Liam Chinn joined the United Religions Initiative (URI) team as director of Evaluation and Learning in March 2013. For the past decade he has worked with international and local NGOs on governance and peacebuilding programs in multiple countries across Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Timor-Leste, where he directed a USAID funded conflict mitigation program. He brings extensive expertise in program development and evaluation and will guide URI as it begins to build regional impact evaluation strategies. He has a long held passion for promoting greater engagement of civil society in the development process, authoring several surveys on community level conflict and the role of local leaders – including religious leaders – in bridge building. Liam holds a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of Chicago and is an avid cook, trained in both Thai and Cantonese cuisines.
Christopher Key Chapple
Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and director the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He has published several books, including Karma and Creativity (1986), a co-translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1991), Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions (1993), Hinduism and Ecology (2000), a co-edited volume, Jainism and Ecology: Nonviolence in the Web of Life (2002), and Reconciling Yogas (2003). Dr. Chapple serves on several advisory boards, including the Green Yoga Association (Oakland), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), and the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale).
Paul-Gordon Chandler
Paul-Gordon Chandler is the Founding President of CARAVAN, an international peacebuilding non-profit that uses the arts to build bridges between the creeds of the Middle East and West. An author, interfaith advocate, arts patron, social entrepreneur, and a U.S. Episcopal priest, he grew up in Muslim West Africa has lived and worked extensively throughout the Islamic world in leadership roles within faith-based publishing, relief and development agencies, and churches. From 2003-2013 he was the Rector of the international Episcopal church in Cairo, Egypt. His most recent book is titled IN SEARCH OF A PROPHET: A Spiritual Journey with Kahlil Gibran. For more information, see: www.paulgordonchandler.com.
W. Y. Alice Chan
W. Y. Alice Chan is the executive director of the Centre for Civic Religious Literacy, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, a PREVNet Emerging Scholar, and a co-chair for the Comparative and International Education Society’s Religion and Education Special Interest Group. Her teaching experiences and work in private and non-profit settings inform her work and research today. More detail about Alice is available at her LinkedIn page.
Biswadeb Chakraborty
Biswadeb Chakraborty is the United Religions Initiative’s coordinator for east India. With graduate degrees in percussion (Indian drum) and human resource project management, his interfaith activism and musical career as performer and producer weave together beautifully. For six years Biswabed worked at Transformative Collaborations International, a California-based organizational development venture. In India and abroad he has worked with young human rights and interfaith activists, using his music to attract large numbers to the cause. From a deeply spiritual family that encouraged his early musical abilities, Biswabed is a networker bringing together artists, human rights activists, and interfaith organizations. His musical group Ektaan promotes a grassroots-supported, discrimination-free India on television and radio, in concerts, and on CDs.
Paul Chaffee
Paul Chaffee is publisher and editor of The Interfaith Observer (TIO), a monthly internet magazine promoting healthy interfaith culture which began in September 2011. He was the founding executive director of the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, where he served for 17 years. He sat on United Religions Initiative’s original Board of Directors for six years, was a trustee of the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN) for ten, and served as a Parliament Ambassador for the Parliament of the World’s Religions for three.
Paul led the teams which planned the initial URI-North America summit in 2001 and NAIN’s 20th anniversary NAINConnect in 2008. Over the years Paul has started and/or edited numerous newsletters, including Bay Area Interfaith Connect, published each month by the Interfaith Center at the Presidio. His publications include Accountable Leadership (2nd edition, 1996), Shared Wisdom (2004), a booklet about developing interfaith relationships, and Remembered Light (2007). Ordained in the United Church of Christ. Rev. Chaffee was honored as a Distinguished Alum at Pacific School of Religion in 2007 and as an Interfaith Visionary by the Temple of Understanding at its 50th anniversary in 2010.
Jan Chaffee
Jan Chaffee, as a young girl in Ohio, decided San Francisco was where she wanted to live. Turning 21, she made the move and her family followed. She spent twenty years as a legal secretary, most of it with Louis O. Kelso, the pioneering economist who created the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and other corporate financing techniques that build private ownership of productive capital into employees and other citizens. In 1996, with her husband Paul Chaffee, Jan helped found the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, managing its funds for 15 years and Chapel use for a dozen. As such, she was on the front-end of interfaith celebrations, weddings, concerts, funerals, programs, staffing, and administration. With Paul, she retired from the Center at the end of 2010. Today Jan oversees The Interfaith Observer’s finances.
Justin Catanoso
Justin Catanoso is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and a regular contributor to Mongabay.com, a leading global environmental news organization. He specializes in reporting on climate change policy and has covered the last three United Nations climate summits, including the historic agreement in Paris in 2015. More specifically, Catanoso covered the release of Pope Francis' papal encyclical Laudato Si in Rome. He later wrote a series of stories from Peru on the intersection between faith and environmental protection, and whether the pope's message would be heeded by Peruvian leaders in governmental, business, education and the Catholic church. His 2015 reporting on the subject, which he continues to follow, was sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, DC.
Mercedes Cary
Mercedes Cary is an M.A. student at the Graduate Theological Union, concentrating on Ethics & Social Theory, with a certificate in Women’s Studies in Religion. Mercedes received her B.A. from UC Santa Barbara in Classical Archaeology and went on to study Hinduism before enrolling at the GTU.
She currently studies gender theory and religion in civil society, both at the GTU and UC Berkeley. Her thesis-in-progress explores gendered and generational differences among Hindu immigrants in the Bay Area. Other areas of interest include: feminist theory, intersectionality, the sociology of culture and religion, and the rise of social media.
Brian Carwana
Brian Carwana is executive director of the Encounter World Religions Centre, an educational centre that introduces participants to the people, places, practices, and philosophies of the world’s religions.
Henry Ralph Carse
Henry Ralph Carse, Ph.D., born in Vermont in the USA, has lived for over 40 years in Israel and Palestine, including Jerusalem. His experiential teaching and writing touch on the Art and Practice of Pilgrimage, Wilderness Spirituality, and Interfaith Peace Activism. Dr. Carse is the founder of Kids4Peace International (www.k4p.org), a non-profit interfaith dialogue and action movement that engages Palestinian and Israeli youngsters and their families across the lines of conflict.
Sally Carlton
In 2011, Sally Carlton completed a PhD in French History at the University of Western Australia (UWA). She spent 2011-2012 working as a Research Fellow at the Nepal Institute for Policy Studies (NIPS) on issues of human security, democratization, and peacebuilding. She has since moved to Christchurch, New Zealand, where she is working at the Canterbury Refugee Council and conducting her own research into the city’s post-earthquake urban regeneration and human rights situation. She is an Associate of the Peace and Collaborative Development Network and member of many research and international affairs committees.
Kay Campbell
Kay Campbell has been religion reporter for The Huntsville Times, now part of the Alabama Media Group, since 2005. Educated as a teacher, she has taught regular classes as well as music, Spanish, literature and writing to students from kindergarten through college. Raised in a very small Tennessee town as part of a devout family who belonged to a minority Christian denomination, she early experienced both the joys and the frustrations of being part of a misunderstood religious group – and also began interfaith and intrafaith conversations very young. Now an ordained Presbyterian elder, she counts it both a blessing and a ministry to attempt to describe holy matters respectfully and accurately. Among the awards for her writing is the 2011 Religion Commentary of the Year Award from the Religion Newswriters Association.
Heidi Campbell
Heidi Campbell received her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and is Associate Professor of Communications at Texas A&M University. Her teaching and research centers on the social shaping of technology, rhetoric of new media, and themes related to the intersection of media, religion and culture, with a special interest in the internet and digital, mobile culture.
She is also affiliate faculty in Religious Studies and director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies. She has written over 60 articles and book chapters on religion and new media. Her key works include Exploring Religious Community Online: We are one in the network (2005), looking at how online religious communities connect their online and offline social-religious networks; When Religion Meets New Media (Routledge, 2010), investigating Jewish, Muslim & Christian communities’ negotiations with media technologies; and Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (2013) which maps the study of religion online.
Her current research explores how bounded communities domesticate the internet in light of their core beliefs and the relationship between religious digital creatives and established, offline religious authorities. She is on the advisory board of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Religion, Media & Digital Culture.
Libby Byrne
Libby Byrne works as an artist, art therapist, theologian, writer and researcher as she follows the invitation and discovery of art into new ways of being with people in liminal spaces. Within her studio practice Libby works with ideas, images and experiences to extend the way we think, perceive and respond to questions of meaning and existence.
Having worked as an Art Therapist in palliative care and trauma recovery her current research addresses the nature and significance of art, both made and received, in the process of healing that is required for human beings to flourish and live well with illness and in health.
Libby teaches in the Master of Art Therapy Program at La Trobe University whilst developing a growing body of research in the emerging field of Practice-led Theological Inquiry. She works as an Adjunct Lecturer, Honorary Research Associate with the University of Divinity and member of the Centre for Research in Religion and Social Policy (RASP). Her most recent project, a Practice-led Inquiry into the experience of joy the liturgical season of Ordinary Time, was part of Miroslav Volf’s Joy and the Good Life Project at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
Angela Butel
Angela Butel lives in New York City and studies Public and Urban Policy at The New School. Her commitment to building more inclusive, equitable communities grows out of her grounding in Catholic social teaching, which she developed through 16 years of Catholic school in Kansas City, Missouri and through working for Catholic Charities in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology, with concentrations in in human rights and humanitarianism and African studies and a minor in French from Macalester College.
While pursing her Bachelor’s, Angela was involved in interfaith work on and off campus including being a member of the Macalester Multifaith Council, co-chair of Mac Catholics, and an emerging organizer for the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition of Minnesota. In addition to these responsibilities, Angela worked for Amicus, which provides transitional services to ex-offenders, and was involved in her campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
Tarunjit Singh Butalia
Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia is a board trustee of Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations, Parliament of the World's Religions, and North American Interfaith Network and serves as Special Advisor with Religions for Peace – USA. He has served on board of National Religious Coalition Against Torture and World Sikh Council – America Region. Locally he has worked with Interfaith Association for Central Ohio for over 20 years and currently is Moderator of its Program Committee. He is co-editor of landmark book Religion in Ohio: Profiles of Faith Communities and received the 2016 Luminosa Award for Unity from Focolare Movement.
Jim Burklo
Jim Burklo is the associate dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California and teaches at USC’s School of Social Work. An ordained United Church of Christ pastor, he is the author of two books on progressive Christianity: Open Christianity – Home by Another Road (2000) and Birdlike and Barnless: Meditations, Prayers and Songs for Progressive Christians (2008). His blog is called Musings, and he edits the monthly INgage interfaith e-newsletter for southern California. He pastored California churches in Sausalito, San Mateo, and Palo Alto, served eight years on the campus ministry staff at Stanford University, and organized and led the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, a homeless services agency. Jim served on the executive council of The Center for Progressive Christianity.
Adam Bucko
Adam Bucko is an activist and spiritual director to many of New York City’s homeless youth and the co-author of Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation. He grew up in Poland during the totalitarian regime and spent his early years exploring the anarchist youth movement as a force for social and political change. At 17, Adam immigrated to America where his desire to find his path towards a meaningful life led him to monasteries in the U.S. and India, where he began working with homeless youth at the “Ashram of the Poor.” Returning to the US, he worked on the streets of various American cities with young people struggling against homelessness and prostitution, eventually co-founded The Reciprocity Foundation, an award-winning nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of New York City’s homeless youth. Adam has also established HAB, an ecumenical and inter-spiritual “new monastic” fellowship for young people which offers formation in radical spirituality and sacred activism. Adam’s work has been featured by ABC News, CBS, NBC, New York Daily News, National Catholic Reporter, Ode Magazine, Yoga International Magazine and Sojourner Magazine.
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat have been covering contemporary culture and the spiritual renaissance for four decades. They are the authors of Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life (1998). In that book, they introduced the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy — 37 spiritual practices that are common in the world’s religions. Their book Spiritual Rx: Prescriptions for Living a Meaningful Life (2001) recommends resources and exercises for exploring those practices. They are also the authors of two gift paperbacks, 100 Ways to Keep Your Soul Alive (1994) and its sequel 100 More Ways to Keep Your Soul Alive (1997).
In 2006, they launched on SpiritualityandPractice.com, which has 27,000 pages of content. Each year the Brussats identify spiritual themes in more than 300 books, 50 audios, and 300 films.
Frederic is a United Church of Christ clergyman with a journalism ministry, and Mary Ann is an interfaith minister, ordained by the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary. The Brussats are members of Judson Memorial Church, a United Church of Christ congregation in Greenwich Village, New York City. They are also initiates of the Mevlevi Sufi Order that traces its inspiration to Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi. They live in a loft in New York City with their cats.