The Rev. Victor H. Kazanjian Jr. is the Executive Director of the United Religions Initiative, (URI) a global grassroots interfaith peacebuilding organization with global offices in 21 countries supporting nearly 1,000 grassroots groups working in 106 countries and with an office at the United Nations where URI is a non-governmental organization with consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. URI’s mission is to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence, and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings. URI is a global network working to cultivate peace and justice by engaging people of all cultures and religions to bridge differences, foster understanding, build relationships and work together on humanitarian issues for the good of their communities and the world. Defying the conventional wisdom that issues of poverty, conflict and violence are best engaged by organizations with a heavy central infrastructure, URI’s decentralized, network-based, light-framed, shared leadership organizational approach is giving people around the world the power to meet their challenges and build cohesive, connected and peaceful communities. Victor regularly leads training programs around the world on intercultural and interreligious dialogue, conflict transformation and peacebuilding, engaging diversity, social justice, community building and community organizing.

Prior to joining URI in October 2013, Victor served for twenty years as the Dean of Intercultural Education, Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life, Co-director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program, and Director of the Peace Studies Program in India at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts USA. Victor is a visiting faculty member at the Malaviya Center for Peace Research at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India, where he served as Fulbright Professor of Peace & Justice Studies in 2006. He also served as a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School. In addition, Victor is the co-founder and co-president of Education as Transformation Inc., an international organization that works on issues of religious diversity and spirituality in higher education. Victor’s work at Wellesley College and through Education as Transformation is widely acknowledged as the catalyst in the national and international movement to establish interfaith programs on college and university campuses that include religious diversity and spirituality as core issues in higher education.

Specializing in inter-religious and intercultural dialogue, conflict transformation, diversity and democracy, and peace building, Victor is a recognized thought-leader and the author and editor books and articles, including Education as Transformation: Religious Pluralism, Spirituality and a New Vision for Higher Education in America, (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), Beyond Tolerance: a Campus Religious Diversity Kit, (Washington: NASPA, 2004), the Studies in Spirituality and Education series published by Peter Lang Press, and “Building a New Global Commons: Religious Diversity and the Challenge for Higher Education,” Victor Kazanjian, James P. Keen and Peter Laurence, Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, Issue 4, Part I, Summer 2010 http://irdialogue.org. He is also a regular blogger for the Huffington Post.

Victor is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church and was trained as a community organizer working to address the systemic causes of poverty and injustice through the support of interfaith and community-based groups. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a graduate of Harvard University.