Berkley Center

Ajahn Jayanto serves as abbot of Temple Forest Monastery in New Hamphsire. Jayanto took ordination at the Cittaviveka Monastery in the United Kingdom in 1991 after training there for two years. He pursued further training there and at Aruna Ratanagiri Monastery until 1997, at which point he embarked on a period of practice in Thailand and other Asian Buddhist countries. He returned to the United Kingdom in 2006 until going back to the United States in 2009 to help found Temple Forest Monastery. Jayanto attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison; world travel, a meditation class at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, and residence at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, all helped crystallize his desire to adopt a monastic life.

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Ajahn Pasanno is a well-known and highly respected monk and teacher of Buddhism who has spent over 40 years training monks in both Thailand and the United States. He took ordination in Thailand in 1974 and later became the abbot of Wat Pah Nanachat International Forest Monastery, ultimately spending 24 years living in Thailand. Under his leadership Wat Pah Nanachat Monastery developed considerably in physical size and reputation. In the late 1990s, Pasanno moved to California to head the new Abhayagiri Monastery. In 2015, he received the honorary ecclesiastical title Chao Khun from the crown prince of Thailand, on behalf of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej; that title is given periodically to monks in the Thai tradition who have distinguished themselves with their contributions to the monastic tradition.