Faith Angle Europe 2023 Forum

Rowan Williams, in full Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth in the City and County of Swansea, was the 104th archbishop of Canterbury (2002–12), as well as a noted theologian, archbishop of the Church in Wales (2000–02), and the first archbishop of Canterbury in modern times chosen from outside the Church of England. He has written extensively across a very wide range of related fields of professional study – philosophy, theology (especially early and patristic Christianity), spirituality and religious aesthetics. He has also written throughout his career on moral, ethical and social topics and, after becoming archbishop, turned his attention increasingly on contemporary cultural and interfaith issues. As Archbishop of Canterbury his principal responsibilities were pastoral – leading the life and witness of the Church of England in general and his own diocese in particular by his teaching and oversight, and promoting and guiding the communion of the world-wide Anglican Church by the globally recognized ministry of unity that attaches to the office of bishop of the see of Canterbury.

Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She has written and translated four books of nonfiction and poetry. She is the author, most recently, of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” a 2018 Times Notable Book and a Times Critics’ Pick, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, in 2019. Griswold has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others, and has been awarded various prizes, including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a pen Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry. Her second book of poems, “If Men, Then,” was published in 2020. She is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Wolfgang Blau is the Managing Partner of Brunswick’s global climate hub and an expert in climate communications. He is the Co-Founder of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network at Oxford University, a global network that trains journalists from more than 250 leading news organizations each year on how to improve their climate journalism.

Previously, he was President International and Global Chief Operating Officer of Condé Nast. Prior to that, he was Chief Digital Officer and, latterly, President at Condé Nast International where he modernized the company’s digital publishing portfolio, initiated the launch of ‘Vogue Business’ and successfully led the Asian, European and Latin American companies into a merger of Condé Nast International with its US sister company.

Wolfgang began his career as a radio journalist and news editor in Germany, after which he spent six years in the San Francisco Bay Area covering digital technology and media companies for German national newspapers and broadcasters. On his return to Germany, he became Editor-in-Chief of ZEIT ONLINE, a position that won him Germany’s “Chief Editor of the Year” award.

He is an advisor to the United Nations Climate Division, UNFCCC and a Trustee of Internews.org. He will be a Visiting Fellow of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House in 2023.

Delphine Horvilleur is helping transform the traditional French Jewish community through her work as a leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France. The grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Horvilleur grew up with a strong sense of Jewish tradition. She studied journalism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, then moved to New York, where she took an intensive course of Jewish study at the Drisha Institute before beginning her studies at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. After her ordination in 2008, she returned to France, where she became (and remains, as of 2017) one of three leaders of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France, a liberal community affiliated with the World Union for Progressive Judaism, as well as rabbi of one of its two Parisian synagogues. In her work to bring a more progressive and inclusive mindset to the Jewish community, Horvilleur often draws upon both the values of secular French culture and the historical context that explains why Judaism developed along certain lines in France. This understanding of Jewish history and tradition influenced her two books on religion, Eve’s Costume: Feminism, Modesty, and Judaism (2013), and How the Rabbis Make Children: Sex, Transmission, and Identity in Judaism (2015).

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and a prize-winning historian with a particular expertise in the history of communist and post communist Europe. She is also a professor of practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs ARENA, a research project on disinformation and 21st-century propaganda, and a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She is the author of several books, including “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe,” and “Gulag: A History,” which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Applebaum is a former member of The Washington Post’s editorial board, a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, and a former Warsaw correspondent of The Economist.

Radosław (Radek) Sikorski is a member of the European Parliament as well as a distinguished statesman with the Office of the President at CSIS. He is also currently a senior fellow at the Center of European Studies at Harvard University. He was formerly Poland’s minister of defense (2005–2007), foreign minister (2007–2014), and speaker of parliament (2014–2015). Born and raised in Bydgoszcz, Poland, Mr. Sikorski led a student strike committee there in 1981 as part of the Solidarity movement. He graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. and an M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics. He then served as a war reporter in Afghanistan and Angola. In 1988, he was awarded the World Press Photo for spot news. Mr. Sikorski returned to his home country in 1989. From 2001 to 2005, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. As minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Sikorski was the Polish signatory of the Treaty of Lisbon, in 2007. Together with Carl Bildt, he launched the EU Eastern Partnership. He proposed and helped to set up the European Endowment for Democracy. He negotiated and signed the Poland-Russia regional visa-free regime, Poland-U.S. missile defense agreement, and—together with foreign ministers of Germany and France—the accord between the pro-EU opposition and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013. In 2012, Foreign Policy named him one of its 100 global thinkers for “telling the truth even when it’s not diplomatic.”