Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

Title of Discussion: "Economic Justice in a Diverse Society"
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Luis Rivera-Pagan

Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Mission, holds an S.T.M., an M.A., and a Ph.D., all from Yale University. An American Baptist and a native of Puerto Rico, he is editor of the official report of the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (Brazil, 2006). He teaches courses on Latin American theology, Third World liberation theologies, theological readings of world literature, and problems and issues in the 16th-century Christianization of the Americas. He is interested in the history of Latin American Christianity, and theology and literature.

Title of Discussion: “Xenophobia or Xenophilia: Towards a Theology of Migration”
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Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, and Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. Saskia Sassen’s research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. In her research she has focused on the unexpected and the counterintuitive as a way to cut through established “truths.

In addition to her appointments at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, Saskia Sassen serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities. She has received a variety of awards and prizes, most recently, a Doctor honoris causa from Delft University (Netherlands), the first Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus Award of the University of Notre Dame, and was one of the four winners of the first University of Chicago Future Mentor Award covering all doctoral programs. She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International,Vanguardia, Clarin, and the Financial Times, among others.

Title of Discussion: "The Global City: A Frontier Space for Re-Making the Social"
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Emilie M. Townes

Emilie M. Townes is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African-American Religion & Theology, Yale Divinity School. Professor Townes’s teaching and general research interests focus on Christian ethics, womanist ethics, critical social theory, cultural theory and studies, as well as on postmodernism and social postmodernism. Her specific interests include health and health care; the cultural production of evil; analyzing the linkages among race, gender, class, and other forms of oppression; and developing a network between African American and Afro-Brazilian religious and secular leaders and community-based organizations. Among her many publications are Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health and a Womanist Ethic of Care; Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope; and In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness. Prior to her appointment at Yale, Professor Townes served as the Carolyn Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Currently she is the vice president of the American Academy of Religion and will serve as president-elect in 2007. Professor Townes is an ordained American Baptist clergywoman.

TItle of Discussion: "Justice Notes"
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