Talk:Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs

COI editing
I just fleshed out the COI editing on this article. A slew of WP:SPA editors who didn't know much about WP editing; it is no wonder that there are a lot of problems with this article. Jytdog (talk) 00:56, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I just stubified this and took the tags off.  Not a lot of sourcing that talks about the center per se.  Will be tricky to flesh this out. Jytdog (talk) 01:39, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

conferences >>books
I removed claim that "Additionally, the center hosts an annual conference on religious pluralism, which has led to the publication of two compilations from Oxford University Press: Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (2007) and Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights (2011)." Not even the center's own website describes the books that way. Jytdog (talk) 01:02, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Suggested updates to the Berkley Center Page
[1. Delete Religious Freedom Project content after citation 7]

[2. Add a new third paragraph]

In April 2016, the Center marked its tenth anniversary with a keynote lecture by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Secretary Albright said that it is important for religion to be part of foreign policy discussions. She urged centers such as the Berkley Center to “encourage dialogue to advance the cause of peace.” The center also marked its anniversary by convening scholars and thought leaders such as Karen Armstrong, Martha Nussbaum, the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, and Miroslav Volf for conversations about interfaith dialogue and “Religion, Violence, and Peace: Rethinking the Connections.”

[3. Add more about programs]

Nine programs are currently encompassed under the Berkley Center. The programs engage scholars and students in the United States and around the world.

The American Pilgrimage Project, led by senior fellow Paul Elie, is collecting narratives, from Americans of diverse backgrounds, about the role religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives.

The Doyle Engaging Difference Program, led by Center managing director Michael Kessler, supports courses and student programming that encourages engagement with religious and cultural differences. Four activities form the program: Doyle Seminars, the Junior Year Abroad Network, Doyle undergraduate fellows, and the Education and Social Justice Project.

The Faith, Values, and Public Life Program, led by Center director Thomas Banchoff, explores the intersection of globalization with contemporary issues.

The Globalization, Religions, and the Secular Program, led by senior fellow José Casanova, brings together scholars across disciplines to explore questions related to the intersection between globalization and the resurgence of public religion.

The Islam and World Politics Program, led by senior fellow Jocelyne Cesari, researches issues at the intersection of Islam and politics in areas including democratization, immigration, and women’s rights.

The Program in Law, Religion, and Values, led by Michael Kessler, focuses on how religion and values legitimate, shape, and conflict with global political, cultural, and legal systems in transnational and comparative perspective.

The Religion and Global Development Program, led by senior fellow Katherine Marshall, tracks the engagement of religious communities around global policy challenges and brings together stakeholders to examine best practices and advance collaboration. Marshall blogs about all of these topics for the Huffington Post.

The Program on the Church and the World, led by Gerard Mannion and Fr. Drew Christiansen, S.J., addresses the Catholic Church’s teachings on justice and peace that relate to global challenges of economic and social development, democracy and human rights, conflict resolution, and interreligious dialogue. Christiansen blogs about these topics for the National Catholic Reporter.

Leland524 (talk) 19:47, 18 May 2016 (UTC)


 * I did some of that. You cannot make embedded links like this in WIkipedia.  We need independent sourcing for things.  No more sourcing things from your own website  Please keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, meant to cover subjects of enduring interest and to provide clear knowledge about them.  It is not an extension of your website. Jytdog (talk) 09:45, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Request edit on 17 July 2017
Good morning. I am posting to this talk page because I have a conflict of interest in the Berkley Center entry. I am an employee of the center. Below is content I would like to suggest adding. I have sourced information from third parties, except where Georgetown-support pages were the only or most realiable source on the topic. I have also added Wikipedia links (not as sources, but in the way that Wikipedia cross-links articles) where relevant. I am new to making edits on Wikipedia and appreciate any guidance you can provide. Thank you for considering these additions to the current entry.

Programs
The Berkley Center has several areas of academic research that are each led by a member of the Berkley Center’s faculty (link to faculty section below). The American Pilgrimage Project, led by Paul Elie, invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to talk to one another about the role religion plays in their lives. Katherine Marshall leads a program on religion and global development that was most recently funded by the Henry Luce Foundation from 2013-2016. From 2011 to 2016 the center organized the Religious Freedom Project, led by Thomas Farr and Timothy Shah, which engaged scholars and faith leaders to discuss the meaning and value of religious liberty, its importance for democracy, and its role in social and economic development around the globe. Scholarship on religious freedom has continued under the auspices of the Religious Freedom Research Project, directed by Thomas Farr, and supported in large part through a partnership with Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. The Berkley Center also focuses on globalization, governance, and norms —particularly the relationship between Catholicism and globalization ; religion, violence, and peace, including programs on Islam and gender, and on women and peacebuilding ; and the Church and the world, especially in regard to nuclear disarmament.

Events
The annual Berkley Center Lectures bring global thought leaders to campus for presentations on topics at the intersection of religion, culture, and politics. Past lectures include a three-part teleconference series with the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, who spoke about Islam-West relations ; a conversation with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on the integral role of religion in foreign affairs ; and an exploration of the evolution of myth and ritual, and their enduring significance for human societies by philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Other center events focus on the intersection of religion with current affairs and global challenges, ranging from the role of faith communities in addressing racial tensions in Baltimore to the role of faith organizations in combating anti-microbial resistance.

Student Engagement
The Doyle Engaging Difference Program, made possible by Georgetown Board of Directors Chair William J. Doyle and led by the center's managing director, Michael Kessler, supports the center’s Doyle Seminars Program, the Junior Year Abroad Network, and the Doyle Undergraduate Fellows Program, and emphasizes engagement with religious and cultural differences. In fall 2016, Georgetown University was presented with the White House’s Interfaith Community Service Award in the 2015 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for fostering meaningful relationships among its community members of differing faiths and backgrounds. The Berkley Center, along with the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service and the Office of Campus Ministry, applied for the award, and the application featured the Doyle Engaging Difference Program, along with the Berkley Center’s role in coordinating the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum, as some of its main components.

Religion, Ethics, and World Affairs Certificate
Since the fall of 2011, the Walsh School of Foreign Service has offered a Certificate on Religion, Ethics, and World Affairs in conjunction with the Berkley Center. The program focuses on faith and ethics in international relations, religion and politics seen through a comparative perspective and religion in history and culture. In the spring of 2017 the certificate was expanded to Georgetown College.

Thomas Banchoff
Thomas Banchoff is vice president for global engagement at Georgetown University and a professor in the Department of Government and Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a senior fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, which he led as founding director from 2006 to 2017. Banchoff is the author of Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies (Cornell University Press, 2011) and co-edited The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges (Georgetown University Press, 2016) with Berkley Center colleague José Casanova.

José Casanova
José Casanova is a Georgetown University professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center. He is a scholar on religion and world affairs and published Public Religions in the Modern World with the University of Chicago Press in 1994. His most recent projects focus on understanding globalization through Catholic and Jesuit lenses.

Shaun Casey
Shaun Casey took over as the Berkley Center’s director on July 1, 2017. He previously served three years as a special representative for religion and global affairs and inaugural director of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the Department of State.

Jocelyne Cesari
Jocelyne Cesari is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center and a director of the “Islam in the West” program at the Harvard Divinity School. She is a scholar of Islam and world politics and has written and edited multiple books on the topic, including Islam, Gender, and Democracy in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2017; co-edited with José Casanova) and The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Paul Elie
Paul Elie is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center and a director of the American Pilgrimage Project. He is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), and he serves as a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair.

Thomas Farr
Thomas Farr is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center. Prior to joining the center, Farr served in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service as well as the Department of State, where he acted as founding director of the Office of International Religious Freedom. He has written extensively on religious freedom and international affairs, including World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security (Oxford University Press, 2008).

David Hollenbach
David Hollenbach, S.J., is the Pedro Arrupe Distinguished Research Professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center. His work focuses on the intersection of religion and human rights. He is currently the president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Michael Kessler
Michael Kessler is the managing director of the Berkley Center, a professor at Georgetown University, and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. His work focuses on the nexus of law, politics, and religion, and he edited Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Katherine Marshall
Katherine Marshall is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center and the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue. She spent 35 years at the World Bank before working at Georgetown. Marshall has written numerous publications on global development, including the book Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding: Illuminating the Unseen (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2015; co-edited with Susan Hayward), which examines the particular dynamics of women of faith working toward peace and offers case studies of women peacebuilders.

World Faiths Development Dialogue
The World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) is an NGO that was established in 1998 by James D. Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank, and Lord George Carey , then archbishop of Canterbury. WFDD is a collaboration between Georgetown University, the World Bank, and various faith-based organizations that works to bridge the worlds of religion and international development. Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, is the current executive director.

Henry Luce Foundation
The Henry Luce Foundation has collaborated with the Berkley Center to support a number of initiatives, including projects on religion and foreign policy and a country-mapping effort focused on development in Bangladesh, Senegal, Kenya, and Guatemala.

World Economic Forum
From 2007 to 2010, Georgetown University—under the guidance of Thomas Banchoff, then director of the Berkley Center—collaborated with the Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) on a series of publications on religion in world affairs. A first report on "Islam and the West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue" was released at the WEF annual meeting in Davos in January 2008. A follow-up publication on "Faith and the Global Agenda: Values for the Post-Crisis Economy" was published at the January 2010 Davos WEF meeting.

John Templeton Foundation
In 2011 the center received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to create the Religious Freedom Project. Thomas Farr and Timothy Shah, senior fellows at the center, led the project seeking to advance the study of religious freedom as an interdisciplinary field. In 2014 the center received a second grant from the foundation to continue research, this time investigating the relationship between religious freedom, other fundamental freedoms, and societal flourishing.

Claudiawink (talk) 14:56, 8 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for disclosing and for suggesting content on the talk page instead of editing directly.
 * Two technical notes - Wikipedia articles are not reliable sources - you cite WP several times as a reference. Also this is entirely bare URLs which are a bad thing per WP:BareURL.  I have a short description of how to use the automated tool that is part of the editing interface to create full citations -- see User:Jytdog/How.
 * At a high level, the center continues to try to turn this page in Wikipedia into a proxy for its website. This is not what Wikipedia is for.  Please do read WP:PROMO which specifically talks about that.   A lot of this is just self-sourced recitations of grants received and publications, and detailed description of activities, and a faculty listing.  In other words, your website.
 * Wikipedia's mission is to provide knowledge to the world; there is a difference between that goal, and "getting the word out" about the center's activities. That is what your website is for.  Too many times this conversation becomes a "game" in which somebody from an organization or company basically takes unsourced content from their website, organizes it a bit for a single page format, goes hunting for citations, adds those citations, and presents the content here.  This is upside down.
 * The rightside up way is to look at what important publications (think New York Times, or high quality books discussing history or politics) say about the Center - things it did or that happened to it in the world that mattered enough for somebody independent of the Center to talk about. Does that help? Jytdog (talk) 15:17, 8 August 2017 (UTC)