Berkley Center

John J. DeGioia is the forty-eighth president of Georgetown University. For nearly four decades, DeGioia has worked to define and strengthen Georgetown University as a premier institution for education and research. As the first lay president of a Jesuit university he places emphasis on sustaining and strengthening Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit identity and its responsibility to serve as a voice and an instrument for justice. He has also been an advocate for interreligious dialogue. He continues to teach an Ignatius Seminar each fall, part of a program offering first year students the opportunity to encounter unique courses of study inspired by the Jesuit educational theme of cura personalis (“care for the whole person”). He is a member of the Order of Malta, a lay religious order of the Roman Catholic Church dedicated to serving the sick and the poor. Before becoming president, DeGioia served at Georgetown as senior vice president, responsible for university-wide operations, and dean of student affairs. DeGioia earned his B.A. and Ph.D at Georgetown University.

E.J. Dionne is a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center, University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture teaching in Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and Government Department, and a leading scholar and commentator on religion in U.S. politics. In addition, since fall 2017 he has been William H. Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Kennedy School. The W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, Dionne writes a column for the Washington Post that is syndicated in over 200 outlets nationally and abroad. His books include One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (2017, with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann); Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism: From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond (2016); Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012); Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008); Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004); They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era (1996); and Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.

Michael J. Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post. He is also a policy fellow at ONE, a bipartisan organization fighting against extreme poverty and preventable diseases, and a visiting fellow with the Center for Public Justice. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a speechwriter and advisor to President George W. Bush.

Father J. Bryan Hehir is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government; he is also the secretary of health and social services in the Archdiocese of Boston. His teaching and research focus on ethics and foreign policy and the role of religion in world politics and in American society.

Alan Lightman is Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was also the John Burchard Professor of the Humanities at MIT until 2003. An accomplished physicist and author, Lightman bridges the sciences and the humanities through his exploration of the intersection between science, human experience, and faith in his writing; he has published many essays in news, science, and literary publications. Lightman has written several novels, including The Diagnosis (2000), Reunion (2003), Ghost (2007), and Mr g (2012), a novel on creation as told by God. The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew (2014) explores the philosophical, moral, and theological implications of new findings in science. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Lightman earned his B.A. in physics from Princeton University and Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology. In 2003, Lightman founded the Harpswell Foundation, which seeks to empower future women leaders in Cambodia and elsewhere.

Dr. Saba Mahmood was a professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley until her death in March 2018. Her research explored the relationship between religious and secular politics in postcolonial societies and often addressed ethics and politics, freedom and unfreedom, the religious and the secular, and agency and submission.

Ayana Mathis is a novelist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012), her first novel, was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a selection for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club 2.0. Ayana taught fiction writing as visiting faculty at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and is currently teaching at The Writer's Foundry M.F.A. Program at St. Joseph's College, Brooklyn. She contributed to the New Yorker's Memorial coverage of Nelson Mandela and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times and The Atlantic. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.