PREVIOUS PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

In September 1999, I jointly organized with Mark Silk, Director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, a "Consultation on Religious Persecution as a U.S. Policy Issue."   The goal was to provide a forum for informed and critical reflection on current interest in the phenomenon of religious persecution for those involved in government, journalism, or human rights monitoring.  You can obtain the publication that resulted from this lively and much-debated meeting from the Center's website above.

Since I have been bitten by the organizing bug (I genuinely enjoy putting interesting people together), I organized a special session on the International Religious Freedom Act for the 2000 American Academy of Religion meeting in Nashville. Thanks to a grant from Harvard University's Committee on Human Rights I was able to assemble a group of people with interests in the relationship between religion, the media and human rights at the Center for the Study of World Religions in October 2001. I also helped plan, with a former student, J. J. Rosenbaum (then a law student at Harvard Law School), a conference for alumni of the Harvard Human Rights Journal on "Religion, Democracy, and Human Rights" in February 2002.  We managed to attract the former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, John Shattuck, as well as the incoming Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, John Hanford.

From 1997-2000, I served with great pleasure on the Public Understanding of Religion Committee in the American Academy of Religion since it matched so well my scholarly concerns and interests, later on the International Connections Committee.