Berkley Center

Rev. Andrew (Drew) Christiansen, S.J., was Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs from 2013 until his death in April 2022. His areas of research included nuclear disarmament, nonviolence and just peacemaking, Catholic social teaching, and ecumenical public advocacy. He was a frequent consultant to the Holy See and a member of the steering committee of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. He also served on the Atlantic Council's Middle East Task Force and on the Holy See delegation that participated in the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons during summer 2017.

Irene Jillson is an associate professor in the Department of Professional Nursing Practice at Georgetown's School of Nursing & Health Studies, and she also teaches in the School of Medicine and Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her work has focused on issues ranging from information systems, behavioral health conditions, and bioethics to maternal and child health and HIV/AIDS.

Leo D. Lefebure is the Matteo Ricci, S.J., Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and a Berkley Center faculty fellow. He is also a former Long Room Hub Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. His books include, among others, Transforming Interreligious Relations: Catholic Responses to Religious Pluralism in the United States (2020); Religion, Authority, and the State: From Constantine to the Contemporary World (2016, editor); True and Holy: Christian Scripture and Other Religions (2014); The Path of Wisdom: A Christian Commentary on the Dhammapada (2011, with Peter Feldmeier); Revelation, the Religions, and Violence (2000); and The Buddha and the Christ (1993). Lefebure is  a research fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a trustee emeritus of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, and a former president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. He has previously taught classes supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. He obtained his STL from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Until his death in September 2019, Gerard Mannion was the Joseph and Winifred Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University and a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focused on the role of the church in the world, on social ethics, and on ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Mannion published widely in the fields of ecclesiology, ethics, and public theology, as well as in other fields of systematic theology and philosophy. He was the founding chair of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network and president of the International Network of Societies for Catholic Theology (2017-2020). His numerous books included Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism: Evangelii Gaudium and the Papal Agenda (2017), Where We Dwell in Common: Pathways for Dialogue in the 21st Century (ed., 2015), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (2008, ed. with Lewis Mudge), Catholic Social Justice: Theological and Practical Explorations (2007, co-edited with Philomena Cullen and Bernard Hoose), Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Times (2007), and Schopenhauer, Religion and Modernity (2003). He was also editor of the Bloomsbury Publishing series "Ecclesiological Investigations" and series editor, with Oxford University’s Mark Chapman, of Palgrave Macmillan’s “Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue” series.

Peter C. Phan is the inaugural holder of the Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought in the Georgetown University Department of Theology and Religious Studies and a faculty fellow at the Berkley Center. His research deals with the theology of icons in Orthodox theology, patristic theology, eschatology, the history of Christian missions in Asia, and liberation, inculturation, and interreligious dialogue. He is the author and editor of over 30 books and has published over 300 essays. His writings have been translated into Arabic, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Vietnamese, and have received many awards from learned societies. He is the first non-Anglo to be elected president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and president of the American Theological Society. In 2010 he received the John Courtney Murray Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Catholic Theological Society of America for outstanding achievement in theology. Phan has earned three doctorates.

Debora Tonelli is a permanent researcher at the Center for Religious Studies (Centro per le Scienze Religiose) at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler. She is the Georgetown representative in Rome and a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. Tonelli is also a lecturer in religion and violence at Gregorian University and lecturer in political philosophy and philosophy and religion at Pontifical Atheneum S. Anselmo. Her research and teaching focus on the interaction between politics and religion, particularly in the context of interreligious dialogue and religious violence. Since 2013, Tonelli has coordinated an interdisciplinary project on "Religions and Violence." She holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy and in theology.

Keith Ward is a British philosopher, theologian, priest, and scholar. He is a fellow of the British Academy, a priest of the Church of England, and was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford until 2003; he is currently a visiting professor at Virginia Theological Seminary. Serving as Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford from 1991 to 2004, comparative theology and the relationship between science and religion are two of his main topics of interest. He is the author of numerous books including The Rule of Love (1989), Religion and Human Nature (1998), Why There Almost Certainly is a God (2008), and recently Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (2015). In 1992, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. He has also served as the Gersham Professor of Divinity at Gersham College, London from 2004 to 2008 and is on the council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy.