Jain Contributions to Interfaith Dialogue

We are pleased to welcome three exciting voices in Jain studies and global-critical philosophy of religion, including Purushottama Bilimoria (State University of San Francisco), Marie-Hélène Gorisse (Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion), and Tim Knepper (Drake University). The colloquium will feature talks by each speaker, followed by a roundtable discussion, and ample time for conversation with the audience.

This event is hosted by the University of North Texas College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Philosophy and Religion Department, Jain Studies Program, and Bhagwan Adinath Professorship in Jain Studies, with generous support from the Jain Education and Research Foundation and the Jain Society of North Texas.

• Location: University of North Texas campus
• 3:30 pm: Doors open. Please enjoy light refreshments (vegan), tea, and coffee.
• 4 pm: Colloquium

This event is free and open to the public. We are currently planning to hold the colloquium in person at UNT along with a livestream accessible via Zoom. Please register here to receive email updates. All registered attendees will receive the Zoom link, as well as parking and location details, via email updates.

Please select both General Admission and the RSVP add-on for in-person attendence if you plan to attend in person. This will help us plan our catering order.

Feel free to reach out to Leah Kalmanson at leah.kalmanson@unt.edu with any questions.

Purushottama Bilimoria

Purushottama Bilimoria, PhD works in Indian & Cross-Cultural philosophy, Philosophy of Religion and Critical Thinking, and lectures at State University of San Francisco as well as Cal State Long Beach. He is Principal Fellow at University of Melbourne, where he serves also as an Editor-in-Chief of Sophia, Journal of Dharma Studies, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy & Traditions (all with Springer). Recent publications include: History of Indian Philosophy (with A. Rayner, 2019), Religion and Sustainability (with R. D. Sherma, 2021), Contemplative Studies and Hinduism (with R. D. Sherma, 2021); Indian Ethics Vol. 2 (with A. Rayner & R. Sharma, 2022).

Marie-Hélène Gorisse

Marie-Hélène Gorisse is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham in the project "Global Philosophy of Religion" supported by the John Templeton Foundation. She specialises in Jainism and in the way its epistemology and hermeneutics developed in dialogue with other South Asian philosophico-religious traditions. She also works on the contemporary relevance of Jainism as a contributor to global philosophy.

Tim Knepper

Timothy Knepper is Professor of Philosophy at Drake University, where he directs The Comparison Project, a public program in global, comparative religion and local, lived religion. He is the author of books on the future of the philosophy of religion (The Ends of Philosophy of Religion, Palgrave, 2013) and the sixth-century Christian mystic known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Negating Negation, Wipf & Stock, 2014). He is also the editor of student-written photo-narratives about religion in Des Moines (A Spectrum of Faith, Drake Community Press, 2017) and in Beijing (Religions of Beijing, Bloomsbury, 2020). He is also editor of The Comparison Project’s lecture and dialogue series on ineffability (Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, Springer, 2017) and death and dying (Death and Dying: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, Springer, 2019). The Comparison Project programming currently includes a biennial lecture and dialogue series, a monthly series of open houses at faith communities, an annual interfaith youth camp, photo-narrative projects about local-lived religion, on-line guides to the “religions of Des Moines,” and more.