Berkley Center

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.

Jean Bethke Elshtain was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago from 1996 until her death in August 2013. She also had appointments at Chicago in political science and the Committee on International Relations. Her works have focused on the intersections of religious ethics, war, the family, feminist theory, democracy, and modern political thought. Elshtain had taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Vanderbilt University, with visiting professor positions at Oberlin College, Yale University, and Harvard University; she also held the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Chair in the Foundations of American Freedom at Georgetown University. Among her hundreds of publications are Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003) and Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (2000); her 2006 Gifford lectures were published under the title Sovereignties: God, State, and Self (2008). She was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. Elshtain earned her B.A. and M.A. from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973.

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.

Ariel Glucklich is a Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and offers courses in Hinduism, Psychology of Religion and Anthropology of Religion. He is interested in a wide range of issues including classical Indian law, Hindu myths and rituals, contemporary folk religion and magic in Banaras, theories and methods in the study of religion, phenomenology, neuro-psychology and the evolutionary psychology of religious experience. His books include The Strides of Vishnu: Hindu Culture in Historical Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2008); Climbing Chamundi Hill: 1001 Steps with a Storyteller and a Reluctant Pilgrim (HarperCollins, 2007); and Vishnu’s Footsteps: Exploring the Sacred Sites, Texts, and Myths at the Heart of Hinduism (HarperCollins, 2005). He is currently researching the way that religious emotions are implicated in human self-destructiveness.

William Inboden is executive director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security, associate professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin. Inboden is a non-resident fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and senior advisor with Avascent International. Previously he served as the Legatum Institute's senior vice president and senior director for the White House’s Strategic Planning on the National Security Council. Inboden also worked at the Department of State as a member of the Policy Planning Staff and special advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom. He is the author of Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (2008) and Foreign Policy magazine contributing editor. From 2014 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. Inboden received his Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. degrees from Yale University and A.B. from Stanford University.

David Little, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, is a leading authority on the history of religious freedom, ethics and human rights, and religion and conflict resolution. Little retired in 2009 as T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict at Harvard Divinity School and as an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Until summer 1999, he was senior scholar in religion, ethics, and human rights at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). From 1996 to 1998, he was member of the Advisory Committee to the State Department on Religious Freedom Abroad. Little’s publications include several volumes in the USIP series on religion, nationalism, and intolerance, as well Religion and Nationalism in Iraq: A Comparative Perspective (2007, with Donald K. Swearer), and Peacemakers in Action: Profiles of Religion in Conflict Resolution (2007). Little was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

Christopher Marsh is professor of National Security and Strategic Studies at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, where he teaches courses in the areas of operational art, counterinsurgency, international security and strategy, and morality and war. Previously, Marsh was a professor of political science and church-state studies at Baylor University, where he served as the director of Baylor’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies from 2006 to 2011. Marsh is the president of the Special Operations Research Association and editor of its professional journal, Special Operations Journal; he was also the past editor of the Journal of Church & State and an executive editor of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. Marsh is fluent in Chinese and Russian, and his research interests include religion and war, church-state relations, and Russian foreign and defense policy, particularly military cooperation between Russia and China.

David Novak has held the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as professor of the study of religion and professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. From 1997 to 2002 he also was director of the Jewish Studies Programme. Previously, Novak taught at the University of Virginia, Oklahoma City University, Old Dominion University, the New School for Social Research, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. Novak was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. He is the author of 16 books, including The Sanctity of Human Life (2007) and In Defense of Religious Liberty (2009). From 1966 to 1969 he was Jewish chaplain to St. Elizabeth's Hospital and the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C.