Berkley Center

Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and serves as vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University, where he is a professor in the Department of Government and the Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a co-convener of the Georgetown Global Dialogues and co-chairs the Task Force on Global Citizenship of the International Association of Jesuit Universities.

Erin M. Cline, Ph.D., is the Paul J. and Chandler M. Tagliabue Distinguished Professor in Interfaith Studies & Dialogue at Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. She is the author of seven books and numerous articles on Chinese philosophy and comparative religion. Her new book, The Problem of God: The Challenges of Faith, Religion & Spirituality Today (2026) draws on her work as a comparative theologian teaching Georgetown’s iconic course for the last seventeen years to an increasingly diverse student body (and features a Foreword by Otto Hentz, S.J.). Cline is a specialist in ancient Chinese philosophy and religion, and has just published a new translation of one of the most influential Chinese texts in human history, The Analects: A Contemporary Translation (2026). 

Rev. Otto Hentz, S.J., entered the Society of Jesus in 1955 after graduation from the Jesuit high school in Philadelphia, St. Joseph’s Prep. He taught philosophy at Georgetown as a seminarian between 1962 and 1965. Following the ordinary course in theology, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1968. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago and returned to Georgetown as a professor of theology in 1973.