The Culture of Encounter Project - Georgetown University

His Eminence Cardinal Miguel Ayuso is president of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue. Cardinal Ayuso has taught courses in interreligious dialogue in Cairo and Rome, participated in meetings and conferences on interreligious relations in various countries in Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe, as well as written several important publications on issues related to Christian-Muslim dialogue.

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.

Dr. John Borelli, a historian of religions and theologian, is special assistant for Catholic identity and dialogue to President John J. DeGioia of Georgetown University. Borelli has been at Georgetown University since 2004, where he teaches, manages conferences and events, coordinates dialogues, facilitates workshops, and promotes university relations with offices and institutes of the Holy See.

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.

Fr. Diego Sarrió Cucarella, M.Afr., is president of the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI). Fr. Diego is a member of the Society of Missionaries of Africa and has worked in Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, and Tunisia. His research and publications focus on the intellectual history of Muslim-Christian relations.

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.

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.