Berkley Center

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.

Phillip Martin is part of a GBH News Center For Investigative Reporting team that explored caste discrimination in the U.S. in their Pulitzer Center-supported project. He is an award-winning senior investigative reporter for GBH and a former senior fellow with the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and a Harvard University Neiman Fellow. Martin served as NPR’s first national race-relations correspondent from 1998 to 2001.

Rebecca Shah currently serves as principal investigator for the Religion and Economic Empowerment Project (REEP), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. She is also a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute. Based in Bangalore, India, she is a pioneering scholar of the impact of religion on the social and economic lives of poor women in the Global South and particularly in South Asia. Shah was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and a part of its Christianity and Freedom Project, as well as a research fellow at the Berkley Center.

Dr. Suraj Yengde is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and an inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Initiative for Institutional Anti-racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He is author of Caste Matters (2019) and co-editor of The Radical in Ambedkar (2018).