political philosophy. His recent work has been published in the University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, and Journal of Political Philosophy. Prior to joining the faculty at Virginia, Schwartzman clerked for Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Schwartzman received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Virginia and a D.Phil. in politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. In the spring of 2013, he was a visiting professor at the UCLA School of Law.