Jason McLeod Monson (Ph.D., University of Glasgow; M.P.A., Romney Institute for Public Management; and B.A., Brigham Young University) is most interested in topics related to ethics and religion, particularly issues of social and economic justice and inter-religious (and non-religious) dialogue, and the convergence of academic and practiced approaches to these issues. His Ph.D. dissertation Hunger is the Worst Disease: Conceptions of Poverty and Poverty Relief in Buddhist Social and Economic Ethics deals with the conceptions of poverty found in the traditional Pāli Canon and popular Mahāyāna sūtras. It outlines the moral injunctions in these passages to alleviate poverty and compares these notions to contemporary approaches to poverty relief, such as the Capabilities Approach advanced by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. He has also conducted research on microcredit and literacy approaches to poverty relief, conducting research on the Grameen Bank in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and interning with Katalysis Partnership, a network of microcredit organizations throughout Central America. Jason currently works at Kamehameha Schools, supporting the operations of Hawaiian Culture-based Community Education programs. |