Mr. Chris Anderson is the curator of the set of TED Conferences, which he has developed as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading. After graduating from Oxford, Mr. Anderson began a career in journalism before launching his own publishing company, Future Publishing. Mr. Anderson eventually expanded to the US, where he built a second company, Imagine Media. The combined companies spawned over 100 monthly magazines, employed over 2,000 people, and allowed Anderson to create a private nonprofit foundation, the Sapling Foundation, which hopes to find new ways of tackling tough global issues by leveraging media, technology, entrepreneurship, and ideas.
   
 


Dr. Marcus Braybrooke is a retired Anglican parish priest and the President of the World Congress of Faiths, of which he has been a member for nearly 50 years. He is a co-founder of the Three Faiths Forum, Patron of the International Interfaith Centre at Oxford and a Peace Councillor. In 2004, Rev. Braybrooke was awarded a Lambeth Doctorate of Divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury "in recognition of his contribution to the development of inter-religious cooperation and under-standing throughout the world."He is also the author of over forty books on world religions and Christianity, including, Pilgrimage of Hope, Faith and Interfaith in a Global Age, Time to Meet, How to Understand Judaism, What We Can Learn From Hinduism, and Christian-Jewish Dialogue: the Next Steps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




Professor Suheil Badi Bushrui
Professor Bushrui is the Baha’i Chair for World Peace at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland.  A distinguished author, poet and critic, he is the foremost authority on the works of Kahlil Gibran.  Professor Bushrui has taught at Oxford, York and Ibadan Universities, and was the first Arab national to be appointed Chair of English at the American University of Beirut.  He is a founding member of the International Dialogue on Transition to a Global Society.




The Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes served as Senior Minister of The Riverside Church for 18 years and is currently President of the Healing of Nations Foundation. Before serving at the Riverside Church, Rev. Forbes taught at Union Theological Seminary, where he first served as the Brown and Sockman Associate Professor of Preaching until he became Union’s first Harry Emerson Professor of Preaching in 1985. Dr. Forbes has been lauded by Newsweek and Ebony and is globally recognized as one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.  He is ordained as a minister in the American Baptist Churches and the Original United Holy Church of America.



MASTER OF CEREMONY

Mr. Rolland Smith has over forty five years of professional broadcast experience as an anchorman, reporter, writer, producer and commentator. He is the recipient of 11 Emmy Awards and has been honored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences with 35 Emmy nominations. Highlights of his forty years in broadcasting include: news anchor at WCBS-TV Channel Two News, co-host of The CBS Morning Program, anchor of the documentary series
Eye on New York and the Ten O'clock News at WWOR-TV in New York.

He conducted interviews with many world figures and political leaders, frontline coverage of the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive, anchored the international broadcast feed of Live Aid, was the first journalist to accompany the U.S. Geological Survey Team inside Mr. St. Helens after the volcano's eruption, anchored Our Common Future in an effort to raise the world's awareness of environmental dangers and anchored and wrote a live two-hour broadcast from Moscow entitled Earth Alert: A Global Forum.

In addition to Smith's on-air accomplishments, he is the former President of the Foundation for Global Broadcasting, a non-profit organization encouraging the use of television and radio to further cross-cultural understanding. Currently, he is writing poetry as well as writing and producing independent documentaries.

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