Benjamin Pietro Marcus

Benjamin P. Marcus is a Religious Literacy Specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, where he examines the intersection of religious literacy and identity formation and perception in the United States. He has developed religious literacy programs for public schools, universities, U.S. government organizations, and private foundations, and he has delivered presentations on religion at universities and nonprofits in the U.S. and abroad. He has worked with The Foundation for Religious Literacy; the Washington, D.C. Public Schools; the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department (formerly, the Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives); the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See; the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the U.S. State Department; Interfaith Youth Core; and the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme in the United Kingdom. Marcus is a contributing author in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Religion and American Education, where he writes about the importance of religious literacy education. He recently served as executive editor of the 2015 White Paper of the Sub-Working Group on Religion and Conflict Mitigation of the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group. In 2016, Marcus was awarded a grant from the Germanacos Foundation to write lesson plans about religion for public secondary schools and to convene a regional conference on religious literacy pedagogies with teachers, administrators, subject matter experts, and professional consultants. Marcus earned an MTS with a concentration in Religion, Ethics, and Politics as a Presidential Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He studied religion at the University of Cambridge and Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude.