Berkley Center

Michelle Boorstein is a religion correspondent for The Washington Post. She was awarded first place honors for overall excellence in religion reporting from the Religion Newswriters Association in 2011, 2013, and 2017. She has a B.A. in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and an M.A. in Near Eastern studies from New York University.

William Canny is executive director of migration and refugee services at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. From 1983 to 2012, he managed relief and development operations in locations around the world for Catholic Relief Services. In 2013 and 2014, he directed daily operations for the Papal Foundation, which contributes funding to the Vatican for poverty alleviation initiatives around the world.

Alan Cross is lead pastor at Petaluma Valley Baptist Church in Petaluma, California, having pastored previously in Montgomery, Alabama. A doctoral candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary and a research fellow at the emerging Thom Wolf Institute of Global Studies, he focuses on evangelical views of immigrants and refugees. He is the author of When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus (2014).

Tom Gjelten is a veteran journalist who was most recently religion and belief correspondent at National Public Radio (NPR), reporting on the changing religious landscape in America, the formation of personal identity, the role of religion in politics, and social and cultural conflict arising from religious differences. During spring 2025 he was the Sakka Family Religion and International Journalism Fellow at Georgetown University, a tenure which concluded in June of that year. Gjelten’s nearly four-decade NPR career included overseas reporting in Central and South America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He later covered U.S. diplomacy and military affairs from the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. He is the author of, among others, Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege (1996), Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (2008), and A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (2015). He is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club Awards, a George Polk Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and a National Headliner Award. Gjelten is currently a contributing writer at Moment Magazine, where in 2022 he earned the “Religion Story of the Year” award from the Religion News Association. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Chelsea Patterson Sobolik is the former director of government relations at World Relief, a global Christian humanitarian organization and the largest evangelical refugee resettlement agency in the United States. Previously, she worked for Lifeline Children’s Services, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and on Capitol Hill. She has written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, National Review, and Christianity Today, among other outlets.

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of its foreign policy and national security journal, Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. He has also written for The Wall Street Journal, World, National Review, and other publications. He worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency and is a graduate of Georgetown University.