The symposium program consisted of two sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Video recordings of the talk are available below.
10 am - 11 am
11 am - 12 pm
Lunch Break
Lunch (on your own), 12 pm - 2 pm
2 pm - 3 pm
3 pm - 3:30 pm
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Swami Sarvapriyananda is the Minister and Spiritual Leader of the Vedanta Society of New York since January 6, 2017. Prior to this, he served as assistant minister of the Vedanta Society of Southern California for 13 months, beginning on December 3, 2015. Swami joined the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in 1994 and received Sannyas in 2004. Before being posted to the VSSC’s Hollywood Temple, Swami served as an acharya (teacher) of the monastic probationers’ training center at Belur Math. He has served the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in various capacities including being the Vice Principal of the Deoghar Vidyapith Higher Secondary School, Principal of the Shikshana Mandira Teacher Education College at Belur Math, and the first Registrar of the Vivekananda University at Belur Math.
Glenn Aparicio Parry PhD, is the author of the Nautilus award-winning book Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Books, 2015), and the forthcoming book Sacred Politics (Select Books, 2020). An educator, speaker, and ecopsychologist, Parry’s life-long passion is to reform thinking into a coherent, cohesive, whole. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently the director of a grass-roots think tank, the Circle for Original Thinking. He lives in northern New Mexico.
Swami Atmajnanananda is a Swami (monk) of the Ramakrishna Order, the resident minister at the Vedanta Center of Greater Washington, DC. He joined the Ramakrishna Order in 1981 at the Vedanta Society of Southern California; took first vows of brahmacharya in India in 1992 and sanyasa in India in 1996; transferred to the Vedanta Center of Greater Washington, DC in 1997. He is a scholar in Indian philosophy and traveled extensively throughout India and Bangladesh; contributed various articles and translations to some of the books and magazines of the Ramkrishna order.
Josie Barnes Parker grew up in Mississippi, and received her Bachelor’s in English from Auburn University. She earned her MLS from the School of Information in 1996. She had worked in three public libraries in Washtenaw County, and has been Director of the Ann Arbor District Library for almost 17 years. She served as a column editor for In the Public Interest in the Journal of Library Administration from 2013 to 2018. The column focused specifically on the governance and operations of public libraries around the world. She is pleased to direct an institution that is one of 10 public libraries in America that has earned a five star rating from Library Journal for eleven consecutive years. She considers it a great honor to lead and direct Ann Arbor’s public library.
Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, and author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Previously, he was a researcher at UC Berkeley and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world’s poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.
