The Culture of Encounter Project - Georgetown University

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.

Tricia C. Bruce, Ph.D., is a sociologist with expertise in religion whose scholarship focuses on U.S. Catholicism and social change. The director of the Springtide Research Institute, Bruce's books include Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church (2017), Faithful Revolution: How Voice of the Faithful Is Changing the Church (2011), and How Americans Understand Abortion (forthcoming). She is president-elect for the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

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.

Kim Daniels is the co-director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. A graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago Law School, she was appointed by Pope Francis as a member of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication in 2016.

Monsignor Tomáš Halik is a Czech public intellectual, Roman Catholic priest, scholar, and winner of the 2014 Templeton Prize. He is a professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague, pastor of the Academic Parish, and president of the Czech Christian Academy since 1990. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology, philosophy, and psychology from the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague. He studied theology clandestinely in Prague and after 1989 did post-graduate study at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and at the Pontifical Theological Faculty in Wroclaw.

Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist, and commentator on religious and political affairs. He is the author of the biography The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (2014) and How to Defend the Faith Without Raising Your Voice: Civil Responses to Catholic Hot-button Issues (2012). He has written widely on church affairs and on the Francis papacy for the Tablet, Commonweal, the New York Times, Crux, America magazine, Thinking Faith, and many others.

Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., is a Dominican priest and Oxford academic. He was the worldwide head of the Order of Preachers for nine years (1992 to 2001). During this time he founded the Dominican Volunteers International and helped establish the Franciscan-Dominican representative office at the United Nations. He holds honorary doctorates from 12 universities together with his honorary doctorate of divinity from the University of Oxford. His books include What Is the Point of Being A Christian? (2005), Alive in God: A Christian Imagination (2019), and Questioning God (2021, with Lukas Popko). He is an adviser to Pope Francis, who elevated him to a cardinal in 2024 but, at Radcliffe’s request, he does not wear the traditional red but rather his plain Dominican habit.

Dr. Anna Rowlands is the St. Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, UK. Her publications include The T&T Clark Reader in Political Theology (2020, co-editor) and Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching for Dark Times (forthcoming). She is on Twitter @AnnaRowlands1.