2025 Featured & Invited Speakers
Kazu Haga is a trainer, educator, student and practitioner with over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and restorative justice. He weaves in lessons from decades of Buddhist practice and trauma healing work to advance social change and collective healing. He is a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding core member of the Ahimsa Collective, is a Jam facilitator and author of the book Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm as well as the upcoming book Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging from Collapse.
He teaches nonviolence, conflict reconciliation, restorative justice, organizing and mindfulness in prisons and jails, high schools, universities and youth groups, faith communities and activist movements around the country. Kazu was introduced to the work of social change and nonviolence in 1998, when at the age of 17 he participated in the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage; a 6-month walking journey from Massachusetts to New Orleans to retrace the slave trade. He then spent a year studying nonviolence and Buddhism while living in monasteries throughout South Asia, and returned to the US at age 19 to begin a lifelong path in social justice work.
He spent 10 years working in social justice philanthropy, while directly being involved in and playing leading roles in many movements. He became an active nonviolence trainer in the global justice movement of the late 1990s, and has since led hundreds of workshops worldwide. Kazu is an avid meditator, enjoys being in nature and loves food more than most people do. He is also a die-hard fan of the Boston Celtics. He is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA where he lives with his family. You can find out more about his work at www.kazuhaga.com.
Rachel Elizabeth Harding is a poet, historian and scholar of religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Harding writes about religion, creativity and social justice in the experience of communities of African descent in the US and Brazil. She is associate professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver.
Dr. Harding is author of numerous essays, poems, and scholarly articles, as well as two books: A Refuge in Thunder, a history of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé; and more recently, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism and Mothering, co-written with her mother, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, on the role of compassion and mysticism in African American social justice organizing. Remnants was chosen by the editors of Duke University Press and one of the most influential books of the decade (2010-2020).
Dr. Harding is an ebômi (ritual elder) in the Terreiro do Cobre Candomblé community in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She also co-directs the Veterans of Hope Project – an interdisciplinary initiative on religion, grassroots democracy and healing, founded by her parents, Vincent and Rosemarie Freeney Harding. (www.veteransofhope.org)
Harding’s honors include a Colorado Black Roundtable Civil Rights Award, a Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship, the Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Williams College, the Rosa Parks Award from the University of Colorado Denver, and an honorary doctorate from the Starr-King School for the Ministry.
Atalia Omer is a Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies Professor at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She also recently served as a senior fellow and Dermot TJ Dunphy, Visiting Professor at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard University’s Religion and Public Life program. She earned her PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University.
Her research focuses on religion, violence, and peacebuilding, as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of Palestine/Israel Review.