About Us

LAPIDO MEANS TO SPEAK UP in the Acholi dialect of Northern Uganda.  Religiously literate media work helped to end a war there between 2003-5.  We were founded by journalists to advocate for greater awareness of the faith dimension in policy, governance, and conflict in the UK and abroad.

Many news stories do not make sense - whether to journalists or policy makers who feed off what they report - without understanding religion. Lapido Media is an internationally networked, British-based philanthro-media charity, founded in 2004, that seeks to increase understanding among journalists and opinion formers of the way religion shapes world affairs. 

It’s called religious literacy.  We run media briefings, publish research and essays and work with journalists around the world.  Our stringers practise on our website the kind of religiously literate journalism we wish to see, going deeper to the sources of social motivations, and providing a resource for other journalists.  And we work with civil society groups on campaigns and media strategy to improve the flow and quality of stories with a religion dimension. 

 

Who we are

 
Frances Hawley, CEO

Fran Hawley

As a multimedia focused writer, Frances has experience of religious freedom work overseas, having worked with human rights NGO Christian Solidarity Worldwide.  There she interviewed numerous victims of human rights abuses, ran the comms team, managed public campaigns and worked with delegations to the British and EU parliaments to bring to light religious freedom violations.  These activities were on behalf of a variety of ‘believers’ across over 20 countries including Christians, atheists and human rights lawyers working on religious persecution cases.  Prior to this, she worked in the Civil Service, studied at SOAS and was President of SOAS Student Union in the year of London's 7/7 attacks.  She currently chairs the not-for-profit group at the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

 

Jenny TaylorDr Jenny Taylor is Founder and Executive Director.
A journalist and author she trained with Yorkshire Post Newspapers and became the first race relations reporter in the Westminster Press Group. She has reported from areas of conflict and poverty in Asia and Africa, successfully campaigning to 'break the silence' about the war in Northern Uganda.  She has specialized in Islam and secularization, co-authoring Faith and Power (1998 and 2005) with Professor Lamin Sanneh of Yale, and Lesslie Newbigin.  Her doctorate After Secularism was awarded by SOAS at London University in 2001 and studies the impact of Islam on secularization.  She speaks and writes on the connection between faith and culture, on which she has addressed parliamentary, Commonwealth and media gatherings around the world.  In 2015 she gave the Catherwood Lecture in Belfast for the peace-making group ECONI, was one of five journalists to give evidence to the Commission on Religion and Belief in Public Life in Britain, chaired by Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, and is a member of the judging panel for the Jerusalem Trust Awards.

 

Contributing Editors

Charles Cameron was mentored by Fr Trevor Huddleston CR, and studied theology at Oxford. Since then he has spent decades exploring comparative religion, cultural anthropology and depth psychology, done some teaching, then put in a couple of years as Senior Analyst in a small Washington DC think tank, and now serves as managing editor of the strategy blog Zenpundit.com. He also designs games based on Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, and writes poetry and (occasional) science fiction. He’s a vagabond monk at heart.

 

Jayson Casper

Jayson Casper is a writer and researcher with Arab West Report based in Cairo. He is also the editor of Orient and Occident, a magazine of the Anglican Diocese of Egypt, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. He serves as local correspondent for the US magazine Christianity Today and blogs regularly at A Sense of Belonging. Jayson has worked previously in Mauritania, Jordan, and Tunisia, and holds an MA in Islamic Studies from Columbia International University. Fond of all things Arabic, Jayson enjoys crossing boundaries to promote understanding, bringing the ‘other’ closer to home.

 

Dr. Irfan Al AlawiDr. Irfan Al Alawi is an expert in Middle East affairs and Tasawwuf (Islamic spirituality), and studied at Al-Azhar University, Cairo as well as under the famous Imam Sayyid Habib ahmad Mashhur al Haddad Al Alawi.  He is International Director at the Centre for Islamic Pluralism and a Visiting Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars (Washington).  He has written for the Independent, The Guardian, The Times, as well as for The Weekly Standard, The Spectator, and many Islamic journals. He has translated many works into Arabic, English, Swahili and Urdu.

 

Dominik Lemanski is a national newspaper journalist with over ten years experience working for the Daily Star Sunday and News Of the World both in the UK and abroad. During this time he has developed a keen interest in covering religious affairs with particular emphasis on Islamic extremism in London. He has also covered the refugee crisis in Calais and the Canary Islands and the 2011 famine in East Africa.  He can be found at @dominiklemanski

  

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Other Faiths at Melbourne School of Theology.

 

 

 

International Patron

Most Revd Benjamin Kwashi

 

Patrons

Dr Philip Lewis

Tom Holland

Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui

 

Trustees

  • Nick Isbister, PhD (Chairman)
  • Sean Oliver-Dee, PhD
  • Revd Gareth Wardell
  • Professor John Wolffe
  • Michael Totterdell
  • Revd Angela Robinson
  • Richard L Berry

 


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