Description
RECOMMENDATION: Discretionary grant of $50,000 to The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, for a public event series on religion and global affairs.
The Berkley Center has been a grantee of the HRLI since the start of the initiative, and a productive partner for more than a decade under the leadership of Tom Banchoff. In recent years our grants have supported the work of Katherine Marshall, on a wide range of topics related to religion and development.
Shaun Casey, the Center’s new director (as of July 2017) is working to develop a strategic vision that would link disparate faculty interests, and to expand and diversify the Center’s partnerships in Washington, DC. The project proposed here is intended to jump-start both of those goals, while highlighting “key issues at the nexus of religion and international affairs,” keeping issues “alive in public life in an era of possible diminished public and government interest.”
HRLI staff and Michael Gilligan have interacted often with Casey over the past few years, in his role as Director of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the Department of State from 2013 to 2017. In that role he invited scholars to engage in public policy debates, including under the auspices of the HRLI grant to the American Academy of Religion to support Luce-Franklin Fellows in the State Department. He is well-positioned to link his policy experience and connections with the academic interests of his colleagues at Georgetown, and with a variety of media organizations.
Our grant would enable the Center to convene five events — on religion and refugees, climate change, countering violent extremism, the Alt-right, and the 2018 elections. Each would involve a small working group and be designed to produce short papers and/or other forms of dissemination, as well as a public event.
It is likely that the HRLI would consider a larger grant to the Berkley Center in the future.