Berkley Center

Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and serves as vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he is a professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

Galen Carey is the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). His responsibilities include representing the NAE to government bodies, including Congress and the White House. Prior to his work as vice president, Carey was a longtime employee of World Relief, the relief and development arm of the NAE. Through this position, he served abroad in Croatia, Mozambique, Kenya, Indonesia, and Burundi. He earned a B.A. from Trinity International University, M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and a Doctor of Ministry degree from McCormick Theological Seminary.

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.

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.

Clyde Wilcox is a professor in Georgetown University's Government Department, where he has taught since 1987. Wilcox taught at Georgetown University in Qatar during the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 academic years. Wilcox also taught a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. His research and teaching interests center on the United States, including religion and politics, gender politics, interest groups, public opinion and electoral behavior, campaign finance, and science fiction and politics. Wilcox has published more than 30 books, including Women and Elective Office: Past, Present, and Future (2014, co-edited with Sue Thomas); Onward Christian Soldiers: The Christian Right in American Politics (2010, fourth edition); The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage (2007, co-edited with Craig Rimmerman); and The Values Campaign: The Christian Right in the 2004 Elections (2006, co-edited with John Green and Mark Rozell). Wilcox holds a B.A. from West Virginia University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

Fenggang Yang is a professor of sociology and the director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. Yang is among the world’s leading scholars of religion in China and of immigrant religion in the United States. He has authored or co-edited numerous books, including Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (2011); Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China: Methodology, Theories, and Findings (2011, with Graeme Lang); Confucianism and Spiritual Traditions in Modern China and Beyond (2011, with Joseph Tamney); State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies (2005, with Joseph Tamney); Asian-American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries (2004, with Tony Carnes); and Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (1999). Yang was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Religious Freedom Project. He holds a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of America.