January 16, 2025, 13:00 GMT.
Dr. Azza Karam is founding President and CEO of Lead-Integrity, a global consultancy firm dedicated to serving the common good through empowering women professionals, inspired by their faiths. Dr. Karam was the one-time President and CEO of the Women’s Learning Partnership, and Secretary General of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. Our speaker has twenty years of experience working at the United Nations, where she coordinated the Arab Human Development Reports, co-founded and chaired the United Nations Interagency Task Force on Religion and Development, and founded and convened its Multi-Faith Advisory Council. Additionally, she was Lead Facilitator for UN system-wide peer to peer “Strategic Learning Exchanges” on ‘Religion, Development and Diplomacy.’
Dr. Karam has taught in various universities, is widely published and translated into several languages. Laureate of multiple awards, she was most recently granted a Doctorate in Humane Letters honoris causa, by John Cabot University, in Rome, Italy.
What is interreligious engagement? What do we know about it in practice? Can it contribute to a socially cohesive world in a time of social and cultural fragmentation? These are some of the questions we will be addressing, as we assess the main features of deeply divided societies and take a deep dive into what separates, and what unites, the diverse faiths. Through a dynamic dialogue, Prof Azza Karam will walk her audience through a discussion that highlights the weaknesses and strengths of interreligious engagement today. The dialogue is guided by the observation that identifying how different religious and cultural groups envision difference(s) is the first step to heal some of our social wounds and to close the rifts dividing our political space. Informed interreligious engagement, and not merely interfaith dialogue, is the second and more challenging step to reach social cohesion and restore political peace.
