People

Wendy Cadge is the Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University. She is an expert in contemporary American religion, especially related to religion in public institutions, religious diversity, religious and moral aspects of healthcare, and religion and immigration. She is the author of two books, Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine and Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America. She founded and co-directed the Transforming Chaplaincy Project from 2015 to 2019, and in 2018 launched the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.

Farr Curlin is the Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities and Co-Director of the Initiative on Theology, Medicine, and Culture at Duke University. A practicing palliative medicine physician, he also serves the School of Medicine’s Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Curlin founded and was co-director of the Program on Medicine and Religion. He has published extensively on medical ethics and professionalism, religion in clinical practice, and the connection between faith and professional virtues in healthcare.

Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She served for 12 years (2011-2023) as the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the editor of the Center’s journal, Religion & Politics. Her research focuses on American Christianity. Her latest book, Making the World Over: Confronting Racism, Misogyny, and Xenophobia in U.S. History, urges a re-reading of the nation’s history that opens up greater complexity than our stock narratives. In her current role, she is a frequent facilitator of interfaith dialogues on controversial topics in US society including controversies in healthcare.

Peter Hill is Professor of Psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University. He is a past president of the American Psychological Association’s Division on the Psychology of Religion and was elected Fellow of the APA in 1998. He received the Distinguished Member Award by the Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) and has co-authored or co-edited many books including Measures of Religiosity, Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology, The Psychology of Fundamentalism: An Intratextual Approach, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, and Psychology of Religion and Workplace Spirituality.

The Reverend Gabrielle NS Kennedy served as the Executive Director of Faith & For the Sake of All, which has reorganized as Faith HEALS. As an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) she serves as pastor of Buren Chapel AME Church, Herculaneum, MO.  In addition to her non-profit experience, Rev. Gabrielle has worked in commercial and Medicaid Managed Care across the state of Missouri for over 15 years.  Rev. Gabrielle believes in the embodied work  of her ministry through community collaboration in the areas of health and faith-based social action.

Rabbi Claudio Kogan is Director of the Bioethics Program at Baptist health South Florida. He previously was the Director of the Institute of Bioethics and Social Justice and Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine. In Texas, he did extensive work with immigrant health and health disparities. He is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina and has traveled around the world promoting interfaith dialogue. He sees deep connections between his work as a physician, rabbi, and bioethicist.

Aasim Padela is Professor of Emergency Medicine, Bioethics and the Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He serves on the Council of Faith for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at MCW, and holds a faculty appointment in the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Institute for Health and Equity at  MCW. In addition to maintaining an active clinical, research, and bioethics practice at MCW, he is an internationally-recognized thought and research leader in the fields of Muslim health and healthcare disparity research, and Islamic bioethics.

Diarmuid Rooney is senior director of ministry formation at the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA). He works closely with leaders in Catholic healthcare of diverse faiths and traditions to provide formation opportunities. Formation helps leaders to integrate into their work the dynamics of vocation, tradition, spirituality, ethics, Catholic social teaching, and discernment. He has lived in both Benedictine and Buddhist monasteries and is committed to inter-spiritual dialogue and practice. He has developed extensive training materials to assist healthcare professionals with integrating spirituality into their work.