JENNY - Key Persons
Charles Cameron was mentored by Fr Trevor Huddleston CR, and studied theology at Oxford. Since then he has spent decades exploring comparative religion, cultural anthropology and depth psychology, done some teaching, then put in a couple of years as Senior Analyst in a small Washington DC think tank, and now serves as managing editor of the strategy blog Zenpundit.com. He also designs games based on Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game, and writes poetry and (occasional) science fiction. He's a vagabond monk at heart.
Job Titles:
- Journalist With over Ten Years Experience Working for the Daily Star Sunday
Dominik Lemanski is a national newspaper journalist with over ten years experience working for the Daily Star Sunday and News Of the World both in the UK and abroad. During this time he has developed a keen interest in covering religious affairs with particular emphasis on Islamic extremism in London. He has also covered the refugee crisis in Calais and the Canary Islands and the 2011 famine in East Africa. He can be found at @dominiklemanski
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Founder
JENNY JAMES TAYLOR specialises in religious literacy and was appointed Research Fellow in Communication, Media and Journalism at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology in Cambridge in 2019. A Bloomsbury author and campaigner she pioneered religious literacy in journalism, founding Lapido Media in 2005 as a publicly subscribed online newspaper and publisher. Described by historian Tom Holland as 'groundbreaking', it helped to change the national secular discourse by providing resources for journalists needing to ‘get religion' in an age of globalization. Widely travelled, Taylor has a doctorate in religion from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and has been published many times in academic journals and the mainstream and on-line media including the Guardian, the Times and, in translation, the European press. Her books include Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in ‘Secular' Britain with Lesslie Newbigin and Lamin Sanneh (SPCK 1998 and Wipf&Stock 2005) and A Wild Constraint (Continuum 2008), an extended essay on contemporary sexuality. An Associate of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, she lives where she was born, in Suffolk.
Dr. Irfan Al Alawi is an expert in Middle East affairs and Tasawwuf (Islamic spirituality), and studied at Al-Azhar University, Cairo as well as under the famous Imam Sayyid Habib ahmad Mashhur al Haddad Al Alawi. He is International Director at the Centre for Islamic Pluralism and a Visiting Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars (Washington). He has written for the Independent, The Guardian, The Times, as well as for The Weekly Standard, The Spectator, and many Islamic journals. He has translated many works into Arabic, English, Swahili and Urdu.
As a multimedia focused writer, Frances has experience of religious freedom work overseas, having worked with human rights NGO Christian Solidarity Worldwide. There she interviewed numerous victims of human rights abuses, ran the comms team, managed public campaigns and worked with delegations to the British and EU parliaments to bring to light religious freedom violations. These activities were on behalf of a variety of ‘believers' across over 20 countries including Christians, atheists and human rights lawyers working on religious persecution cases. Prior to this, she worked in the Civil Service, studied at SOAS and was President of SOAS Student Union in the year of London's 7/7 attacks. She currently chairs the not-for-profit group at the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
Job Titles:
- Writer and Researcher With Arab West Report Based in Cairo
Jayson Casper is a writer and researcher with Arab West Report based in Cairo. He is also the editor of Orient and Occident, a magazine of the Anglican Diocese of Egypt, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. He serves as local correspondent for the US magazine Christianity Today and blogs regularly at A Sense of Belonging. Jayson has worked previously in Mauritania, Jordan, and Tunisia, and holds an MA in Islamic Studies from Columbia International University. Fond of all things Arabic, Jayson enjoys crossing boundaries to promote understanding, bringing the ‘other' closer to home.
Job Titles:
- Fellow at the Middle East Forum
Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Other Faiths at Melbourne School of Theology.