Interfaith Vegan Panel with PAN & AIA

Join us for an interfaith virtual panel discussion on veganism. This virtual event aims to create a friendly, pluralistic dialogue among clergy members of various faiths, exploring the ethical aspects of veganism from different religious perspectives. Thank you to Animal Interfaith Alliance for co-hosting this program.

Learn more about PAN here: https://peaceadvocacynetwork.org/

Learn more about AIA here: https://animal-interfaith-alliance.com/

Panelists:

Bishop John Arnold

Bishop John Arnold was appointed Roman Catholic Bishop of Salford by Pope Francis in 2014. Born in Sheffield, England, he has a law degree from Trinity College, Oxford and was called to the Bar in 1976. John entered the Institute of Charity (Rosminians) and began studies for the priesthood in 1978 in Rome. He also completed both a licence and a doctorate in Canon Law. Fr John was ordained priest in 1983 and Bishop in 2006, serving as an auxiliary bishop for Westminster Diocese. Bishop John previously served for many years as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of CAFOD, the Catholic Church's aid and development agency. He is a member of the Bishops’ Conference Department for International Affairs and spokesman on the Environment and was recently appointed President of Catholic Concern for Animals. Motivated by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, which calls on “every person living on this planet” to care for our shared earth, Bishop John has called on the Catholic community to make practical responses to deal with climate change. In March 2019, Bishop John wrote to everyone in the Diocese of Salford calling on them to play their part in responding to climate change and to ‘think globally, act locally’. In the same letter, Bishop John announced his plans to transform his home at Wardley Hall into an ambitious flagship project, Laudato Si Centre. He expresses his thinking on animals and the environment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbu4zrYn7Cc.

Dr Christina Nellist has a PhD in Eastern Orthodox Theology and specializes in animal

suffering and human soteriology. She is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics;

President and Treasurer of Pan Orthodox Concern for Animals Charity; Board member

of the Animal Interfaith Alliance UK; Board member of The Orthodox Fellowship of the

Transfiguration in the USA, and Honorary Associate Life Member of the Progressive

Veterinary Association. She wrote the first Orthodox theological work on animal

suffering – Eastern Orthodoxy and Animal Suffering Eastern Orthodox Christianity and

Animal Suffering: Ancient Voices in Modern Theology; organized the first session relating

to the animal kingdom at the first international conference of the International

Orthodox Theological Association and was invited to speak on behalf of the animal

kingdom at the Halki 111 Summit in 2019, and at the Ecumenical Patriarch’s residence

on Halki in 2022, where she argued the case for including creation care into Orthodox

seminaries and academic education programmes. She was a consultant on the

recent Face of God film – an Orthodox film on the climate crisis and has edited two

volumes entitled Climate Crisis and Creation Care: Historical Perspectives, Ecological

Integrity and Justice; Climate Crisis and Sustainable Creaturely Care: Integrated Theology,

Governance and Justice, both published just before COP 26, 2021. She is a former teacher

and coordinator for Science for L.B. of Havering, and the London Examination Board and

has worked with the governments of Chile, and the Seychelles