IAFOR > The Asian Conference on Ethics, Religion & Philosophy (ACERP) > ACERP2022 > Speakers

Speakers

The Asian Conference on Ethics, Religion & Philosophy (ACERP) is a multidisciplinary conference held concurrently with The Asian Conference on Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences (ACP). Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow participants to attend sessions in both.

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

  • George D. Chryssides
    George D. Chryssides
    The University of Birmingham, UK
  • Amy Wai Sum Lee
    Amy Wai Sum Lee
    Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong
  • Alistair Ping
    Alistair Ping
    QUT Graduate School of Business, Australia
  • Frank S. Ravitch
    Frank S. Ravitch
    Michigan State University College of Law, USA
  • Roswiyani Roswiyani
    Roswiyani Roswiyani
    Tarumanagara University, Indonesia
  • Monty P. Satiadarma
    Monty P. Satiadarma
    Tarumanagara University, Indonesia
  • Brian Victoria
    Brian Victoria
    Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, UK

Previous Speakers

View details of speakers at past ACERP conferences via the links below.

ACERP2021 ACERP2020 ACERP2019
ACERP2018 ACERP2017 ACERP2016
ACERP2015 ACERP2014 ACERP2013
ACERP2012 ACERP2011
George D. Chryssides
The University of Birmingham, UK

Biography

Dr George D. Chryssides is Honorary Research Fellow in Contemporary Religion at the University of Birmingham, after being Head of Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, from 2001 to 2008. George Chryssides obtained a First Class Honours MA degree in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and a First Class Honours Bachelor of Divinity in systematic theology. He subsequently undertook postgraduate research at the University of Oxford, obtaining his doctorate in 1974.

From the 1980s, George Chryssides’ main interest has been new religious movements, on which he has authored numerous books and scholarly articles. Recent publications include Historical Dictionary of Jehovah’s Witnesses (2008), Heaven’s Gate: Postmodernity and Popular Culture in a Suicide Group (2011), Historical Dictionary of New Religious Movements (2012), The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements (co-edited with Benjamin E. Zeller,2014), and Jehovah’s Witnesses: Continuity and Change (2016). He is a regular presenter at national and international conferences.

Keynote Presentation (2022) | Successful Prophecy? Jehovah’s Witnesses, Covid-19 and the War in Ukraine
Amy Wai Sum Lee
Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong

Biography

Amy Lee has a background in comparative literary studies and Buddhist studies, and has published in a range of topics including feminine autobiographies, witchcraft and witchery, experiences of solitude, teenage literature of magic, marginalized experiences by female writers, and popular film and fiction. She has also written about the importance of co-curricular activities in higher education and how they play a role in creating whole person education for young people. In her teaching, she has experimented with approaches of caring pedagogy, and used literary and cultural texts to facilitate emotional wellness on top of subject knowledge. Recent research projects include using Playback Theatre to cultivate self-understanding, self-care, and building connections among diverse groups of participants. She has been an associate professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is now Dean and Professor of School of Education and Languages at Hong Kong Metropolitan University.

Featured Presentation (2022) | Building Resilience through Self-care: Art and Aesthetic Wellness
Alistair Ping
QUT Graduate School of Business, Australia

Biography

Alistair Ping is an Adjunct Professor at QUT Graduate School of Business and is also a Colin Brain Governance Fellow. He is a recognised expert in Ethics and Governance having over 25 years experience in the field. Alistair regularly presents at conferences, including the 2019 Australian Public Sector Anti-Corruption Conference and the 2016 ACERP Conference. He has also worked directly with corporations, not for profit and government agencies in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Africa – including the Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum.

Alistair is also an Australian-American Fulbright Scholar – his study considered Corporate Social Responsibility trends in the United States and the report ‘Engage’ was submitted to the Australian Senate Inquiry into Corporate Social Responsibility in Australia. Following on from this study Alistair completed a PhD at QUT in Applied Ethics which investigated ‘Why Good People Do Bad Things’ – a key result of this interdisciplinary research was the development of a causal factor model which considers behavioural and contextual cues that can lead to unethical outcomes. Insights from this research were submitted to the Victorian ‘Integrity and Oversight Committee’. Alistair is also the author of two business books on Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility; six personal development books; and numerous magazine and newspaper articles.

Spotlight Presentation

Building a Moral Culture From the Ground Up – Why Fairness, Justice and Reciprocity Are Key

Rationalist models of ethical decision making (Jones, 1991) assume that higher order conscious reasoning dominates the ethical decision-making process and that bad people do bad things due to either greed, bad character or poor values. Interventions following unethical crisis commonly follow on from this assumption and include; new deterrents; efforts to weed out the ‘bad apples’; and retraining in Values. However, research shows that people with ‘a good will’ create bad outcomes in business on a seemingly regular basis and that efforts at ethics education make little or no difference (Desplaces et al., 2007; Jewe, 2008). This paper builds on Ping’s (2017) inter-disciplinary causal factor model on ‘Why Good People Do Bad Things’ which indicated that individual perceptions of justice regarding the subjective assessment of unfolding reality have a cumulative effect on the behaviour of individuals. When subjects perceived reality to be unfair or unjust they were more inclined to use moral neutralisations to justify acts that would objectively be considered to be in violation of their aspirational moral values. This perception and the invoked justifications then blinded them to the moral aspect of the issue at hand and allowed them to create unethical outcomes that they perceived to be just. Moral Intention Theory proposes that the key to creating a moral culture is to teach people how to set moral intention based on fairness, justice and reciprocity - and then to protect it from the flawed justifications that neutralise the very morals that good people aspire to live by.

https://submit.iafor.org/submission/submission62281/

Frank S. Ravitch
Michigan State University College of Law, USA

Biography

Frank S. Ravitch is Professor of Law and Walter H. Stowers Chair in Law in Religion at the Michigan State University College of Law. He also directs the MSU College of Law, Kyoto Japan Program. He is the author of Freedom’s Edge: Religious Freedom, Sexual Freedom, and the Future of America (Cambridge University Press, 2016) (Nominated for a Prose Award); Marketing Creation: The Law and Intelligent Design (Cambridge University Press 2012), Masters of Illusion: The Supreme Court and the Religion Clauses (NYU Press 2007); Law and Religion: Cases, Materials, and Readings (West 2004)(2nd Ed. 2008) (3rd Ed. 2015 with Larry Cata Backer), School Prayer and Discrimination: The Civil Rights of Religious Minorities and Dissenters (Northeastern University Press, 1999 & paperback edition 2001). He is co-author, with the late Boris Bittker and with Scott Idleman, of the first comprehensive treatise on Law and Religion in more than one hundred years, Religion and the State in American Law (Cambridge University Press 2015) (this project was supported by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment). He is also co-author of, Employment Discrimination Law (Prentice Hall, 2005) (with Pamela Sumners and Janis McDonald).

Professor Ravitch's articles, which have appeared in a number of highly regarded journals, have primarily focused on law and religion in the US and Japan, but he has also written about civil rights law and disability discrimination. He has authored a number of amicus briefs to the US Supreme Court and has given numerous academic presentations nationally and internationally. In 2001, he was named a Fulbright scholar and served on the law faculty at Doshisha University (Japan). He has also made dozens of public presentations explaining the law before school groups, community groups, and service clubs and has served as an expert commentator for print and broadcast media.

Professor Ravitch’s current projects include a book on the Japanese Legal System (co-authored with Colin Jones), a chapter on law and religious tradition, and a project focusing on Law, Religion, and Authoritarianism. He speaks English and basic conversational Japanese and Hebrew.

Keynote Presentation (2022) | Religion and COVID 19 in the U.S.: The Good, the Bad, and the Shocking

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2020) | Religious Complicity and LGBTQ Rights
Keynote Presentation (2019) | The Religious and Ethical Void of Trumpism & the Oddity of Trump Support Among Some Evangelical Christians
Keynote Presentation (2018) | Law, Religion and Authoritarianism: From State Shinto to Religio-Trumpism
Featured Presentation (2017) | Freedom’s Edge: Balancing Religious Freedom and Equal Access to Facilities and Services for Transexuals
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | Free Speech and Hate Speech – History, Story, Narrative
Roswiyani Roswiyani
Tarumanagara University, Indonesia

Biography

Roswiyani Roswiyani is a Psychologist at the Tarumanagara University Counseling Service. She is also a Lecturer of Clinical Psychology at the Tarumanagara University, Indonesia. She has a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Indonesia, Indonesia and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

She has a well-rounded background in clinical practice and refined talents in teaching and supervising. Her research interests focus on art therapy, depression, well-being, and resiliency among older adults. She also has extensive experience with psychological counseling, psychotherapy, and psychological assessment; and she has been a reviewer for national and international journals.

Featured Presentation (2022) | Perceived Stress of Students During Online Learning
Monty P. Satiadarma
Tarumanagara University, Indonesia

Biography

Dr Satiadarma is a clinical psychologist who has taught psychology at Tarumanagara University since 1994. He was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Tarumanagara, as well as the Dean of Psychology, Vice Rector and Rector of the university. He graduated with a degree in Psychology from the University of Indonesia, Art Therapy from Emporia State, Kansas, Family Counselling from Notre Dame de Namur, California, and Clinical Hypnotherapy from Irvine, California. He has published a number of books and has a particular interest in educational psychology and music & art therapy – methods with which he treated survivors of the Indonesian tsunami on behalf of the International Red Cross and the United Nations. He is a board member and area chair of the International Council of Psychology, and a founder and board member of the Asian Psychology Association.

Featured Presentation (2022) | Perceived Stress of Students During Online Learning

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2019) | “The Value of Internationalising Psychology” or “The Value of Indigenous Psychologies”
Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | Psychological Literacy
IAAB Presentation (2017) | Life Changes, Identity Loss and Psychological Problems
Spotlight Presentation (2016) | Fairness and Happiness
Spotlight Presentation (2015) | The Lucifer Effect in Indonesian Educational Settings
Featured Presentation (2014)
Featured Presentation (2013)
Featured Presentation (2012)
Brian Victoria
Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, UK

Biography

Brian Victoria is a native of Omaha, Nebraska and a 1961 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. He holds a MA in Buddhist Studies from Sōtō Zen sect-affiliated Komazawa University in Tokyo, and a PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University.

In addition to a second, enlarged edition of Zen At War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Brian's major writings include Zen War Stories (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); an autobiographical work in Japanese entitled Gaijin de ari, Zen bozu de ari (As a Foreigner, As a Zen Priest), published by San-ichi Shobo in 1971; Zen Master Dōgen, coauthored with Prof. Yokoi Yūhō of Aichi-gakuin University (Weatherhill, 1976); and a translation of The Zen Life by Sato Koji (Weatherhill, 1972). In addition, Brian has published numerous journal articles, focusing on the relationship of not only Buddhism but religion in general, to violence and warfare.

From 2005 to 2013 Brian was a Professor of Japanese Studies and director of the AEA “Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions Program” at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, OH, USA. From 2013 to 2015 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan. His latest book, Zen Terror: The Death of Democracy in Prewar Japan was published by Rowman & Littlefield in February 2020. Brian is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and a fully ordained Buddhist priest in the Sōtō Zen sect.

Keynote Presentation (2022) | The Rehabilitation of a Buddhist Heretic

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2021) | Zen Terror: Killing Compassionately?
Featured Presentation (2019) | Is Religious Tolerance Always Desirable: The Case of Shinto and Buddhism
Featured Presentation (2018) | Shinto: Window on Universal Religion
Featured Presentation (2017) | Military Conscription, Slavery and the Modern State
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | Battles of Ideas: Identity and Alienation
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