Keynote Speakers

His Excellency Sheikh Ali Goma’a, Grand Mufti of Egypt, Dar al Ifta

Sheikh Ali Goma'a is a leading signatory of A Common Word Between Us and You and holds one of the highest positions in Sunni Islam as Grand Mufti of Egypt. He is a master of both the Islamic intellectual ('aqli) and transmitted (naqli) sciences, and author of over 50 books as well as scores of articles. He has supervised more than 70 theses in different universities.  He specializes in the science of the foundations of Islamic law (usul al-fiqh), and studied Islamic law at al-Azhar Univ, Cairo (BA; MA: PhD 1988). There he taught in the Faculty of Islamic and Arabic Studies from the time he received his MA until his appointment as Grand Mufti of Egypt in 2003. Via Dar al Ifta, personally and through Islamic jurists working under his supervision, he is responsible for the issuance of numerous significant fatwas or religious opinions guiding Muslims in religious questions.

The Right Reverend William O. Gregg, Assistant Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina-Charlotte Office & Chair, Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church

Bishop William Gregg was ordained and consecrated VI Bishop of Eastern Oregon in 2000 before coming to the Charlotte Office of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina in 2007. He studied at Richmond (BA 1973) and Boston Univ (MA 1980) as well as theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA (MDiv 1977) and Notre Dame (PhD 1994). Bishop Gregg served 2001-6 as Chair of the Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (a policy and strategy body), and serves currently as an Anglican member of the International Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialog, and as a member of the Episcopal House of Bishops Theology Committee. He has also taught theology at St Mary of the Woods College, a Catholic women’s college, and served as parish priest or chaplain in New London, CT, Charlottesville, VA, Abingdon, VA, Terra Haute, IN, and the Diocese of Northern Indiana.

Environment and Climate Change Panel

Prof Douglas Maclean, Parr Center for Ethics & Dept of Philosophy, Univ of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Douglas E. Maclean teaches in the area of practical ethics and moral & political theory, including environmental values, while serving as Director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Parr Center for Ethics. He studied philosophy at Stanford (BA 1968) and Yale Universities (PhD 1977). He has held visiting or permanent appointments at the University of Maryland, the US Naval Academy, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Virginia Polytechnic, Oxford and the Australian National University. His recent work examines how values do and ought to influence decisions on the personal level as well as a matter of government policy, including publications such as “Comparing Values in Environmental Policies: Moral Issues and Moral Arguments,” in Valuing Health Risks, Costs, and Benefits for Environmental Policy Making (eds. Hammond & Coppock 1990), “The Ethics of Cost-Benefit Analysis: Incommensurable, Incompaitble, and Incomparable Values,” in Democracy, Social Values, and Public Policy (eds. Carrow, Churchill & Cordes (1998) and "Some Morals of a Theory of Nonrational Choice,” in Judgments, Decisions, and Public Policy (eds. Gowda & Fox 2002).

Prof Waleed El-Ansary, Dept of Religious Studies, Univ of South Carolina-Columbia

Waleed El-Ansary teaches comparative religion, Islam and Islamic economics. He studied economics at George Washington (BA 1986) and the Univ of Maryland (MA 1998) and the Human Sciences with an emphasis on Islamic studies at George Washington (PhD 2006) He is a consultant to the Royal Court of Jordan as well as the Grand Mufti of Egypt and is involved in interfaith dialog. His research focuses on the relationship between religion, science, and economics, and he has lectured widely on topics relating to economics, philosophy, and policy.  He is the author of "The Spiritual Significance of Jihad in the Islamic Approach to Markets and the Environment," "The Economics of Clash of Civilizations : Reexamining Religion and Violence," and "The Quantum Enigma and the Islamic Sciences of Nature."

Prof Cinnamon Carlarne, School of Law & School of the Environment, Univ of South Carolina-Columbia

Cinnamon Pinon Carlarne is an environmental lawyer working principally on evolving systems of domestic and international environmental law and policy. She studied environment science at at Baylor Univ (BA 1998) and Oxford University (MS 2002) and law at UC-Berkeley (JD 2001) and Oxford Univ (BCL 2003). Her current work focuses on comparative climate change law and policy-making, and fragmentation in international environmental law.

Human Rights & Ethics Panel

Prof Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin, State Islamic Univ Sunan Kalijaga, Yogakarta, Indonesia

Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin teaches sharia law at the State Islamic University (UIN) Sunan Kalijaga in Yogyakarta, Indonesia where she is also head of the Women’s Studies Center. She studied sharia law at UIN Sunan Kalijaga (LLB 1988), and sociology at Monash (MA 1993) and Gadjah Mada University (2004). Her research focus is Islam and women, and to date she has been a consultant to a variety of multilateral and bilateral institutions.  She has co-taught via videoconferencing an intensive course entitled Women's & Human Rights Under Islam at the USC Law School over the past several years, and has been a visitor at Emory Law School as one of its Islam and Human Rights Program fellows.

Prof Harkristuti Harkrisnowo, Univ of Indonesia & Directorate of Human Rights, Ministry of Justice, Jakarta

Harkristuti Harkrisnowo is a criminologist and public commentator, plus human and women’s rights activist in Indonesia as the world’s most populous Islamic country. She studied law at the University of Indonesia (SH, LLM) and criminology at Sam Houston State University (MA, PhD). She teaches at the University of Indonesia where she leads its Center for the Study of Human Rights and serves simultaneously as Director General for Human Rights in the Indonesian Ministry of Justice.  Since 1999, she has been a member of the Indonesian National Law Commission, a reform body. She is also a senior advisor to the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission and worked within government at the deputy secretary level in the short-lived Ministry of Human Rights. She has visited at the USC Law School previously to teach in an intensive course entitled Women’s & Human Rights Under Islam.

Dr Nicholas Adams, Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, Cambridge Univ, UK

Nicholas Adams is the Academic Director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme at the School of Divinity, University of Cambridge, UK. He studied theology at Cambridge (BA 1st Hons 1992, King’s College; PhD 1997, King’s College) His two principal scholarly interests are in the relation of German Idealism to Christian theology, and Scriptural Reasoning as a model for engagement between Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the modern world. He is the author of Habermas and Theology (Cambridge Univ Press, 2006). He received his PhD and held a research fellowship for two years at Trinity Hall, Cambridge before spending ten years teaching theology and ethics at the University of Edinburgh.

Development Panel

Prof (Rev) Joseph M. Isanga, Ave Maria School of Law, Ann Arbor, MI

Father Joseph Isanga joined the Ave Maria faculty following his appointment as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Civil and Human Rights. He is a widely published scholar on human rights in Africa and has expertise in international law, jurisprudence, law, ethics, and public policy. Father Isanga is a priest from the Diocese of Jinja, Uganda. He received a Bachelor of Philosophy from Pontifical Urban University in Rome; a Bachelor of Divinity and a Bachelor of Laws from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; a Diploma in Legal Practice from Law Development Center in Kampala, Uganda; and a Master of Laws and a Juridical Sciences Doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. Father Isanga teaches International Law and Law, Ethics, and Public Policy.

Prof David Linnan, Univ of South Carolina School of Law, Columbia

David Linnan is a scholar of comparative, economic and public international law with a special interest in Asian law. He studied humanities at Emory University (BA 1976) and law at the University of Chicago (JD 1979), where he was comment editor of the law review. He was in private law practice for six years in Los Angeles and has held research or teaching appointments elsewhere at the University of Washington-Seattle, the Australian National University in Canberra (RSPAS & Faculty of Law), the University of Melbourne, the University of Indonesia Faculty of Law and Graduate Law Program in Jakarta (separately), and the Max-Planck-Institut (Strafrecht), Freiburg i.Br., Germany. 2000 to date he is the Program Director for the Law & Finance Institutional Partnership (http://www.lfip.org), a legal and financial sector reform project run from Jakarta now as an academic consortium of Indonesian and foreign universities.

Dean Marsudi Triatmodjo, Gadjah Mada Univ, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Marsudi Triatmodjo is Dean of the Faculty of Law, Gadjah Mada University and a scholar of public international law. He studied law at Gadjah Mada University (SH 1984; PhD 2001) and Dalhousie University-Canada (LLM 1990). He has been a researcher and teacher at leading Indonesian institutions of higher education and for the Indonesian government in the areas of public international law, the law of the sea and international environmental law. Most recently he participated in the government-sponsored drafting committee for statutory reform of Indonesian higher education, to move towards autonomous institutions of higher education.

Theology Panel

Prof Ibrahim Kalin, Al-Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown Univ, Washington, DC & Official Spokesperson for A Common Word Between Us and You

Ibrahim Kalin teaches in the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and is a signatory of the Common Word. He received his PhD from George Washington University, and his broad interests reach into Islamic culture and history. Prior to coming to Georgetown, he taught for three years in the Dept of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross and was founding director for the SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research based in Ankara, Turkey.

Prof (Rev) Daniel Madigan, Dept of Theology, Georgetown Univ, Washington, DC

Daniel Madigan S.J. is an Australian Jesuit priest who teaches in Georgetown's Department of Theology as the Jeanette W. and Otto J. Ruesch Family Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies. He studied history at Monash University (BA 1st Hons 1977), Christian religion at the Jesuit Theological College and Melbourne College of Divinity (BD 1983), Arabic and Islam at Vidyajyoti Institute of Religous Studies in Delhi, India and the Dar Comboni Institute of Arabic in Cairo, Eygpt and Harvard University. He studied Islamic religion at Columbia University (MPhil 1993; PhD 1997). He is also Consultor of the Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims 2005-2010 of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Vatican City, and a Senior Fellow of Georgetown’s Al-Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. In 2007-8 he was International Visiting Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, and continues there as a Senior Fellow directing a project on Christian theologies that are responsive to Islam. Before moving to Georgetown he taught in Rome (2000-7), where he was was the founder and director (2002-7) of the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University. His main fields of teaching and research are Qur'anic Studies, Interreligious Dialogue and particularly Muslim-Christian relations. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University, Ankara University, Boston College and Central European University.

Prof Robert Fastiggi, School of Theology, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit, MI

Robert Fastiggi is Professor of Systematic Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary where he has taught since 1999. He studied religion at Dartmouth College (BA) and theology at Fordham University (MA; PhD). His publications include The Natural Theology of Yves de Paris (Scholars Press, 1991); The Mystical Theology of the Catholic Reformation: An Overview of Baroque Spirituality (with co-author José Pereira, University Press of America, 2006); What the Church Teaches about Sex: God's Plan for Human Happiness (Our Sunday Visitor, 2009); and Called to Holiness and Communion: Vatican II on the Church (with co-editor Steven Boguslawski, O.P., University of Scranton Press, 2009). He is the co-editor of the English edition of Denzinger-Hünermann, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (40th edition) to be published by Ignatius Press and the Executive Editor of the electronic updating of the New Catholic Encyclopedia. From 1985-1999, he taught at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas.

Mysticism Panel

Prof Caner Dagli, Dept of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross, Worchester, MA

Caner Dagli teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at College of the Holy Cross. He studied religion at George Washington (MA) and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell (BA) and Princeton (PhD). In 2006-7 he served as Interfaith Affairs Consultant in the Royal Hashemite Court of Jordan, where he participated in such projects as An Open Letter to the Pope (in response to the Regensburg lecture) and A Common Word Between Us and You. He is the author of The Ringstones of Wisdom, a study and translation of Ibn al-Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam, and has published in the fields of Islamic philosophy and Sufism. He is an assistant editor for the forthcoming Study Quran from HarperOne under chief editor Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Father John Chryssavgis, Theological Advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch

Rev Dr John Chryssavgis was born in Australia, where he matriculated from the Scots College (1975). He received his degree in Theology from the University of Athens (1980), a diploma in Byzantine Music from the Greek Conservatory of Music (1979), and was awarded a research scholarship to St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary (1982). He completed his doctoral studies in Patristics at the University of Oxford (1983). After several months in silent retreat on Mt Athos, he served as personal assistant to the Greek Orthodox Primate in Australia (1984-94) and was co-founder of St. Andrew’s Theological College in Sydney (1985), where he was Sub-Dean and taught Patristics and Church History (1986-95). He was also Lecturer in the Divinity School (1986-90) and the School of Studies in Religion (1990-95) at the University of Sydney. In 1995, he moved to Boston, where he was appointed Professor of Theology at Holy Cross School of Theology and directed the Religious Studies Program at Hellenic College until 2002. He established the Environment Office at the same School in 2001. He has also taught as professor of Patristics at Balamand University in Lebanon. Currently, he serves as theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch on environmental issues.

Michael S. Allen, Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard Univ, Cambridge, MA

Michael S. Allen received his B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of South Carolina in 2001 and his M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School in 2006. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard, specializing in comparative philosophy and mysticism.

Metaphysics Panel

Prof Joseph E.B. Lumbard, Brandeis Univ, Waltham, MA

Joseph Lumbard (PhD Yale 2003) is Chair of the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Program at Brandeis University and a former adviser on interfaith affairs to King Abdullah II of Jordan . His research focuses upon Islamic intellectual traditions with an emphasis on Sufism and Islamic philosophy. He is an associate editor for the forthcoming Harper Collins Study Quran, and the editor of Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition (World Wisdom, 2009), a collection of essays that examines the religious, political and historical factors that have led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Prof James S. Cutsinger, Dept of Religious Studies, Univ of South Carolina, Columbia

James Cutsinger teaches theology and religious thought at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. He studied political theory and Russian at Cornell College (BA 1975) and theology at Harvard University (PhD 1980). A widely recognized writer on the sophia perennis and the perennialist school, he is also an authority on the theology and spirituality of the Christian East. His publications include Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon (SUNY,1997), Not of This World: A Treasury of Christian Mysticism (World Wisdom 2003), Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox in Dialogue (InterVarsity, 1997), and Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East (Fons Vitae 2002).

Prof Maria Dakake, Religious Studies Dept, George Mason Univ, Fairfax, VA

Maria Massi Dakake teaches courses on Islam and other Near Eastern religious traditions, as well as on women in religion.  She is one of the founding faculty members of the interdisciplinary Islamic Studies Program recently established at George Mason University. She studied government at Cornell (BA 1990), and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton (MA 1998; PhD 2000). Her research interests lie in the fields of Islamic theology, philosophy and mysticism, with a particular interest in Shi`ite and Sufi traditions and in women’s issues. She has published articles and presented papers on early Shi`ism, Islamic philosophy and Sufism. She most recently completed a book entitled, The Charismatic Community: Shi`ite Identity in Early Islam and is working on an edited volume on women and Sufism.