Charles P. Gibbs

For 17 years, Charles has served as URI's founding Executive Director. He has worked with religious, spiritual and other leaders in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. He has been a featured speaker internationally and has written extensively about interfaith cooperation. He co-authored with colleague Sally Mahé, Birth of a Global Community, a book on the birth of the United Religions Initiative. In addition, he has published many articles on interfaith work, contributed a chapter to Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding, published by the United States Institute of Peace, and co-authored, with colleague Barbara Hartford, a chapter in Positive Approaches to Peacebuilding. His essay, Opening the Dream: Beyond the Limits of Otherness, appears in the anthology, Deepening the American Dream. As an Episcopal priest, Charles brings to his work a strong commitment to spiritual transformation and to work for peace, justice and healing, as well as an abiding belief in the sacredness of all life on this planet.

URI Stories of Impact

URI Being What We Seek to Become - Charles P. Gibbs

A living image of the future URI wished to create and a powerful experience of the answers being there materialized on the extraordinary second night of the conference.

Isabel Ramos, My Teacher and Friend Charles Gibbs

In August 2008 near Iguaçu Falls, 90 representatives of 12 Cooperation Circles from 11 countries gathered for the Third URI Latin America regional assembly, which was to be followed by a day-long meeting for the Indigenous people attending. Isabel Ramos, a gifted copla singer from Cordoba, Argentina, was one of the Indigenous people. At the end of the first evening, I learned that when Isabel first saw me, a white, male Christian, she ran weeping and screaming from the room. I represented the devil that aimed to destroy Indigenous cultures and the people who lived them.