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.

Mark M. Gray is a research associate professor at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies and director of Catholic Polls at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). He is the co-author of Word, Liturgy, Charity: The Diaconate in the U.S. Catholic Church, 1968-2018 (2018) and Catholic Parishes of the 21st Century (2017).

Conrad Hackett is associate director of research and senior demographer at Pew Research Center. His areas of expertise include international religious demography and the sociology of religion. He is an author of Religion and Education Around the World (2016), The Global Religious Landscape (2012), and various other studies of religious demography.

Becky Yang Hsu is an associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where she is also affiliated with the Asian Studies Program and the Graduate School's M.S. in Health and the Public Interest Program. She is directing a research group on the topic of Culture and Society as part of the Georgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. She is the author of Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor, with Richard Madsen, of The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2019); Hsu is currently completing a single-authored book, Serenity: Happiness and Death in China (University of Chicago Press), which focuses on family, bereavement, and well-being. She was project leader (PI) of a John Templeton Foundation funded project, "The Concept of Fu in Contemporary China: Searching for Well-Being, Purpose, and the Good Life" (2013-2016). The Washington Post featured two videos from her fieldwork (“What people around the world mean when they say they’re happy,” February 3, 2016). She is on the editorial boards of two journals, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Social Science and Medicine—Mental Health. She holds a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Todd M. Johnson is director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is also a visiting research fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs, leading a research project on international religious demography.

Gina Zurlo is co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a visiting research fellow at Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Religion and Demography and editor of the World Christian Database and World Religion Database.