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.

Hent de Vries is Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities at New York University and director of the summer School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. Before joining NYU, de Vries directed the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, holding the Russ Family Chair in the Humanities with a joint appointment in philosophy. De Vries is author, most recently, of Miracles et métaphysique (2019), the text of his Étienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and of Le miracle au coeur de l'ordinaire (2018).

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.

Philip Gorski is professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale University. He is co-director (with Julia Adams) of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research, and co-runs the Religion and Politics Colloquium at the Yale MacMillan Center. He is the author of American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present and The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Growth of State Power in Early Modern Europe.

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.

Byron Johnson is the founding director of the Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR) and Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at Baylor University. Johnson is a leading authority on the scientific study of religion, the efficacy of faith-based organizations, and criminal justice. Johnson previously directed research centers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of, among others, The Quest for Purpose: The Collegiate Search for a Meaningful Life (2017, with Perry L. Glanzer and Jonathan P. Hill), The Angola Prison Seminary (2016, with Michael Hallett, Joshua Hays, Sung Jang, and Grant Duwe), and More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More (2011). In 2012 and 2013, Johnson served as a member of the steering committee for the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project (RFP); ISR was a strategic RFP partner. He was also a senior research fellow of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Research Project from 2017 to 2018.

Raymond Martin is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at Union College. His research has been primarily in the areas of theories of personal identity and philosophy of history. He has authored and edited numerous books including (with John Barresi) The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (Columbia University, 2006), and has also written several textbooks, articles and book chapters on philosophy, religion, and theories of personal identity. Before coming to Union College in 2002, he taught at the University of Maryland for many years. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Ohio State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

Margarita Mooney is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow in the university’s Carolina Population Center. Her areas of research interest are religion, immigration, theory, tourism, culture and economic sociology. She is currently conducting research on the relationship between religion, resilience, and physical and mental health among young adults, and on the collective enactment of virtue ethics in religious practices. She recently published Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (University of California, 2009). She is also the author of several book chapters and numerous articles in such journals as Sociology of Religion, European Review of International Migration, and American Journal of Education. Mooney received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University.