Berkley Center

Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and serves as vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he is a professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Andrea Bartoli is president of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue. An international affairs expert and a leader of academic institutions who has worked in the higher education sector as tenured professor and senior administrator, he was the permanent representative of the Community of Sant’Egidio to the United Nations and to the United States (1992–2018).

David Beckmann is president emeritus of Bread for the World, having led the organization from 1991 to 2020 as it worked to strengthen U.S. political commitment to overcoming hunger and poverty. A Lutheran clergyman and an economist, Beckmann previously worked with the World Bank; he earned degrees from Yale, Christ Seminary, and the London School of Economics. 

Dr. John Borelli, a historian of religions and theologian, is special assistant for Catholic identity and dialogue to President John J. DeGioia of Georgetown University. Borelli has been at Georgetown University since 2004, where he teaches, manages conferences and events, coordinates dialogues, facilitates workshops, and promotes university relations with offices and institutes of the Holy See.

Chester A. Crocker is the James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies in Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and serves on the board of its Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. Crocker’s teaching and research focus on international security, conflict management, and mediation.

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.

Chester Gillis is a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies who served as the dean of Georgetown College from 2008 to 2017. An expert on the U.S. Catholic Church, the history of Catholicism, and the papacy, including Pope Benedict XVI, his other areas of expertise include interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism. Gillis was the initial holder of the Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies and was a Berkley Center research fellow who directed the center's Program on the Church and Interreligious Dialogue; in 2008, he was the faculty mentor for the Berkley Center's undergraduate fellows program. Gillis has served on the faculty of Georgetown University since 1988. His publications include, among others, Catholic Faith in America (2003/2012), The Political Papacy (2005), and Pluralism: A New Paradigm for Theology (1993). He holds degrees in philosophy and religious studies from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.