BUIES CREEK – John Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University, will deliver the Department of Religion Annual Lecture at Campbell University on Feb. 12, 2013. Sponsored by the Thomas F. Staley Foundation, the lecture will be held in Butler Chapel at 7 p.m. The public is invited.
Esposito will speak on “The Challenge of Pluralism: Christian-Muslim Relations in the 21st Century.”
“I am excited to have someone with the national stature of John Esposito visit our campus,” said Glenn Jonas, chair of Campbell’s religion department. “His story is itself interesting. He grew up in an American Catholic family and spent 10 years in a monastery in pursuit of the monastic life.”
Esposito is also professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown and is founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding: History and International Affairs in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. At the College of the Holy Cross, he was the Loyola Professor of Middle East Studies, chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and director of the Center for International Studies.
In addition, he’s a consultant to the U.S. Department of State as well as to corporations, universities and media organizations across the world. He has served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies and as vice chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. He’s currently a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100 Leaders, and is a recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s 2005 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion and of Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azzam Award for Outstanding Contributions in Islamic Studies.
Esposito graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. Antony College; a Master of Arts degree from St. John’s University; and a Ph.D. from Temple University.
He has written more than 30 books and is editor in chief of the four- volume “Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (1995).” He also edited “The Oxford History of Islam (1999,” “The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2003)” and “The Islamic World: Past and Present (2004).”
For more information on this lecture, visit http://divinity.campbell.edu or call 1-800-334-4111, ext. 1675.