Berkley Center

Fred Bahnson is an American writer and the author of the book Soil and Sacrament (2013). He is currently a Pulitzer Center grantee. Bahnson’s work focuses on spirituality and the environment. His writing has appeared in publications such as Harper’s, Oxford American, Orion, Notre Dame Magazine, Emergence, Image, The Sun, and the Best American Spiritual Writing series.

Ryann Craig is special assistant to the vice president for mission and ministry and director of academic initiatives in Georgetown University's Office of Mission and Ministry. From October 2019 through December 2023 she was the director of student programs and an assistant research professor at the Berkley Center, as well as a faculty fellow at the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service at Georgetown University. Before joining the Berkley Center, she worked in academic support and student advising as assistant director of academic support at the Catholic University of America. She recently served as a copy editor for the International Qurʾānic Studies Association’s journal and monograph series (2016-2018) and has been involved in a number of religious minority cultural heritage preservation initiatives in the United States, Germany, and Israel/Palestine. Craig completed her Ph.D. (Catholic University of America) on the use of Quranic proof texts by medieval Christian Arabic and Syriac authors while in residence as a doctoral fellow at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem. She is co-editor with Vasile-Octavian Mihoc of A Contested Coexistence: Insights in Arabic Christianity from Theology to Migration (Harrassowitz, 2020).

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.