Chester Gillis was appointed Dean of Georgetown College in April 2009. He has been a member of the faculty in the Theology Department at Georgetown since 1988 where he served as department chair. He was the initial holder of the Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies and the founding director for the Program on the Church and Interreligious Dialogue at the university’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and served on the Executive Faculty of the University. He holds degrees in philosophy and religious studies from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Chicago. His research interests include comparative religion and contemporary Roman Catholicism. He is the author of Catholic Faith in America (2003), Roman Catholicism in America (1999), Pluralism: A New Paradigm for Theology (1993), and A Question of Final Belief: John Hick’s Pluralistic Theory of Salvation (1989), and editor of The Political Papacy (2006). He is co-editor of the Columbia University series Religion and Politics.
He is married to Marie Varley Gillis. Their daughter, Alison, graduated from Georgetown College in 2008 and is currently a student at the Law Center.
