John Hartley
Senior fellow, center for faith in the public square
Research Interests: Religion, politics and global affairs; Conflict transformation; Politics of disarmament; Religious and track 2 diplomacy; Muslim-Christian relations; Moral imagination; Redemptive diversity and justice; Intellectual humility & religious exclusivism; The self and social life; Transformative leadership amidst difference; Vertical leadership development.
John aims to cultivate moral imagination and empower shrewd and transformative leadership across social boundaries typically associated with tension and conflict. He got his start in the work of reconciliation and conflict transformation amidst the Liberian civil wars. In the 25 years since, he has lived, worked, studied, led, consulted and conducted research in more than 20 countries. His work crosses sectors, from government relations to civil society, from corporations to the church.
John’s scholarship emphasizes the concept of religious habitus. These embodied dispositions emerge and develop in community and go on to inform, among other things, styles of social interaction at the boundaries of difference. As such, they influence how people and communities enrich (and degrade) both communal and common goods in social life. Competition over authority and struggles to experience authentic recognition are among the forces giving shape and color to religious habitus. Other streams of John’s scholarship analyze diplomatic discourse at the UN, apply network and field-analytic approaches to various social puzzles (from measuring corporate dispositions towards diversity to evaluating social interventions that aim to enhance peaceful coexistence or conciliation across fraught religious and cultural boundaries) and cultivate vertical growth in leadership. Mixed field, survey, network, historical and narrative methodologies undergird his research and practice.
Examples of current projects include an initiative for redemptive diversity in the corporate context, advising the World Evangelical Alliance’s engagements at the United Nations and Luke10.faith. Examples of past projects include “Race, Islamophobia and Policing” in the US, “Muslims & Christians Working together against Violent Extremism” in Southeast Asia and “Youth Peacebuilding” initiatives among Syrian refugees in rural Lebanon.
At Yale, John was Teaching Fellow for several years in the special course on Faith & Globalization led by Prime Minister Tony Blair and Miroslav Volf. He long-convened the Initiative on Religion, Politics and Society at the MacMillan Center and also convened the center’s Iran Colloquium. He also held teaching fellowships on political sociology, Muslim social movements and Christianity and social power.
John holds a PhD and two master’s degrees in sociology from Yale University, a master’s degree in history from the University of Isfahan (Iran) and a BA in International Relations from the University of California at Davis.
