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.

Heidi Hadsell is president and professor of social ethics at Hartford Seminary. Hadsell previously served as director of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland. She also served as dean of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and taught at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil. Hadsell is widely published on ecumenism, environmental ethics, interreligious relations, and the public role of religion in society. She sits on several national and international boards, including Arigatou International; Globethics.net; Advisory Committee to the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Association of Theological Schools in North America and Canada, and Plowshares Institute. She was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum. Hadsell holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, M.A. from Union Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California.

Farooq Kathwari is the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. In addition, he serves as co-chair of the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council.

David Saperstein was the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from January 2015 to January 2017. He is currently is an adjunct professor with the Center for Jewish Civilization in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and previously was a senior research fellow of the Religious Freedom Research Project at the Berkley Center. An ordained rabbi, he served for several decades as the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism representing the public policy positions of the Reform Jewish Movement, the largest segment of American Jewry, to the government and leading the movement’s efforts to strengthen social justice programming in synagogues across North America. Over the years, he headed several national religious coalitions, including co-chairing the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, and served on various national boards, among them the NAACP, People for the American Way, and the World Faiths Development Dialogue. In 1999 and 2000, Saperstein served as the first chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was a crucial part of the faith-based movement that supported passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. A frequent media commentator on religion and public life, Saperstein is also an attorney and taught, for over 30 years, seminars on First Amendment law and Jewish law at Georgetown University Law Center.