Ravindra Svarupa Dasa (William H. Deadwyler, III) joined ISKCON in 1971 in Philadelphia, USA, where he has served for most of his devotional career. He was initiated by Srila Prabhupada in 1971 and earned a Ph.D. in Religion from Temple University in 1980. He has been a member of the ISKCON Governing Body Commission since 1987. He is an initiating guru for ISKCON and is the Philadelphia temple president.

Ravindra Svarupa Dasa's particular focus is on educational development within ISKCON, academic preaching and spiritual counselling. His writings have been published in numerous academic publications and ISKCON publications, including ICJ and BTG. He is married, has three children and two grandchildren.
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Istvan Kamaras, Ph.D., graduated from the University of Budapest (ELTE) in Hungarian Literature, Library Science and Sociology. From 1968-85 he worked for the National Library as head of the Department of the Sociology of Reading. From 1985-90 he was an empirical researcher in the sociology of religion at the Institute for Cultural Studies. From 1990-95 he was a research and development staff member for the National Institute of Education. From 1996-9 he was a professor at the Janus Pannonius University of Pécs, teaching courses in philosophy, anthropology, sociology of arts, and religion. Since 1999 he has been a professor in Veszprém University, working on establishing a Department of Religious Study and Ethics.

His main research interests are the reception of art, the role of the priest, Catholic rectory activities, Catholic renewal movements, and new religious movements. He has published numerous books on the sociology of culture, arts and religion.
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Bhaktavatsala Dasa joined ISKCON in Germany in 1988 and was initiated the following year. He served in the areas of book distribution and congregational development. He was involved in ISKCON administration as a GBC management assistant and deputy, as well as executive secretary to the chairman of the GBC. Since 1995 he has been involved with writ-ing and teaching seminars and courses under the auspices of the VTE (Vaisnava Training and Education). He is currently working on the development of a graduate course in Vaisnava ministerial studies.
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Michael D. Langone, Ph.D., a counseling psychologist, is Executive Director and Director of Research and Victim Assistance at AFF (American Family Foundation). He is editor of AFF's Cultic Studies Journal, editor of Recovery From Cults, and co-author of Cults: What Parents Should Know and Satanism and Occult-Related Violence: What You Should Know. Dr. Langone has studied cultic groups and psychological manipulation for twenty years and has worked with several hundred families and former group members. He was the 1995 Albert V. Danielsen Visiting Scholar at Boston University's Danielsen Institute.
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John Borelli (Ph.D., Fordham University) directs Interreligious Relations and assists with ecumenical affairs for the (US) National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB). A Consultant to the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, he is also an ad-visor to Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and the Catholic University of America Institute for Interreligious Study and Dialogue. He is a member of the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter Group and is on the Executive Council of the US chapter of the World Council for Religion and Peace.

John staffs four NCCB dialogues with Muslims and serves on the Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the United States.

His articles, presentations and reports have been published in Vatican II: The Continuing Agenda (Sacred Heart University Press), New Theology Review, Mid Stream, Ecumenical Trends, Origins and Faith Alive (Catholic News Service), The Living Light (USCC), Buddhist-Christian Studies, Pro Dialogo (Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue), and Ecumenism. With John Erickson he has co-edited The Quest for Unity: Orthodox and Catholics in Dialogue (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press/USCC, 1996), and he edited Handbook for Interreligious Dialogue (Silvert Burdett & Ginn, 1990).
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Marcus Braybrooke is the vicar of three villages near Oxford. He is Joint-President of the World Congress of Faiths and a Trustee of the International Interfaith Centre. His books include: Pilgrimage of Hope; Faith and Interfaith in a Global Age; The Explorer's Guide to Christianity; A Wider Vision; he is editor with Peggy Morgan of Testing the Global Ethic; and with Jean Potter All in Good Faith.
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Gavin D'Costa is Senior Lecturer in Theology, in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies, University of Bristol. He has written: Theology and Religious Pluralism, and edited Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, and the forthcoming: The Trinity and the Meeting of Religions (Orbis, New York, 2000). He is on the Catholic Bishops Advisory Committee for Other Faiths and was visiting McCarthy Professor at the Gregorian University, Rome (1998) where he taught on Christian attitudes to other religions. He is married and has two children.
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Michael Ipgrave is Secretary of the Churches' Commission for Interfaith Relations, the ecu-menical commission which co-ordinates the interreligious work of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. He is also Adviser on Interfaith Relations to the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England. He is an Anglican priest, and lives in Leicester with his wife Julia and three sons.
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Felix Machado was appointed by the Pope as under-secretary at the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. A Ph.D. at Fordham University in New York, his doctoral research was on the Jnaneshvari, a commentary on the Bhagavad-gita by Sant Jnaneshvar, a thirteenth century Bhakti Saint from Maharastra. He has written over one-hundred articles in various reviews in English, Marathi, Italian and French and is a part-time lecturer in two different universities in Rome. He completed his studies in Bombay University, Bombay Diocesan Seminary, Catholic Faculty in Lyons, Maryknoll School of Theology, New York and Fordham Unversity, New York. He was born and raised in Vasai (near Mumbai), India.
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Brian Pearce served in the UK Civil Service from 1959-84; During 1984-86, he helped to establish the Inter Faith Network for the UK of which he has been Director since 1987. The Network links over 85 member organisations with an interest in building good relations between Britain's different faith communities.
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Rabbi Jacqueline Tabick, of North West Surrey Synagogue in Weybridge, UK, is Vice Chair of the World Congress of Faiths. She is married to a rabbi and they are blessed with three children. She has contributed articles to many teaching and Jewish magazines and is a regular on the UK television programme 'Pause for Thought'.
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Alan Unterman is currently the Minister of an Orthodox synagogue in the South of Manchester and a part-time lecturer in Comparative Religion at Manchester University. He was born in 1942 near London, and was educated at the Universities of Birmingham, Oxford and Delhi, and at Talmudic academies (yeshivot) in the UK and Israel. He is the author of a number of books on Judaism: The Wisdom of the Jewish Mystics; Judaism & Art; Jews: their Religious Beliefs and Practices; Dictionary of Jewish Lore & Legend; and has contributed to the Penguin Dictionary of Religions and Penguin Handbook of Living Religions.
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Malati-manjari-devi Dasi (Miriam Saha) works for German televison as a story editor. She has been a member of ISKCON for eight years and has been involved in ISKCON Communications since 1994.
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Gerald Carney is professor of Religion at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He is also currently serving as Associate Dean for Academic Support. Jerry teaches courses in world religions, especially South Asian religions. Jerry's doctoral research at Fordham University (Ph.D., 1979) was a theological study of Kavikarnapura's Caitanya-candrodaya-natakam, a ten act drama devoted to the life of Caitanya. Subsequent research treated the Gaudiya Vaisnava rasa-sastra, the ritual cycle in Radha-Ramana Mandira, and contemporary rasa-lila dramas in Vrndavana. Since 1983, Jerry has been doing bibliographical research on Baba Premananda Bharati, a Bengal Vaisnava missionary who came to the US in 1902 and established a Krsna temple in Los Angeles in 1906. An article comparing the arrival of Baba Bharati in the West with that of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was published in the Journal of Vaisnava Studies in spring 1998.

Prior to Fordham, Jerry studied Roman Catholic theology at the Gregorian University (Rome). Jerry lives with his wife, Dr. Ellen Deluca, in Lynchburg, Virginia.
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Babhru Dasa (William R. Reed) is a lecturer in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University and an adjunct professor of English at San Diego Mesa College. He began chanting Hare Krsna in 1969 and joined ISKCON in Honolulu, Hawaii early in 1970. Over the years, he has preached throughout the Hawaiian Islands and in California and Mexico. He also founded and managed a gurukula in Hawaii in the 1970s and 1980s and taught at a gurukula in California during the 1980s. More recently, he served for several years on ISKCON San Diego's board of directors.
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Gerald Surya has been a congregational member of the Brooklyn (New York) Temple for ten years. He has an interest in Vaisnava philosophy and has done interviews for the Journal of Vaishnava Studies. He is a graduate of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, (M.D. in 1995) and is currently practising internal medicine in the New York City area.
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David Smith is a Reader in Indian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK. He is currently completing a book on Hinduism and Modernity. His Dance of Siva was published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press.
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Gaura Vigraha Dasi (Gabriela Valkova) holds an MA in Linguistics and Philology from the Sofia University 'St Kliment Ohridski'. Since 1989 she has been serving in the North European division of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (NE BBT) as a translator, editor and proofreader. In 1996 she became production manager and translation consultant for about twenty East European and CIS languages in the NE BBT. In this capacity she has organised a number of translation seminars and educational programmes and has compiled manuals for translators, editors and proofreaders. Besides her service for the BBT, at present Gaura Vigraha Dasi is also managing the translation projects of Govinda-Verlag, Switzerland.
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