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.

Chester Gillis is a professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies who served as the dean of Georgetown College from 2008 to 2017. An expert on the U.S. Catholic Church, the history of Catholicism, and the papacy, including Pope Benedict XVI, his other areas of expertise include interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism. Gillis was the initial holder of the Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies and was a Berkley Center research fellow who directed the center's Program on the Church and Interreligious Dialogue; in 2008, he was the faculty mentor for the Berkley Center's undergraduate fellows program. Gillis has served on the faculty of Georgetown University since 1988. His publications include, among others, Catholic Faith in America (2003/2012), The Political Papacy (2005), and Pluralism: A New Paradigm for Theology (1993). He holds degrees in philosophy and religious studies from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.