CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

AMY L. ALLOCCO is an associate professor of religious studies at Elon University, where she directs the Multifaith Scholars program. Her research focuses on vernacular Hinduism, especially ritual traditions, goddesses, and women’s religious practices in contemporary South India, where she has been studying and conducting fieldwork for two decades. Allocco’s current project, “Domesticating the Dead: Invitation and Installation Rituals in Tamil South India,” is an ethnography of the ongoing ritual relationships some Hindus maintain with their deceased kin.

MICHAEL BIRKEL is a professor of Christian spirituality at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana. In interfaith studies he has taught such courses as the Spirit of Islam: The Qur’an and Its Interpreters, Abrahamic Mysticism, and Islam and Film. His publications include Silence and Witness: Quaker Spirituality; Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme; and Qur’an in Conversation. Currently he is completing a book on Quakers and mysticism, and he has written a forthcoming article entitled “Allowing the Mystics to Initiate Interfaith Dialogue: Said Nursi and Rufus Jones.”

GEOFFREY D. CLAUSSEN is the Lori and Eric Sklut Scholar in Jewish Studies and associate professor of religious studies at Elon University. His scholarship focuses on Jewish virtue ethics, and he has particular interests in questions of love and justice, war and violence, and moral education. He is the past president of the Society of Jewish Ethics and the author of Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar.

LISA E. DAHILL is an associate professor of religion at California Lutheran University. Dahill is the coeditor of Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, as well as many other essays and articles on interspecies religious thinking and practice. A scholar of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and past president of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, she is happiest outdoors: biking or kayaking or “rewilding Christian spirituality” in collaboration with colleagues in the Wild Church Network.

KRISTI DELVECCHIO is academic initiatives manager at Interfaith Youth Core. In this capacity, she supports scholars and educators across the US who are building interfaith/interreligious studies curricula by stewarding grant programs, managing faculty development seminars, and curating online educational materials. Del Vecchio has published and presented on a wide range of topics related to this emerging field, including the possibilities of interreligious environmentalism, the role of atheists and humanists in interfaith contexts, and the contributions of Catholic institutions in developing interfaith leaders.

JEANNINE HILL FLETCHER is a professor of theology at Fordham University in New York City. Hill Fletcher is a constructive theologian whose research is at the intersection of Christian systematic theology and issues of diversity (including gender, race, and religious diversity). Her most recent book is The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism and Religious Diversity in America. Other works include Monopoly on Salvation? A Feminist Approach to Religious Pluralism and Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue.

USRA GHAZI was a strategic designer at the Collaboratory, the design and innovation hub of the US Department of State’s Education and Cultural Affairs Bureau. She is now the director of policy and progress at America Indivisible. Ghazi is an interfaith leader and aspiring diplomat with over a decade of experience in interfaith youth work through US and international organizations including Interfaith Youth Core. She has served as a policy advisor and Franklin Fellow at the US Secretary of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs and a policy fellow for the City of Boston in the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement.

MARK E. HANSHAW, formerly the dean of the School of Arts and Letters at Texas Wesleyan University, is now the associate general secretary at the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. Hanshaw is the coauthor of From East to West: A Comparative Study of the World’s Great Religions and the author of Muslim and American? Straddling Islamic Law and U.S. Justice. He is a recipient of the Texas Wesleyan Board of Trustees award for scholarship, a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, and a Rotary International Fellowship. He was awarded a platinum Remi at the Houston International Film Festival for his work on the academic film The Embrace of a Loving God: Encountering Sufism.

WAKOH SHANNON HICKEY is an associate professor of religious studies at Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore. Hickey specializes in American religious history, Buddhism, religion and medicine, and interreligious dialogue, with particular interests in race and gender. Her book Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine combines these interests. Ordained as a priest of Sōtō Zen Buddhism, Hickey uses contemplative pedagogies and has served as a chaplain in both hospitals and higher education, currently as Buddhist campus minister for Johns Hopkins University.

ELIZABETH KUBEK is a professor of literature and director of the Medical Humanities Program at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. Her areas of expertise include the novel and new and emerging media, as well as literary and critical theory. Kubek’s current research focus is on interdisciplinary studies and hybrid visual and verbal media, especially comics and graphic narrative.

MARION H. LARSON is a professor of English at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has served as a visiting scholar and sat on the board of directors for the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning. She also served as the arts and humanities editor for Christian Scholars Review. She has published articles on faculty development, hospitality as a metaphor for teaching, and interfaith dialogue. Larson’s most recent work, coauthored with Sara Shady, is From Bubble to Bridge: Educating Christians for a Multifaith World.

MATTHEW MARUGGI is an associate professor in the Department of Religion at Augsburg University, where he teaches and researches in the areas of vocation, spirituality, the ethics of world religions, and interfaith studies and action. He also teaches liberation theology courses in Central America. Maruggi codirects the Interfaith Scholar Seminar, a curricular and cocurricular program that promotes interfaith dialogue and community engagement with students from a variety of traditions and core commitments.

KATE MCCARTHY is interim dean of undergraduate education at California State University, Chico, where she also served as chair of the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities and developed an undergraduate certificate program in interreligious and intercultural relations, the first of its kind at an American public university. She is the author of Interfaith Encounters in America and coeditor, with Eric Mazur, of God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture.

BARBARA A. MCGRAW is professor of social ethics, law, and public life and the founding director of the Center for Engaged Religious Pluralism at Saint Mary’s College of California. Recipient of the Mahatma Gandhi Award for Advancement of Religious Pluralism, she speaks on interfaith leadership in business, education, and government institutions and is author or editor of works on religion and public engagement, including Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground; Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously; Many Peoples, Many Faiths; and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S.

RACHEL S. MIKVA is the Herman E. Schaalman Chair in Jewish Studies and Senior Faculty Fellow of the InterReligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary. The institute and the seminary work at the cutting edge of theological education, training religious leaders who can build bridges across cultural and religious difference for the critical work of social transformation. With a passion for justice and academic expertise in the history of scriptural interpretation, Mikva addresses a range of Jewish and comparative studies, with a special interest in the intersections of sacred texts, culture, and ethics.

KEVIN MINISTER is an assistant professor of religion at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, where he teaches courses in religious diversity, religion and politics, and religion and ecology. He is also a steering committee member of the Valley Interfaith Council, a local affiliate of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. His contribution to this volume reflects his teaching, research, and activism concerning how religious communities cooperate to create sustainable societies.

BRIAN K. PENNINGTON is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society and a professor of religious studies at Elon University. A scholar of modern Hinduism, he is the author of Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion, editor of Teaching Religion and Violence, and, with Amy L. Allocco, coeditor of Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion. His book in progress, God’s Fifth Abode: Entrepreneurial Hinduism in the Indian Himalayas, is a study of the pilgrimage city of Uttarkashi.

ELLIE PIERCE is the research director for the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. She began working for the Pluralism Project as a student field researcher in San Francisco. She was a section editor for On Common Ground: World Religions in America and coeditor of World Religions in Boston: A Guide to Communities and Resources, with Diana Eck. Pierce coproduced and codirected the documentary film Fremont, U.S.A. with Rachel Antell. She is the author of over fifteen decision-based case studies, which can be found on the Pluralism Project’s website, with more in development.

OR N. ROSE is the founding director of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership at Hebrew College. Rose previously served Hebrew College as director of the former Center for Global Judaism and as associate dean and director of informal education at the Rabbinical School, where he still teaches. He is the coeditor of Jewish Mysticism and the Spiritual Life: Classical Texts; Contemporary Reflections; and My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth, and Transformation.

HEATHER MILLER RUBENS is the executive director and Roman Catholic scholar of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. Rubens develops educational initiatives that foster interreligious learning for the public in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. The questions that animate Rubens’s work in interreligious literacy include when, where, and how religious communities can understand an affinity between themselves as well as constructively engage their differences. Her current project focuses on the theoretical, theological, and ethical implications of building an interreligious city.

BENJAMIN E. SAX is the Jewish Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. Sax has published on Jewish-Christian relations, Jewish atheism, Jewish aesthetics, the Holocaust, German-Jewish history and culture, Jewish philosophy, and contemporary Jewish theology. His current research project is focused on the theoretical and theological implications of the interreligious city, tentatively titled The Interreligious City: A Theory of Religious Pluralism. He also is currently finishing a book titled The Life of Quotation and Modern Jewish Thought.

SARA L. H. SHADY is a professor of philosophy at Bethel University. With coauthor Marion Larson, she published From Bubble to Bridge: Educating Christians for a Multifaith World. Her writing is featured in several articles on interfaith engagement and in the books Faith, Film and Philosophy: Big Ideas on the Big Screen; The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons; and Walking Together: Christian Thinking and Public Life in South Africa. Her interests include constructing inclusive communities and political societies, the role of religion in politics, and existentialism.

MARTHA E. STORTZ is the Bernhard M. Christensen Professor of Religion and Vocation at Augsburg University. Stortz is a Christian theologian whose scholarship includes work in historical and systematic theology, ethics, and biblical studies. In addition to her many published articles, she is the author of A World According to God: Practices for Putting Faith at the Center of Your Life; Blessed to Follow: The Beatitudes as a Compass for Discipleship; and Called to Follow: Journeys in John’s Gospel,

MARGARITA M. W. SUÁREZ is a professor of religious and ethical studies at Meredith College, a women’s college in Raleigh, North Carolina. Trained in global contextual theologies and ethnographic methodologies, she focuses her scholarhip on religions in Cuba and interfaith leadership. She teaches courses under the broad rubric of religion and culture and interfaith studies: Anthropology of Religion; Women, Religion, and Ethnography; World Religions; Religion and Globalization in the Americas; and Introduction to Interfaith Leadership.

DEANNA FERREE WOMACK is an assistant professor of history of religions and multifaith relations at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and the director of the Leadership and Multifaith Program (LAMP), a collaboration between Candler and Georgia Tech. Her teaching and scholarship combine commitments to Christian-Muslim dialogue and American-Arab relations. Her forthcoming book, Protestants, Gender, and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria, explores encounters between American missionaries and Arab residents of Ottoman Syria in the pre–World War I period.

HOMAYRA ZIAD is a scholar-activist and writer. She has served as assistant professor of Islam at Trinity College and currently leads the integration of Islam and Muslim communities at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS) in Baltimore. At ICJS, she creates programs for activists and emerging religious leaders at the intersection of religion and social justice. Homayra is cochair of the American Academy of Religion’s Interreligious and Interfaith Studies Group and serves on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland. She is coeditor of the forthcoming volume Words to Live By: Sacred Sources for Interreligious Engagement.