When she wrote the piece TIO republished, Anya Dunaif was in the eighth grade at Saint Ann’s School. At the time, she lived in Brooklyn, New York, with her parents and little brother. Anya likes painting, drawing, writing, photography and film. She also plays cello.
Annie Duflo
Annie Duflo, executive director for Innovations for Poverty Action, is responsible for leading the strategic directions of IPA and its day-to-day operations. Previously, she served as IPA’s research director, managing IPA’s research network, staff capacity-building, and new project development. She also played a key role in the scaling up of successful programs with particular focus on education. Annie has a wealth of experience implementing and managing randomized evaluations in the field. Prior to joining IPA, Annie was the executive director of the Centre for Microfinance (CMF) at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR) in Chennai, India, which she joined at its creation. Annie holds a Master of Public Administration and International Development degree from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Master in Social Sciences from EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)/ ENS (École Normale Supérieure) in Paris.
Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd is a religious naturalist, evidential mystic, and big history evangelist. An outspoken “New Theist,” he is the author of the bestselling, bridge-building book, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World (2009). It has been endorsed by six Nobel laureates and other science luminaries, including noted skeptics and atheists, and by religious leaders across the spectrum. He has been featured on national TV, including CNN, Fox News, and ABC News, and delivered a TEDx talk in May, 2012. He has been a Distinguished Lecturer at CalTech (sponsored by The Skeptic Society) and at the United Nations. He is also the host of the online conversation series, The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity, and Evolutionize Your Life, a free online tele-seminar.
Michael and his evolutionary educator wife, Connie Barlow, share the inspiring side of science in ways that offer practical tools for living and realistic hope for the future. Since April 2002 they have traveled North America non-stop, addressing more than 1,700 groups from Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and Unitarian churches, to skeptic, freethinker, and secular high school, college, and university settings, to New Thought, New Age, and Eastern spirituality groups. Michael and Connie’s work has been featured in numerous national and local media, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Discover magazine.
James Doty
James R. Doty, M.D., is professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and Founder and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the founding benefactor of the Center, which supports rigorous research on compassion. Dr. Doty collaborates with scientists from a number of disciplines examining the neural bases for compassion and altruism. In addition, Dr. Doty is an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. As a philanthropist, he supports a number of charitable organizations focused on peace and healthcare throughout the world. Additionally, he supports a variety of research initiatives and has provided scholarships and endowed chairs at multiple universities. He serves on the board of a number of non-profit organizations and is the chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. He also serves on the International Advisory Board of the Council of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.
Katherine Don
Katherine Don is a freelance writer, editor and researcher. She has been a contributing writer to six nonfiction books, including Power of the Dog from St. Martin’s Press, and Armchair Reader: The Book of Myths and Misconceptions from Publications International. She is the author of Real Courage: The Story of Harper Lee, a YA biography of Harper Lee from Morgan Reynolds Publishing. Her second YA book, Nujood Ali and The Fight Against Child Marriage, was published by Morgan Reynolds in 2015.
Katherine’s essays and journalism have appeared at Salon.com, The Atlantic online, the Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches, Next American City magazine, Bitch online, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor at Bustle.com and Romper.com, where she covers the news, health, and entertainment.
Her first screenplay, a short film that she co-wrote with her friend Sakina Fakhri, was the first-place winner in the screenwriting category at the 2015 Los Angeles Movie Awards. It also won Best Screenplay at the California International Shorts Festival. The film, Corner Piece, is a psychological mystery that follows two detectives working for a totalitarian regime.
In 2011, Katherine founded The Book Don, a boutique book doctoring service that provides personalized editing packages for authors of nonfiction and literary fiction books.
Katherine holds a master’s degree in journalism from NYU and a bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology from Northwestern University. She loves to write and research in the areas of childbirth care, reproductive justice, and gender and media issues. Click here to follow her tweets on these topics. Additionally, Katherine freelances as a grant writer and/or editorial consultant for nonprofit organizations, and edits academic essays at Scintilla Tutoring. Read more of her work here.
Gus diZerega
Gus diZerega is a political scientist/theorist with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. While living and working as an artist and craftsperson to finance his degree, he met and later studied with teachers in NeoPaganism, the earth religions more generally, and shamanic healing. His spiritual studies took him far from academia’s libraries into seasonal Wiccan celebrations, encounters with Pagan deities, and out into solitary fasts in the California desert, alone on remote beaches or isolated high on mountains doing vision quests. He was blessed with three very good teachers, Don Frew, Timothy White, and Antonio Costa e Silva (now Segyu Choepal Rinpoche).
The past 25 years Gus has aimed to bring together the disparate strands of modern social science, Pagan spirituality, and shamanic spiritual practices. He has done so through his own practice and through his teaching and writing. Gus continues being active in scholarly publishing in political and environmental theory and is the author of Power, Politics and Persuasion: A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization (2000), Pagans and Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience (2001), and Beyond the Burning Times: Christian and Pagan in Dialogue (2009). He is also founding editor of the new online open source academic journal Studies in Emergent Order.
Rosen Dimov
Rosen Dimov has a PhD in legal pluralism, inspired by his involvement in interfaith dialogue. Since 2011 he has served as a United Religions Initiative Youth Ambassador and has led a series of training sessions and projects in Bulgaria and abroad involving people from various religions. His other passions in life include youth work, the arts, social entrepeneurship, and sustainable development. He has worked for European Union institutions as one of the youngest staff members and now is the managing director of European Alternatives and president of the Australia-based International Young Professionals Foundation. The latter role enabled him to coordinate the Global Youth Service Days in 2013 for Middle Eastern and Latin America URI cooperation circles.
Jan Diehm
Jan Diehm is the Infographics editor of The Huffington Post. She previously worked as a designer for the Center for American Progress, the Hartford Courant and the Baltimore Sun. She studied journalism at Western Kentucky University.
Mark Diamond
Rabbi Mark S. Diamond is executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, a multi-denominational organization of 330 rabbis. Rabbi Diamond is a senior rabbinic fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and serves on the Ethics Resource Committee of Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The rabbi is president of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders and led the Council's February 2005 interfaith trip to Israel. In April 2006, he brought forty African Methodist Episcopal pastors, rabbis, synagogue and church members on a relief mission to rebuild homes and lives devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Rabbi Diamond headed an interreligious delegation of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders on a January 2008 mission to the Vatican and Israel, highlighted by an audience with Pope Benedict XVI.
Benjamin DeVan
Benjamin B. DeVan has taught religion, philosophy, and African American literature at North Carolina Central University, Peace College, and a January term mini-course at MIT titled, “Religion: Bringing the World Together, or Tearing the World Apart?” He completed his MA in Counseling at Asbury Theological Seminary, his MDiv at Duke University, a ThM at Harvard in World Religions with a thesis on evangelical Christians and Islam, and is now a doctoral candidate at Durham University, UK, writing a dissertation on the New Atheism. Ben writes for State of Formation and the Journal of Comparative Theology.
Gaea Denker
Gaea Denker is the Communications Manager for the United Religions Initiative, a global grassroots interfaith network that cultivates peace and justice by engaging people to bridge religious and cultural differences and work together for the good of their communities and the world. In her daily work, Gaea encounters incredibly inspiring stories of people working for peace, in over a hundred different countries, despite terrible conditions of violence, hatred, and fear. She loves being able to tell these peacebuilders’ stories to a global audience so that all people in the world can know not to give up hope, and that peace is possible.
Rev. Doris Davis
Rev. Doris Davis is a 77-year-old Interfaith minister and sacred activist who, in the spirit of Peace Pilgrim, completed a 6 ½ month mother-daughter cross-country walkabout in 2011. Doris and her actor/filmmaker daughter Viveka, made their way across America from Oceanside, California to Washington D.C. They were disseminating the peace pledge developed by the Culver City Interfaith Alliance as they focused the attention of people they met and walked with along the way by “imagining a world where women are equally valued decision-makers in partnership with men worldwide.” A magna cum laude graduate of UC Berkeley in Dramatic Literature with a Masters Degree in Dance from UCLA, she is the mother of four and grandmother of two. She is co-chair of the Culver City Area Interfaith Alliance, and chaplain emeritus of the Southern California Committee for A Parliament of the World’s Religions. She is a longtime student of A Course In Miracles and the teachings of the Ascended Masters. She calls herself a “freelance mystic” with Christian roots.
Claire Davis
Claire Davis has been engaged in the non-profit sector in South and Central America and the United States for the past 20 years, working in the fields of communication, grant writing and public relations for non-profits. She is currentlya graduate student in intercultural and international communication in Canada. Her thesis will focus on the reconfigurations and transformations occurring in religious movements due to the integration of digital technology.
Greg Damhorst
Greg Damhorst studied physics as an undergraduate and now is an MD/PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he pursues a doctorate in bioengineering developing a portable, low-cost, point-of-care device for HIV/AIDS diagnosis in resource-limited settings.
Greg has been a leader with Interfaith in Action, the University of Illinois’ premier student interfaith organization, since early 2007. Motivated by Jesus’ compassion and ministry of healing, Greg is pursuing a career at the intersection of medicine, technology and service, and he is interested in the role interfaith cooperation will play in the effort to bring health to the people who need it most.
Greg is also a co-founder of Faith Line Protestants, a blog that explores Christian participation in the interfaith movement, especially at the intersection of evangelism and common action for the common good.