Revd Dr Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator SJ

Fr Orobator is a Jesuit priest and the Dean of the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University. He grew up in Nigeria and joined the Society of Jesus from a background in traditional African religion. Fr Orobator has Ph.D in theology and religious studies from the University of Leeds, an MBA from Georgetown, and a licentiate in sacred theology from Santa Clara. He also studied philosophy in Kinshasa and theology in Nairobi. He was previously provincial superior of the Jesuits of the Eastern Africa Province. He has taught theology and religious studies, at, among others, Hekima University College in Kenya.

Fr Orobator is author of the books “Theology Brewed in an African Pot;” “Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist;” and “The Pope and the Pandemic: Lessons in Leadership in a Time of Crisis,” a Catholic Media Association award winner. Edited volumes include “The Church We Want: African Catholics Look to Vatican III,” and (as co-editor), “Feminist Catholic Theological Ethics: Conversations in the World Church.” 

Prof. Mario Biggeri

Mario Biggeri is Full Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Florence, and a Fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association. His research concentrates on sustainable human development, poverty measurement, child wellbeing, international cooperation, social business, impact evaluation, qualitative and quantitative research methods. He is the author and/or co-author of more than twenty books and has published numerous articles. He has been a consultant and advisor for UNICEF, UNDP, the World Bank, ILO, UN-Habitat, the European Commission, among others. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Bethlehem in Palestine, where he teaches a course on human development and the capability approach.

James P. Bailey is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds an MA in religion from Yale University and a PhD in theological ethics from Boston College. He is the author of Rethinking Poverty: Income, Assets, and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition, published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Dana Bates is the executive director and co-founder of New Horizons Foundation, which seeks to inspire youth to lead and produce social change through innovating and sustaining models of experiential education in Romania. He has a degree in philosophy from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, and a master’s of divinity from Gordon Conwell Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts. He has a PhD from the University of Middlesex in London, and his dissertation was titled “The Glory of God Is Humanity Fully Alive: Exploring Eastern Orthodoxy as a Resource for Human Development in Conversation with the Capability Approach.” Based in the Jiu Valley in Romania, he leads the Semester Abroad Program for Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, and Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts.

Meghan J. Clark is an associate professor of moral theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University in New York. She is the author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress, 2014). In 2015 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Hekima University College in Nairobi, Kenya, and she has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania examining the development work of the Daughters of Charity. In 2018 she was a visiting residential research fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham, UK.

Amy Daughton is an associate professor in practical theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where she is also currently the head of department and director of the doctoral program in practical theology. Her research is situated at the intersections of theology, politics, and practice and is ultimately concerned with questions of the moral life and the contributions of theology in a plural society. Significant recent publications include work on Paul Ricoeur and intercultural hermeneutics in conversation with Thomas Aquinas in With and For Others, and she co-edited the T&T Clark Reader in Political Theology.

Séverine Deneulin is the director of international development at the Laudato Si’ Research Institute in Campion Hall at the University of Oxford and an associate fellow in international development in the Oxford Department of International Development. She has been a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to the founding of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, she was an associate professor in international development in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

Katie Dunne is a lecturer in religious education at St. Angela’s College Sligo, a college of the National University of Ireland in Galway. She holds a PhD in theology alongside MTh and BATh degrees from St. Patrick’s Pontifical University in Maynooth, Ireland. Prior to joining the faculty at St. Angela’s College, she was an assistant professor in theology in the School of Religion at Trinity College in Dublin.

Helmut P. Gaisbauer has been a senior scientist at the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research at the University of Salzburg since 2011. One of his long-term research projects validates the efforts of combatting child poverty in Romania organized by faith-based organizations in Salzburg. He holds a doctorate in political science from Salzburg University and the Salzburg Centre for European Union Studies. He has published extensively on poverty and social exclusion in Europe.

Lori Keleher is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at New Mexico State University. She is the president of the International Development Ethics Association and a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association, Senior Advisor on Philosophy and Development Ethics at the Center for Values in International Development, and co-lead editor of the Journal of Global Ethics. She co-edited with Jay Drydyk The Routledge Handbook of Development Ethics (Routledge, 2019); with Stacy Kosko, Agency and Democracy in Development Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2019); and with Des Gasper, 'Lebret and the Projects of Économie Humaine, Integral Human Development, and Development Ethics', a special issue of the Journal of Global Ethics (2021).

Elizabeth Hlabse is the director of the Program on Faith and Mental Health at the McGrath Institute for Church Life of the University of Notre Dame. A licensed mental health therapist, she supports persons therapeutically through an integrative, neural-developmental lens that attends to the intersection of spirituality and psychology. She holds an MS from Divine Mercy University in Sterling, Virginia, and completed postgraduate studies in Christian ethics at the University of Oxford.

Guillermo Otano Jiménez works as an advocacy officer at the Alboan Foundation, a Jesuit NGO in Spain. He is also the coordinator of Justice in Mining, a Global Ignatian Advocacy Network (GIAN) created by the Society of Jesus that gathers together the Jesuit social centers, NGOs, and universities seeking to discern and promote socio-environmental justice in conflicts related to mining. He has a BSc and a PhD in sociology from the Public University of Navarre. As a researcher, he has focused on the capability approach and the analysis of social changes; corporate regulations; extractivism; and the link between religion and development.

Cathriona Russell teaches ethics, theology, and hermeneutics in the School of Religion, Theology and Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has a PhD and a BA in theology and ethics from Trinity College and a BSc and MSc in agricultural science from University College Dublin. Her teaching, research, and publications focus on environmental theology and philosophy; technology, development, and medical and research ethics; and creation theologies in cosmology, anthropology, and hermeneutics. She is an avid plant collector and vegetable gardener with a special interest in the manuscripts of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and the urban environments of her native city.

Ilaria Schnyder von Wartensee is the director of IN-WONDER LLC, an experiential learning program on human flourishing.  From 2014 to 2022, she served as the Ford Family Research Assistant Professor at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her main research interests are international development and the study of migration, with a particular focus on the dignity of people and their integral human development. A native of Switzerland, she graduated in international relations from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and holds an MSc in anthropology and development from the London School of Economics and a PhD in international law and economics from Bocconi University in Milan.

Joshua Schulz earned a PhD from Marquette University in Milwaukee and is presently an associate professor of philosophy at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. Working in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, he has published widely in moral philosophy on issues concerning personhood, political liberalism, medical ethics, and artificial intelligence. He also serves as co-chair of the Ethics Committee and as a clinical ethics consultant for the Lehigh Valley Hospital Network in Pennsylvania.

Clemens Sedmak is a professor of social ethics and the director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the co-director of the Center for Ethics and Poverty Research at the University of Salzburg. He has co-edited, with Paolo Carozza, The Practice of Human Development and Dignity (with the University of Notre Dame Press).

Augusto Zampini-Davies is a priest and moral theologian of the Diocese of San Isidro, Buenos Aires. He served as adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development at the Vatican and as the head of the Vatican COVID-19 Commission, as well as an expert advisor to the 2019 Synod of the Amazon. He has also worked as theological advisor to the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD) in the United Kingdom and as an assistant priest and lecturer in social ethics in England and Argentina. He has a PhD in theology from the University of Roehampton in London, an MSc in international development from the University of Bath in the United Kingdom, and a licentiate degree in moral theology from the Universidad del Salvador, Argentina. Prior to becoming a priest, he worked as a lawyer in Argentina.