Karen Armstrong OBE is a historian of religion,

Transcription

1 Biographies Karen Armstrong OBE is a historian of religion, whose books on the traditions of India, China, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been translated into fortyfive languages. They include, A History of God, which was an international bestseller; The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism; Islam: A Short History, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time; Buddha; The Great Transformation: The Origin of Our Religious Traditions and most recently Fields of Blood; Religion and the History of Violence. In 2007 she was appointed by Kofi Anan to the High Level Group of the UN Alliance of Civilizations with the task of diagnosing the causes of extremism. In 2008, she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. It was launched in the fall of 2009 and has become a global movement. Also in 2008 she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In 2013 she received the British Academy s inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding and in 2015 the ISESCO prize for educators. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Trustee of the British Museum. Akintunde E. Akinade is professor of Theology at Georgetown University s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He is the author of Christian Responses to Islam in Nigeria: A Contextual Study of Ambivalent Encounters (2014). Myriam Benraad BA, MPhil, PhD (Sciences Po Paris, France) is a researcher specialising in the contemporary Middle East and Arab and Muslim politics. She has taught political science and Middle Eastern politics at the American University Centre of Provence (AUCP, Aix-en-Provence). She is the author of Irak, la revanche de l Histoire. De l occupation étrangère à l État islamique (Iraq: the Revenge of History. From Foreign Occupation to the Islamic State, Paris: Vendémiaire, 2015) and Irak : de Babylone à l État islamique. Idées recues sur une nation complexe (Iraq: From Babylon to the Islamic State. Misconceptions on a Complex Nation, Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu, 2015). 195

2 Barry Cooper FRSC, a fourth generation Albertan, was educated at Shawnigan Lake School, the University of British Columbia and Duke University (PhD, 1969). He taught at several eastern universities before coming to the University of Calgary in He has published 180 articles and over 30 books, most recently Consciousness and Politics: From Analysis to Meditation in the late work of Eric Voegelin, (St Augustine s Press, 2016); in 2004, the University of Missouri Press published New Political Religions: An Analysis of Modern Terrorism. He publishes a weekly column in the Calgary Herald and other CanWest Global papers. Renaud Fabbri is the Managing Editor of Adyan/Religions at the Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (France) and is specialized in the Philosophy of Religion and in Political Philosophy. His book Eric Voegelin et l Orient : Millénarisme et Religions Politiques de l Antiquité à Daech (Paris: l Harmattan, 2016) analyzes the spiritual and ideological roots of Islamism, Jihadism and Hindu Nationalism in the light of Eric Voegelin s philosophy of consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi ( ) was the preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. Eric Geoffroy is an Expert in Islam and Professor in Islamic Studies in the Department of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Strasbourg (France). He also teaches at another institutions such as the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona). Specialist in the study of Sufism in Islam, he works as well on intercultural and interreligious relations and spirituality challenges in the contemporary world (spirituality and globalization; spirituality and ecology ). He published more than ten books and directed collective works as well. He is the author of numerous articles in magazines specialized in Islamology and has written more than twenty articles in the Encyclopedia of Islam 2nd and 3rd 196

3 ed. (Brill, Leiden). Some of his publications have been translated into different languages. Daisaku Ikeda (1928- ) is a Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, poet and author. He is president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a socially engaged network of Buddhist lay believers with members in 192 countries and territories around the world; he is also the founder of a number of educational and research institutions, including the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, and Soka University. Since 1983, Ikeda has issued peace proposals addressing critical global issues and in support of the work of the United Nations. Grace Ji-Sun Kim is an ordained minister in the PC (USA) noted for her work in the fields of feminist, post-colonial and Asian American theology. Kim is the author or editor of 10 books, most recently Embracing the Other (2015) and Making Peace with the Earth (2016). She earned a B.S. from Victoria University in 1992; an M.Div. from Knox College in 1995; and a Ph.D. from University of Toronto in Ibrahim Kalin, Ph. D. is curently the spokesperson for the Turkish presidency and is a fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. He received his Ph. D. from the George Washington University. His field of concentration is post-avicennan Islamic philosophy with research interests in comparative philosophy, Muslim-Christian relations and modern Turkish history. Dr. Kalin has published widely on Islamic philosophy and the relations between Islam and the West. Patrick Laude has been teaching at Georgetown since His scholarly interests lie in comparative spirituality, poetry, and Western interpretations of Islam and Asian contemplative and wisdom traditions. He has authored over ten books including: Pathways to an Inner Islam (SUNY, 2010), Pray Without Ceasing (World Wisdom, 2006), and Divine Play, Sacred Laughter and Spiritual Understanding (Palgrave, 2005). 197

4 Ali Lakhani graduated from Cambridge University with a B.A. (Hons), LL.B., and LL.M. He is based in Vancouver and has practised as a barrister and solicitor at all levels of the courts in Canada for nearly 40 years. In 2015 he was appointed Queen s Counsel. In 1998 he founded Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity, which he continues to edit. He is the editor of the anthology, The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam (2006), which contains his prize-winning essay on 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, 'The Metaphysics of Human Governance: Imam 'Ali, Truth and Justice', and is the author of an anthology of essays, The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom (2010). An Ismaili Muslim, he has recently written a book (forthcoming) on Ismaili faith and ethics, focusing on the teachings of His Highness the Aga Khan. Oliver Leaman teaches philosophy at the University of Kentucky and has previously taught in the Middle East and Britain. He is the author most recently of The Qur an: Philosophical Perspectives, Bloomsbury, 2016 and Controversies in Contemporary Islam, Routlege 2013 and is on the editorial board of the Islamic Studies section of Oxford Bibliographies Online. Louis Massignon ( ) was a Catholic scholar of Islam and a pioneer of Catholic- Muslim mutual understanding. He was an influential figure in the twentieth century with regard to the Catholic church's relationship with Islam. Senad Mrahorović, PhD, is a researcher at the DICID. His research interests include Religious studies, Orientalism, Sufism, philosophy and religious art. 198 John Paraskevopoulos is a Shin Buddhist priest from Australia. He attended the University of Melbourne where he was awarded first-class honours in Philosophy. Reverend Paraskevopoulos received ordination in 1994 at the Temple of the Primal Vow (Hongan-ji) in Kyoto and has written a number of works including Call of the Infinite (also pub-

5 lished in French, Italian and Greek editions), The Fragrance of Light and The Unhindered Path (scheduled to appear in late 2016). He is currently engaged in a range of pastoral and scholarly endeavours. Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is a Board Affiliate of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, an Advisor to the Institute of Traditional Psychology and has worked for several years in the field of mental health, covering a broad spectrum of disorders in various psychiatric settings. He has published in numerous journals, including Sacred Web, Sophia, Parabola, Resurgence, Temenos Academy Review, Studies in Comparative Religion and is the editor of Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy. He lives on the Central Coast of California. Sofia Stril-Rever: PhD in Indian studies, a writer, biographer and interpreter of the Dalai Lama with whom she has co-authored 3 books: New Reality (Les Arènes, 2016), My Spiritual Journey (Harper One, 2010), translated from French into about twenty languages, and My Appeal to the World (Hay House International, 2015). As an interpreter of sacred mantras, she has also released the CD Dakinis (SometimeStudio, Paris, 2012) Sofia Stril-Rever is the cofounder and spokeperson of P.U.R.E., the Association for Peace and Universal Responsibility, based in Paris, France, www. buddhaline.net Eric Vinson, Ph. D in Political Science (Sciences Po Paris) is specialized in religious, spiritual and political issues. He teaches religiology, Buddhism and religious pedagogy in the Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP), and religious and secular culture in Sciences Po. As a journalist, he worked for French newspapers such as Le Point and Le Monde des Religions. As the president of Enquete and Growing Together, two nonprofit NGOs, he is devoted to the promotion of religious knowledge and education, dialogue and mutual understanding in secular societies. Co-written with his wife Sophie Viguier-Vinson, his latest book is entitled Jaurès le prophète, mystique et politique d un combattant républicain (Albin-Michel, Paris, 2014). 199

6 Eric Voegelin was a German-born American political scientist and philosopher. Born in Cologne in 1901, he died in Stanford, California in In his first works, Voegelin focused on the religious roots of modern political ideologies such as Communism and Nazism, which he initially interpreted as a form of Gnosticism. In his later works he developed a theory of consciousness and a religious phenomenology. His most important works include Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Order and History (5 volumes) and Anamnesis. They have been published in the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (University of Missouri). The most accessible introduction to his thought remains his Autobiographical Reflections. Elizabeth Zelensky teaches at several Washington D.C. area universities, including Georgetown University and George Mason University and has worked as a historical consultant for the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Justice. Her scholarly interests focus on the discourse of Westernization and spirituality in prerevolutionary Russia and she has written Windows to Heaven(Brazos, 2005). 200