Welcome to my personal website!

I love religion, peace, understanding culture, writing and photography. I'm passionate about free software too (free as in freedom).

I am a PhD student in social anthropology at the University of Minnesota. In my PhD, I intend to research religion in Iran.

I have an MA in Peace Studies from the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, also focusing on religion.

My blog is called On the Edge of Consciousness.

Photography

I photograph professionally. Clients who have commissioned me to do work have included the University of Notre Dame, the ABS-CBN Foundation and The Brooke.

My primary photographic subject is people. I have images online at pbase and flickr. If you want to use these photos, please contact me for permission.

Audio Slideshows

I especially enjoy the story telling element involved in the creation of audio slideshows, which combine still photography and audio.

Sample slideshows

  • Iran: A Riot of Color is my newest audio slideshow. It conveys the feeling I have for the land of Iran.
  • Understanding Peace is one of my early productions. In it I advance the idea that peace is not only a state of being but also a form of action.
  • Iran has proven my most popular slideshow. Many tens of thousands of people have viewed it. My blog entry on the show contains a variety of viewer's comments. The popular website Iranian.com also featured the show.
  • Gamot Cogon School is a fund-raising slideshow made for a private school operating in the midst of a poor, largely rural community near Iloilo, in the Philippines.
  • Bilin shows scenes from a September 2, 2005 protest by Palestinians against Israeli occupation and the security barrier in the village of Bilin in the West Bank.

Research Interests

The areas I am most interested in are:

  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • Israel / Palestine
  • Philippines

Religion and Peace

I have long been interested in religious dimensions of peace and conflict. Religious difference is a relevant factor in a variety of national and international conflicts worldwide, as well as the oppression of religious minorities. During periods which are relatively peaceful in comparison, religious people can hold beliefs about people from other religions that are discriminatory. These beliefs can contribute to injustice, intolerance, abuse and violence, or can justify less visible, ongoing forms of oppression and neglect. Such beliefs can range from the relatively mild—the assertion that one's religion is truer and better than all other religions—to the more blatantly discriminatory, such as the assertion that there exist major world religions that do not deserve to be considered as religions, or even that their followers can be enemies of God.

Yet at the same time, there are truly devout religious people who can be profoundly respectful of people from other religions, even as they acknowledge that other religions contain practices and beliefs which contradict their own. Such people can act in ways that directly contribute to peace, justice, and freedom. I have been fortunate enough to come to know and learn from such people.

A very broad question is, unsurprisingly, why equally devout religious people can hold such strikingly different beliefs about the religious other. This is of course an immensely complex question, given the enormous range of psychological, cultural, economic, political, historic and other factors that contribute to the formation, promotion and maintenance of particular religious beliefs and action.

In my PhD research, I propose to ask a narrower question, drawing on my observation that within countries like Iran, there are a wide range of prophets, saints, mystics, poets, and models worthy of study and emulation by religious devotees. Such religious figures can provide deep meaning to these devotees. Consequently, there can be said to be a kind of inner relationship between the devotee and their religious figures, which finds outer expression in a huge variety of forms, which are social, political, cultural and so forth. My most basic question is this: what might this relationship contribute to beliefs about the religious other, and the truth claims of different religions?

Time

By and large, the social sciences (such as anthropology and sociology) have not done a great job of incorporating time into their theoretical work. Intriguingly, throughout history, some thinkers and peoples have had very different conceptions of time to that of dividing it up into the past, present and future. For me the most compelling example is that of the Buddha, and his concept of paccuppanna, which means "arisen with a background". It was part of his principle of dependent arising—the idea that absolutely everything arises dependent on its conditions. I am very much interested in how this idea combines with the ways in which people describe the events in their lives as the unfolding of a kind of story, which the events of their life come to reveal. I am also interested in the direction of time, particularly the idea that the past is in front of us.

Other Research Interests

  • Understanding peace as not only a goal but also as a form of action; theories of time and peace (see this audio slideshow)
  • The development of a spiritual imagination
  • The life of the magnificient nonviolent Muslim leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

Software Development

I support the use and development of free software. I've put a lot of time in 2009 into developing Rapid Photo Downloader for Linux, the leading photo downloader (importer) for the Linux Desktop.

Contact Me

You can email me at: