Berkley Center

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow. He is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to January 2006 he was Saul Stern Professor at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). From 1993 until 1995 Galston served as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Allen Hertzke is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma (OU) and faculty fellow in religious freedom for OU’s Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage. He is also a distinguished senior fellow with Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Hertzke has written extensively on religious advocacy in politics, particularly faith-motivated activism in foreign policy. His publications include Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1 Historical Perspectives and Christianity and Freedom: Volume 2 Contemporary Perspectives (2016, ed. with Timothy Samuel Shah), Religious Freedom in America: Constitutional Roots and Contemporary Challenges (2015, ed.), The Future of Religious Freedom: Global Challenges (2012, ed.), and Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (2004). He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. From 2011 to 2016, Hertzke was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and co-chair of its Christianity and Freedom Project steering committee from 2012 to 2013.

Ed Husain is a British writer and political advisor. Currently, he is a senior fellow and Andrew H. Siegal Professor in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. In addition to publishing three books, Husain served as a senior advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Husain has a B.A. in history from the University of North London and an M.A. in Middle East studies from SOAS, University of London.

Wilfred McClay holds the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at Oklahoma University. He previously taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (1999-2013). McClay is author of several books and serves on the editorial boards of the Wilson Quarterly, First Things, and Historically Speaking.

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.

Amy Sullivan is a reporter specializing in the relationship between religion and politics. She is a contributing editor to Time Magazine where she writes for the magazine’s political blog, Swampland. She has also written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Washington Monthly and the Los Angeles Times and was included in The Best Political Writing, 2006. In 2008 Sullivan published the book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap. She has previously served as editorial director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and frequently appears on radio and television discussion forums.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is an American-born Muslim scholar and educator and president of Zaytuna College, which he co-founded in 1999 as America’s first accredited Muslim institution of higher learning. It was preceded by the 1996 founding of the Zaytuna Institute, committed to presenting a classical picture of Islam in the West and reviving traditional study methods and the sciences of Islam. After becoming Muslim in 1977, he spent ten years in the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and in North and West Africa receiving teaching licenses in Islamic subjects. He then returned to the United States and earned degrees in Religious Studies and Health Care. Yusuf is the first American lecturer to teach in the Qarawiyin, Morocco’s most prestigious and oldest university; he also advises Stanford University’s Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Hanson was one of the 138 Muslim signatories of A Common Word Between Us and You.