Berkley Center

R. Scott Appleby is the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs and a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, the Contending Modernities project, which explores the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world. Appleby is a graduate of Notre Dame and has both his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago.

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.

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.

Grace Davie is professor emerita of sociology at the University of Exeter. In addition to numerous chapters and articles, she is the author of Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994), Religion in Modern Europe (2000), Europe: The Exceptional Case (2002), and The Sociology of Religion (2007); she is co-author of Religious America, Secular Europe (2008), and Welfare and Religion in 21st Century Europe, Volumes One and Two (2010/2011). Grace Davie is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe (2021)

David Ford is an Anglican theologian, the Regius Professor of Divinity emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Selwyn College. He was the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme from 1992 to 2015. Ford also taught for 15 years at the University of Birmingham. His work in the area of Christian theology has been inspired by post-liberal and narrative theology. Ford is one of the founders of scriptural reasoning and has been extensively involved in generating new modes of engagement for interfaith relations in the post-9/11 world. He is the author of The Future of Christian Theology (2011) and Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (2007), as well as co-editor of The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning (2006) and Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century (2005). In 2013, Ford was named an Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to theological scholarship and interfaith relations.

Rev. Dr. David Marshall is the academic director of the Building Bridges Seminar for theological dialogue between Muslim and Christian scholars, which he helped launch in 2002 and in which he has been involved ever since. Since 2012, Building Bridges has been directed from Georgetown University, where Marshall is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He has served in a variety of contexts, including as chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2000 to 2005, where he had responsibility for interfaith relations. Much of Marshall’s work has been in the field of theological education. He has taught at St. Paul’s University (Limuru, Kenya), Edinburgh University, Duke Divinity School, Georgetown University, Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (Rome), and Bern University. From 2018 to 2021, he served as program executive in interreligious dialogue and co-operation at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, with particular responsibility for Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim relations. Marshall studied theology at Oxford University and holds a doctorate in Islamic studies from Birmingham University.

David Martin was an emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics until his death in early 2019. He also served as president of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion and was an ordained priest in the Church of England. Martin wrote extensively on the sociology of religion and secularization, most notably in A General Theory of Secularization (1978), and on the intersection of sociology and theology, with his essays on this topic collected in Reflections on Sociology and Theology (1996). He examined the expansion of Pentecostal Protestantism in the developing world in his widely cited Tongues of Fire: Conservative Protestantism in Latin America (1990) and Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (2002). He also wrote on religion and violence in Does Christianity Cause War? (1998) and The Future of Christianity: Reflections on Violence and Democracy, Religion and Secularization (2011). Martin published his autobiography in 2014.