Parliament of Worlds Religion 2009 Melbourne Australia

Author(s): Parliament of the World’s Religions
Publisher: USA Parliament of the Worlds Religions

Page 359

PROGRAM DE Wednesday, December 9, 2009
9:30-11:00am INTRARELIGIOUS SESSION
Imam Khalid Fattah Griggs has been the imam of The Community Mosque of Winston-Salem in North Carolina since 1984. He is cochairman of the North Carolina-based Black Leadership Roundtable of Winston-Salem-Forsyth County. Griggs holds a degree in political science and English from Howard University in Washington, DC. He was part of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the late 1960s and was involved with the Islamic Party of North America in the 1970s after his conversion Amjad-Mohammed Saleem is the head of media and public relations for The Cordoba Foundation. He was the architect of a global partner ship between Muslim Aid and the United Methodist Committee on Relief. which was hailed by the British Prime Minister as a landmark example of Muslims collaborating with Christians during times of conflict in South Asia.
Analyse This!: Views of Young Saudi, Australian and American Muslim Women on Their Faith and Evolving Roles Shaima'a Al-Hajj Ndidi Amatullah Okakpu Norah Ziad Elmagraby Room 218 Panel Discussion In this session, four young Muslim women from very different parts of the world shatter the stereotype that they are passive participants in their faith and evolving roles in society. To the contrary, they are actively engaged in their own Muslim communities and in the greater world community. Panellists will include an environmental activist who tells the truth about women's rights and Islam, a young civic leader fully engaged in inter- and intrafaith learning and activism on a global level, and two additional speakers whose names were not available at time of publication. Shaima'a Al-Hajj is a senior Management Information Systems Student at Dar-Al Hekma College, Saudi Arabia. She is an enthusiastic business student with a particular interest in marketing and has been involved in many business projects with major global enterprises such as Proctor & Gamble. She is an active member of international clubs such as the Toastmasters and the Model United Nations. She is very involved in global issues and has conducted many seminars regarding the financial crisis and urgent political problems. She is also an active member of the social community and an environmental activist. Ndidi Amatullah Okakpu is currently an assistant at the Muslim Journal. She worked directly tor world leader Imam w Deen Mohammed as Coordinator of his Islamic training program and joined the first delegation from his community to study at Abu Nour University in Damascus, Syria under the late Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro. Ndidi works closely in interfaith efforts with the Catholic organisation Focolare Movement and was a Muslim American delegate at their conference in Castelgandolfo, Italy, Norah Ziad Elmagraby is a Junior Nursing student at Dar Al-Hekma College, where she is founder of the Dar Al-Hekma Recycling club and Student Government President. She is also on the Dean's list for academic excellence. She participated in Zaied University's Youth Delegation to Dubai in 2008 for the Women as Global Leaders conference and led many community service projects.
Compassion as a Common Value / The Global Food Crisis as a Spiritual Challenge Solomon Katz, Moderator Anindita Balslev Rev Dirk Evers Rabbi Dr Alon Goshen-Gottstein Nomanul Haq Samdhong Rinpoche Room 219 Panel Discussion Compassion, recognised and recommended by all world religions as well as in secular moral traditions, must be implemented in all levels of our collective life. Today, we need to address a series of problems, among which food and water crises are in the forefront. We must examine these issues within today's political and scientific scenarios while also looking to the resources of religious traditions. We intend to explore the resources of different religious traditions and relate these to projects that seek to remove various sorts of inequalities. Earlier, in two conferences in Germany and India, we discussed religious concepts of compassion and their relationships to political and social behaviour with religious scholars, scientists and diplomats. This program will present our results to a wider public Dr Solomon Katz is director of the Krogman Center for Childhood Growth and Development at the University of Pennsylvania and is a professor of anthropology and a senior lellow at the Wharton School Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. He was founder and Chairman of the Task Force on the African Famine for the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and is currently Chair of the AAA Task Force on World Food Problems. Dr Anindita N Balslev works in areas of Indian and Western philosophy. She was formerly Associate Research Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and has been a visiting professor at Aarhus University and various other universities in India and the US Dr Balslev has published many papers in professional journals and is the author of 'A Study of Time in Indian Philosophy. She is also the editor of Cross-Cultural Conversation Rev Dirk Evers is Associate Professor for Systematic Theology at Tuebingen University. He studied Protestant theology at the Universities of Muenster and Tuebingen and at the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary in Madurai and is an ordained minister of the Lutheran Church. His Christian theology of creation in dialogue with scientific cosmology won the ESSSAT prize from the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology in 2002. He has published numerous articles on systematic theology and science and religion. Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein has been director of the Elijah Institute and lecturer and director of the Center for the Study of Rabbinic Thought, Beit Morasha College, both in Jerusalem, since 1997. Ordained a rabbi in 1977, he holds a PhD and BA from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His nearly three dozen articles have appeared in edited collections and in such scholarly journals as Harvard Theological Review, Journal for the Study of Judaism, and Studies in Interreligious Dialog. Syed Nomanul Haq is a senior faculty member in the School of Humanities and the Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. A leading authority on religion and ecology and environmental ethics, Haq has published widely and contributed to several encyclopaedias, Haq received his PhD from Harvard University and has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts University Samdhong Rinpoche is currently serving his second term as Prime Minister of Tibet in exile. He was born in Tibet and started his religious training at Drepung Monastery in I hasa, completing his middle school of the Madhyamika School of Buddhism at the age of twelve. He
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