Interfaith Advisory Board

Joan Chittister, OSB is an internationally known writer and lecturer and the executive director of Benetvision, a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality. She serves as co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women and was a member of the TED prize-sponsored Council of Sages, an interfaith group that developed a Charter for Compassion (2009) being promulgated worldwide with all faith organizations. Joan was a keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Breakthrough: Women, Faith and Development Summit to End Global Poverty and the Parliament of World Religions gathering in Melbourne, Australia. She has appeared with the Dalai Lama at both the First Emory University Summit of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding and at the conference Seeds of Compassion. Joan has written more than 40 books and received numerous awards for her work on behalf of peace and women in church and in society. A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, USA, she served as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization of the leaders/superiors of the over 67,000 Catholic religious women in the US, president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses, and was prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie for 12 years. Sister Joan received her doctorate from Penn State University in speech communications theory.

The Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy is President of the Interfaith Alliance in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan, grassroots organization with 185,000 members and 75 faith traditions, who celebrate religious freedom and unite their voices to challenge religious extremism. He also pastors Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana. Dr. Gaddy is a familiar face on television news programs, where he provides commentary on issues related to politics and religion. He’s the author of more than 20 books and is host of “State of Belief.”

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City. He’s the author of You Don’t Have to be Wrong for Me to be Right, which examines the challenges we face in living together peacefully, and how the things that make us different—in both religious and secular life—also make us alike. Brad was listed four years in a row in Newsweek magazine as one of America’s “50 most Influential Rabbis” and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, the Washington Post and BeliefNet.

Dr. Eboo Patel is the founder and President of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based institution building the global interfaith youth movement, and was named by US News & World Report as one of America’s Best Leaders of 2009. Eboo holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship, and is the author of the award-winning book, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. He served on President Obama’s Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships; he was named by Islamica Magazine as one of ten young Muslim visionaries shaping Islam in America; and, with the Interfaith Youth Core, was honored with the Roosevelt Institute’s Freedom of Worship Medal in 2009.