Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia department of religion in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences will host a symposium on Indonesian diversity Tuesday, Nov. 9, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the North Psychology-Journalism Plaza Auditorium, located on Baldwin Street.Ignatius Ismartono, M. Syafi’i Anwar and Syafaatun Al-Mirzanah, religious experts from Indonesia, will speak at the event, and attendees will be invited to participate in question and answer sessions.
Later in the evening, an informal reception for the speakers will be held from7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the UGA Catholic Center, located at 1344 South Lumpkin Street.
Ismartono, a Jesuit priest, represented Indonesia at the World Council of Religious Leaders, which met at the United Nations in 2000.He is the head of the Crisis and Reconciliation Service of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference. Anwar, Ph.D. is executive director of the International Center for Islam and Pluralism as well as a lecturer and faculty member with the State Islamic University in Jakarta. al-Mirzanah, Ph.D. is the director of academic affairs and a professor of Islamic Thought at State Islamic University of Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta. She wrote a2007 Ph.D. thesis, When Mystic Masters Meet: towards a new matrix for Christian-Muslim dialogue, which is a comparative study of the Sufi, Ibn’ Arabi and Meister Eckhart, the 13th century Dominican mystic.
Along with UGA’s department of religion, the symposium is sponsored by the Indonesian Foreign Ministry and Consulate in Houston and co-sponsored by the Virtual Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Islamic World and the UGA Asian Studies Center.
For more information, contact Alan Godlas, associate professor in the department of religion in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, at godlas@uga.edu or 706/542-1486.For information about UGA’s department of religion, see http://www.uga.edu/religion.