Hans Gustafson is the director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he also teaches courses in the area of (inter)religious studies and theology. He is the author of several articles and chapters, the book Finding All Things in God: Pansacramentality and Doing Theology Interreligiously (Pickwick 2016, Lutterworth 2017), and is editor of the forthcoming Learning from Other Religions: Leaving Room for Holy Envy (Palgrave, 2018).He holds M.A. degrees in philosophy and theology, and a Ph.D. degree in religion. He resides in Minnesota with his wife and three sons.
Vanita Gupta
Vanita Gupta is the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division and the top civil rights prosecutor for the United States Department of Justice. Formerly, she was a civil rights lawyer and the Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where she oversaw the ACLU's national criminal justice reform efforts.
Gupta was born in the Philadelphia area of Pennsylvania to Indian immigrant parents. She spent most of her childhood in England and France. She is a graduate of Yale and New York University Law School, graduating from law school in 2001.
Peter B. Gudaitis
Peter B. Gudaitis has served as the president of the National Disaster Interfaiths Network (NDIN), and as a consultant, recovery contractor, researcher and trainer since 2007. He lectures nationally and internationally on interfaith and inter-religious partnerships and disaster management, as well as on religious literacy and competency in crisis settings, and disaster readiness, response and recovery best practices.
Gudaitis has over 25 years of experience in chaplaincy, disaster emergency management, faith-based philanthropy, program management and social services administration. As associate director of Episcopal Charities of the Diocese of New York from 1999 to 2003, he managed community-based outreach and youth grant programs and also directed diocesan 9/11 relief and recovery programs. He has eight years of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) experience.
Gudaitis holds a Master of Divinity degree from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church and a B.A. from Kenyon College. He has served on many local and national boards and committees in a variety of capacities.
Rita M. Gross
Known as a warm, humorous, and very clear teacher, Rita M. Gross’ teaching involves a rare combination of academic and dharmic perspectives. She has extensive training and experience both as a professor of comparative studies in religion and as a Buddhist dharma teacher. Her Buddhist teaching is non-sectarian and she teaches for both Zen and Vipassana centers as well as Tibetan centers. She is one of six senior teachers (lopon) appointed by Her Eminence Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche to teach at Lotus Garden, Khandro Rinpoche’s Western center. In the Shambhala mandala, she is authorized to teach all levels of Shambhala Training.
Lopon Rita can teach on most topics pertaining to Buddhism for seminaries, universities, and Buddhist centers. She has specialized in topics pertaining to Buddhism and contemporary issues, including gender issues, ecology, and religious diversity. She also teaches about the implications of an accurate understanding of Buddhist history for Buddhist practitioners. In addition, she has focused on issues pertaining to theology of religious diversity and inter-religious exchange and can offer a variety of solo or co-taught workshops on this topic for seminaries and religious institutions.
John Grim
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim are the Directors of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale. Over the last twenty years, the Forum on Religion and Ecology has been drawing together the research and insights of scholars, theologians, and laity within the world’s religions. They have identified ideas, ethics, and practices regarding ecology and justice from these traditions in books, journals, and films. Now there are environmental statements from the world’s religions, educational programs, and grassroots projects on the ground.
Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar at Yale University where she has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies.
Her concern for the growing environmental crisis, especially in Asia, led her to organize with John Grim a series of ten conferences on World Religions and Ecology at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard (1995-1998). Together they are series editors for the ten volumes from the conferences distributed by Harvard University Press. In this series she co-edited Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997), Confucianism and Ecology (Harvard, 1998), and Hinduism and Ecology (Harvard, 2000).
Tucker has been involved with the Earth Charter since its inception. She served on the International Earth Charter Drafting Committee from 1997-2000 and was a member of the Earth Charter International Council. She also serves on the Advisory Boards of Orion Magazine, the Garrison Institute, and Green Belt Movement U.S.
Grim teaches courses in Native American and Indigenous religions and World religions and ecology. He has undertaken field work with the Crow/Apsaalooke people of Montana and Salish people of Washington state. He is the author of The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) and edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Harvard, 2001). Grim is co-executive producer of the Emmy award winning film, Journey of the Universe. This film is the center piece of massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Yale/Coursera.
Brian Grim
Brian J. Grim is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and a leading expert on the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom and international religious demography. He is an associate scholar with the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project and an affiliated scholar at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs. Prior to becoming the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation’s president in 2014, Grim directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, Middle East, and Europe. He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Price of Freedom Denied (2010), and writes the Weekly Number Blog. Grim holds a doctorate in sociology from the Pennsylvania State University and is also a TEDx speaker.
Kathleen A. Green
Rev. Dr. Kathleen A. Green is Executive Director of the Yale Humanist Community and a Yale Silliman College Fellow. Her doctoral dissertation focused on collaboration between humanists and religious adherents in interfaith engagement. Dr. Green also serves on the faculty of Claremont Lincoln University’s Master of Arts in Interfaith degree program, and is an Affiliated Community Minister at the Unitarian Society of New Haven. She resides in Connecticut.
Bettina Gray
Bettina Gray has woven several careers into a rich life. She is a co-founder of North American Interfaith Network, serving on its board since 1986 and as its chair since 2008. As a television producer, she created The Parliament of Souls, 27 half-hour interviews with religious leaders and teachers, including the Dalai Lama, at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions. The series, which came with a companion book, was repeatedly broadcast on PBS and in 140 countries. For more videotaped interfaith interviews, go to her Creative Films. As a composer she has written numerous soundtracks for interfaith and human rights-based video productions, and she continues teaching and performing musically and is Composer-in-Residence of San Francisco's Slavyanka Russian Chorus. She has keynoted and lectured on world religions and human rights in various settings, including Mills College, University of California (Berkeley), and Graduate Theological Union, and been a consultant to the World Council of Churches regarding interfaith relations.
Jonathan Granoff
Jonathan Granoff is an international lawyer, advocate, scholar, and award winning screenwriter who serves as President of the Global Security Institute, United Nations Representative of the Permanent Secretariat of the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, and Ambassador for Peace, Security and Nuclear Disarmament of The Parliament of the World’s Religions. He serves on numerous advisory and governing boards such as the International Law Section of the American Bar Association, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship, Universal Sufi Council, World Wisdom Council, Tikkun, International Association of Sufism, Middle Powers Initiative, Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament working to bring the values of love, compassion, and justice into action. He is a Fellow in he World Academy of Arts and Science and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Blessed with having lived and studied with H.H. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen since his youth he is honored with the namesake Ahamed Muhaiyaddeen.
Lanier Graham
Lanier Graham began his curatorial career at New York's Museum of Modern Art. While there he played chess with Duchamp and dedicated his first book Chess Sets (1968) to him. He later served as Curator of the National Gallery of Australia, and Curator of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, where Duchamp had his first museum retrospective in 1963. It was in Pasadena at the NSM in 1991 that Graham used works from the 1963 retrospective as the nucleus for the widely respected exhibition "Impossible Realities: Marcel Duchamp & the Surrealist Tradition."
Graham has published a large number of articles, books, and catalogues on modern art and philosophy, as well as world art and sacred symbolism, including catalogues of the work of Monet, van Gogh, Guimard, Matisse, Ernst, Duchamp, and de Kooning. Among the books he has written are Three Centuries of American Painting (1971 & 1977), The Spontaneous Gensture: Prints & Books of the Abstract Expressionists Era (1987), The Prints of Willem De Kooning: A Catalogue Raisonne (1991), and Goddess in Art (1997), which is now available in four languages.
His research field involves relationships between traditional art and modern art, especially the iconography of the transcendent. He is in the process of completing two books: Mallarme & Modern Art and Images of the Infinite:Spiritual Philosophy in Modern Art which will include his interviews with major figures of the era, including Duchamp. Both books examine Modernism as a secular search for wholeness.
He has taught Art History, Religious Studies, and Museum Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, California Institute of Asian Studies, San Francisco, Naropa Institute, Boulder, and Humboldt State University, Arcata, California. He now teaches Art History at California State University, East Bay, where he also directs the University Art Gallery. His profile appears in Who's Who in America andWho's Who in the World.
Pamela Jay Gottfried
Pamela Jay Gottfried is a rabbi, parent, teacher, and author. An inveterate Scrabble player and New York Times Crossword Puzzle fanatic, she credits her love of words to her third grade teacher and her parents, who encouraged her to develop her vocabulary through reading and using the dictionary at an early age. Rabbi Gottfried is a New York City native who moved to Atlanta in 1999. Her areas of expertise include rabbinic literature and the development of Jewish law. Since her rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1993, she has taught students of all ages in churches, colleges, community centers, schools, and synagogues.
Rabbi Gottfried balances her love of writing with her work as a potter, fostering her creativity in a tactile world removed from the computer and Internet. She is also a founding member of 100 People of Faith, in Atlanta, and is active in several non-profit organizations that foster interfaith relations and the elimination of prejudice and poverty.
Jack Gordon
Jack Gordon is a photographer and media producer based in Washington DC. He is currently spearheading the multimedia project Faith in Action DC, which celebrates the community service work of people of faith throughout the nation's capital region. Additionally, Jack serves on the Board of the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington as a representative for the D.C. area Bahá’í community.
Rev. Claire Goodman
Rev. Claire Goodman OUnI grew up in an interfaith (Christian and Jewish) but non-observant family in wonderfully diverse New York City. Her parents left her on my own to explore and over the years she found her way to every cultural and faith community within walking distance of her home: Episcopal, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Quaker, and more! She first became involved in a faith community at age 13 at one of the oldest Quaker meetings in the country. It was there that she took her very first Yoga class which eventually led her to Integral Yoga, a synthesis of many of the world’s great faith traditions, emphasizing that “Truth is One, Paths are Many.”
Goodman received her undergraduate degree in 1981 in Cultural Anthropology and Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and although she loved her studies, she found she was more attracted to a heart-centered, practical approach than an academic one.
In 1999 Goodman completed Life Coach training and was blessed to find her way to One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, a 2-year program of study in New York City leading to ordination as an Interfaith Minister. Seminary curriculum provided a firm knowledge base in ancient and contemporary faith traditions and spiritual paths and their practices as well as ongoing experience of practical ministry. Through a workshop elective she discovered the wonderful world of creating beautiful, heartfelt wedding ceremonies for couples from varied backgrounds, and that set her on the path to the wonderful work she does now. In 2013 Goodman was privileged to be co-ordained by the Order of Universal Interfaith (OUnI) and in March 2014 she co-hosted the Big I Conference for Inclusive Theology, Spirituality and Consciousness in Phoenix.
Andrea Goodman
Rev. Andrea Goodman is an interfaith minister and co-founded The Interfaith Peace Project in 2007. Her leadership role as the President of the Board of Directors is part of her active interfaith ministry that includes Sacred Visits to various faith centers; interfaith spiritual direction; officiant of life events, retreat leader; and academic advisor to students at the Chaplaincy Institute. Andrea has a long career in employee relations and diversity, bringing spirituality to corporate work places. Her interfaith spirituality is founded in a Buddhist practice and Catholic social justice teachings.
She can be contacted at goodandrea@comcast.net.
Elías González
Elías González studied philosophy and social sciences at ITESO and is currently doing his thesis, titled “Encuentro, re-ligación y diálogo. Reflexiones hacia un diálogo inter-re-ligioso” (“Meeting, Religion, and Dialogue: Reflections for an Interreligious Dialogue”) where he approaches the interreligious dialogue as a religious act. He collaborates with Carpe Diem Interfaith Foundation and its program, the Universal Multicultural Dialogue. He is the creator and coordinator of the “Microdiálogos” for Carpe Diem.
Elías or “Elahas,” as his friends call him, has participated in various interreligious events and rituals and has coordinated spirituals retreats and interfaith ceremonies. He has been involved in dialogue with Buddhists, Hindus, and Shamans. Elías studied Latin-American philosophy in Ecuador, and he worked in Cusco, Peru as a shaman assistant in Ayahuasca ceremonies. He has lived in spiritual communities like Janaj Pacha in Bolivia and worked with indigenous people in Rarámuri, Wixárrika, Shipibo and Quechua communities. He has written for various magazines and been a speaker at interreligious conferences.
Daniel Gómez-Ibáñez
From 1991 to 1993 Daniel Gómez-Ibáñez was the Executive Director of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, which he and others founded in Chicago in 1988. The 1993 centennial event in Chicago was probably the largest and most diverse gathering of world religious and spiritual leaders ever assembled. Dr. Gómez-Ibáñez worked with Dr. Hans Küng to produce the document Toward a Global Ethic; an Initial Declaration, signed by over 100 religious and spiritual leaders at the Parliament.
Afterwards he founded the Peace Council and served as its Executive Director until he retired in 2007. The Peace Council was a response to the many appeals at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions for effective, practical interfaith collaboration in areas of conflict.
During the fifteen years of its existence the Peace Council provided seed money for bread baking and weaving cooperatives in Mayan refugee camps, equipped indigenous health workers, helped establish a shelter for victims of child prostitution and rape in Thailand, walked with Buddhist monks through heavily-mined combat zones in Cambodia, provided medical supplies to pediatric hospitals in North Korea, worked with international organizations to advance women’s rights and opportunities, promoted the peaceful return of Muslim refugees to Kosovo, and worked with the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, sharing the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with many other NGOs. Other programs took the Coiuncilors to Palestine and Israel, Canada, South Korea, Northern Ireland, Mozambique, the Sudan, and even New York.
Henry Goldschmidt
Henry Goldschmidt is the director of programs at The Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY). Dr. Goldschmidt is a cultural anthropologist, community educator, interfaith organizer, and scholar of American religious diversity. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and has taught religious studies and cultural anthropology at Wesleyan University and elsewhere. He is the author of Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights (Rutgers U. Press, 2006) and the coeditor of Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford U. Press, 2004).
Philip Goldberg
Philip Goldberg has been studying India’s spiritual traditions for about fifty years, as a practitioner, teacher and an author. He is the author or coauthor of more than twenty books, including Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path(2006); American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (2010), which was named one of the top ten religion books of the year by both the Huffington Post and the American Library Association’s Booklist; and his latest, The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru (2018).
As a public speaker and workshop leader, he has given presentations at venues throughout the US. India and other locations, and has appeared in national media. An ordained Interfaith Minister and spiritual counselor, he is cohost of the popular podcast Spirit Matters, leads American Veda Tours to India, and blogs regularly on Spirituality & Health and Elephant Journal. His websites are www.PhilipGoldberg.com and http://www.spiritmatterstalk.com. He serves as secretary of the founding Board of Directors of The Interfaith Observer (TIO).
Mike Goggin
Mike Goggin serves the Ignatian Volunteer Corps as Regional Director for Washington, DC and Suburban Maryland after more than 20 years of working in the DC faith-based non-profit community. Highlights include six plus years of youth ministry at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in the Archdiocese of Washington, nine years of directing programs and coordinating special events for the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington (IFC), and four years as National Executive Director of the St. Vincent Pallotti Center for Apostolic Development, a lay missionary organization. He contributed a chapter to Dr. Eboo Patel’s book Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), became the youngest President in the history of the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN), also in 2006, and earlier won the Outstanding Adult Leadership Award from the Office of Youth Ministry/CYO in Washington.
Ted Glick
Ted Glick has devoted 44 years of his life to the progressive social change movement. After a year of student activism Grinnell College, he left in 1969 to work full time against the Vietnam War. As a Selective Service draft resister, he spent 11 months in prison. In 1973 he co-founded the National Committee to Impeach Nixon.
For the last nine years Ted has played a national leadership role in the effort to stabilize our climate and for a clean energy revolution. He was a co-founder in 2004 of the Climate Crisis Coalition and in 2005 coordinated the USA Join the World effort leading up to December 3rd actions during the United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal. In May, 2006 he became the national coordinator of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council and is currently National Policy Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. For three and a half months in the fall of 2007 he ate no solid food as part of a climate emergency fast focused on getting Congress to pass strong climate legislation, one of 20 extended fasts for social justice.
He has participated in and led hundreds of actions and been arrested seventeen times for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. His prolific writing on the movement to which he devotes his life includes his 2000 book, Future Hope: A Winning Strategy for a Just Society (2000) and his column, "Future Hope," distributed nationally since 2000. His book Love Refuses to Quit: Climate Change and Social Change in the 21st Century (2009) is free for downloading.