Brian Cox 
Faith–Based Diplomacy [EPUB ebook] 
The Work of the Prophets

The Reverend Canon Brian Cox
Canon Brian Cox is an ordained Episcopal priest and a trained professional in conflict resolution who serves as a pastor, as a senior official of a Washington DC–based nongovernmental organization, and as a director of an academic program devoted to faith-based diplomacy.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois. He received his BS in Geological Sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, and his Master of Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a Master of Dispute Resolution degree from Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California.
He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1975. He has served congregations in Southern California and Northern Virginia. At the present time, he serves as rector of Christ the King Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, California. He has been a leader in the work of faith-based reconciliation on a local, regional, and national context in the Episcopal Church.
His involvement with international affairs began in 1984 when he spent several months in South Africa under the auspices of Africa Enterprise and the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria. In 1985, he founded and became the first US Director of Sharing of Ministries Abroad (SOMA), which was involved in conducting spiritual renewal conferences for leaders of the Anglican Communion in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. In 1990, he founded the European Reconciliation Fellowship, which focused on the work of faith-based reconciliation with political and religious leaders in East Central Europe—particularly the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. It was in East Central Europe that he began to develop the strategic paradigm of faith-based reconciliation, which is defined by eight core values and by a deliberative process of constructive joint problem-solving.
In 1996, he founded the Reconciliation Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and developed the faith-based reconciliation process as a religious framework for peacemaking in intractable identity-based conflicts. As such, he sought to apply the principles and skills of faith-based reconciliation to his own community, which included initiatives concerned with racial reconciliation, Jewish/Christian reconciliation, and civic reconciliation.
In 1999, he joined a newly formed nongovernmental organization called the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy and later became ICRD’s senior vice president. The mission of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy is to address problems of communal identity that exceed the grasp of traditional diplomacy (such as ethnic conflict, tribal warfare, and religious hostilities) by effectively combining religious concerns with the practice of international politics. As such, it is committed to faith-based diplomacy. He has served as ICRD’s project leader for Kashmir and the Middle East. In Kashmir, he worked on both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the Line of Control. His groundbreaking work created a public conversation in Kashmir about reconciliation as part of its future, created movement in the stalemate between Kashmiri Muslims and Hindu Pandits, and led to an important bridgebuilding meeting between top Pakistani Kashmiri Muslim leaders and Indian Pandit (Panum Kashmir) leaders in Nepal in 2005. In the Middle East, he has been or is currently involved with four project tracks: working with Syrian opposition leaders toward national healing and the creation of a pluralistic community in the region consisting of Syriac Christians, Kurds, and Arab Bedouins; empowering young Palestinian Christian and Muslim leaders in the West Bank to create a forward-looking people movement based on healing, transformation, and nonviolence; engaging with Israeli leaders in creating a Jerusalem-based entity that offers a faith-based alternative to enable enemies to sit together under a different architecture to solve their problems with each other; and building a bridge with Muslim B