Berkley Center

Shaun Casey is a senior fellow with the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics at the University of Virginia and a Pulaski Institution non-resident fellow. He served as director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and professor of the practice in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 2017 to 2021. He previously was U.S. special representative for religion and global affairs and director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He has also served as professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and held positions at the Center for American Progress and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Casey has written on the ethics of the war in Iraq, as well the role of religion in American presidential politics. He is the author of The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (2009) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology (forthcoming, with Michael Kessler); he is writing a book on ethics and international politics tentatively titled Niebuhr’s Children. Casey holds a B.A. from Abilene Christian University, MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and M.Div. and Th.D. in religion and society from Harvard Divinity School.

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.

Indira Lakshmanan is senior executive editor at National Geographic. She previously was executive editor of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Washington columnist for the Boston Globe. She also worked at Bloomberg News as a diplomatic correspondent and national political reporter and spent a dozen years as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the Boston Globe in Bosnia, Asia, and Latin America.

Dalia Mogahed is director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, where she leads the organization’s research and thought leadership programs on American Muslims, and CEO of Mogahed Consulting. She is also an expert commentator in topics of public opinion, Islamophobia, Muslim women, and American Muslim demographics.

Mark Oppenheimer is coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and a lecturer in English at Yale University, as well as a contributor to magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, the Nation, and the New Republic. His interests include American religious history, memoir, and popular literary criticism.

Jon Sawyer is executive director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which funds independent reporting to raise the standard of media coverage of global affairs and also supports a broad range of educational initiatives. Sawyer became the center’s founding director after a 31-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Jon was the Post-Dispatch Washington bureau chief from 1993 through 2005.