The Interfaith Association of Central Ohio’s 2007 Annual Interfaith Main Event Luncheon featured Dr. Suheil Badi Bushrui, Founder and Director of University of Maryland’s Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace Project. The title of his talk was “Our Spiritual Heritage”.
Suheil Badi Bushrui
In 2006, Professor Bushrui had the privilege of editing with Professor David Cadman, Selected Speeches and Articles of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales with an introduction by President C.D. Mote, Jr. (published by the Center for Heritage Resource Studies, the University of Maryland). These essays reflect His Royal Highness’s leadership in drawing attention to global issues and concerns which affect the whole of humanity. This past June, the prestigious Congress of Protestant Churches of Germany invited Professor Bushrui with a distinguished group of international scholars and world leaders (including HH the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, HRH Prince Hassan of Jordan, and the Nobel Laureate Professor Mohamed Younes of Bangladesh) to make a contribution to a special book entitled The Power of Dignity – Rethinking Globalization, which was submitted at the recent G8-Summit meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany. The aim of the book was to draw the attention of world leaders at the G8-Summit to many of the ignored aspects of globalization.
Professor Suheil Badi Bushrui is a distinguished author, poet, critic, translator and media personality, well known in the United States, Europe, and the Arab world. Widely recognized for his seminal studies in English of the works of W. B. Yeats and for his translations of Yeats’s poetry into Arabic, he is also the foremost authority on the works of Kahlil Gibran. In his capacity as the Founder-President of the International Association for the Study of the Life and Works of Kahlil Gibran, he actively works with a network of scholars and researchers located throughout the world.
At present, Professor Bushrui is the Director of the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace Project at the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland. This is the first international academic forum devoted to the preservation of Gibran’s legacy and the promotion of East-West intercultural relations. He is the founder of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, which he occupied as the first incumbent from 1992 to 2005. He is also Senior Scholar of Peace Studies with the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, Senior Scholar with the Academy of Leadership, and Fellow of the Temenos Academy (London, UK).