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.

Friedrich Wilhelm Graf is professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, as well as a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. He is also chairman of the Commission for Theological-Historical Research at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and president of the Ernst-Troeltsch-Society. A leading liberal Protestant theologian and a public intellectual in Germany, Professor Graf has published widely history of Protestant and Roman Catholic theology since the Enlightenment and on a range of contemporary social and ethical issues. In 1999, he won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation, the highest honor awarded in German research.