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.

Riccardo Cristiano is an Italian journalist and Vatican expert who reports on interreligious dialogue, religion, and international affairs. The author of Bergoglio o barbarie: Francesco davanti al disordine mondiale (2020), he has also been a contributor to Radio Rai, La Stampa, and Reset Dialogues on Civilizations.

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., is the undersecretary for the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education. Before that he served as the editor in chief of the Jesuits’ biweekly review, La Civiltà Cattolica, a post he assumed in 2011. Since entering the Society of Jesus in 1988, he has worked in a variety of capacities, including joining the review’s community in 1998. Fr. Spadaro considers his work to be part of the new cybertheology – “thinking faith in the Internet age.”