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.