The Culture of Encounter Project - Georgetown University

H.E. Judge Mohamed Abdelsalam is the secretary general of the Higher Committee on Human Fraternity, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Elders, and the former legislative and legal advisor to Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayeb. He was awarded papal knighthood—“Knight Commander with Star of the Order of Pius IX”—by Pope Francis for his services towards spreading tolerance and interfaith dialogue. He is the first Arab and Muslim to receive this accolade.

Irina Bokova was director general of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from 2009-2017. During this time, she actively engaged in international efforts to advance quality education for all, gender equality, and the protection of the world’s cultural heritage as a humanitarian imperative and security issue to strengthen the foundations for lasting peace. Prior to UNESCO, Bokova held several positions in the Bulgarian government including minister of foreign affairs, member of parliament, and ambassador.

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.

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.

Ismat Jahan is the permanent observer of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to the European Union. She is a career diplomat who previously held the positions of ambassador of Bangladesh to Belgium, Luxembourg, and the European Union, and ambassador and permanent representative of Bangladesh to the United Nations.

Msgr. Indunil J. Kodithuwakku K. currently serves as secretary of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, of which he was formerly the undersecretary. A member of the clergy of the diocese of Badulla, Sri Lanka, he previously was professor at the Faculty of Missiology at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries; one way she shares her expertise is through her blog Faith in Action. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Dr. Alessio Pecorario is the coordinator of the Security Task Force of the Vatican COVID-19 Commission. Pecorario is also a senior official of the Vatican's Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Previously, he was a legal adviser of the Vatican's Financial Intelligence Authority, the European Centre for Law and Justice, and the European Commission for Democracy through Law of the Council of Europe.