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.

Monsignor Tomáš Halik is a Czech public intellectual, Roman Catholic priest, scholar, and winner of the 2014 Templeton Prize. He is a professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague, pastor of the Academic Parish, and president of the Czech Christian Academy since 1990. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology, philosophy, and psychology from the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague. He studied theology clandestinely in Prague and after 1989 did post-graduate study at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and at the Pontifical Theological Faculty in Wroclaw.