Joan Chittister currently serves as co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a partner organization of the UN, facilitating a worldwide network of women peace builders, particularly in Israel and Palestine. She was an advisor for the groundbreaking report, A Woman’s Nation, led by Maria Shriver (2009) and was a member of the TED prize-sponsored Council of Sages, an interfaith group that developed a Charter for Compassion (2009) being promulgated worldwide with all faith organizations.

She was a keynote speaker at the Asia-Pacific Breakthrough: Women, Faith and Development Summit to End Global Poverty as well as the Parliament of World Religions in Melbourne, Australia last December. She wrote the book Beyond Beijing: the next step for women, after attending the Fourth UN Conference of Women in Beijing (1995) and the book: Heart of Flesh: a feminist spirituality for men and women.

Sister Joan appeared with the Dali Lama at both the First Emory (University) Summit of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuildingand at the conference Seeds of Compassion. She was the coordinator of The Rising Great Compassion, an interfaith retreat for monastic women at Dharma Drum Mountain Center in Taiwan.

Joan Chittister has written more than 40 books and received numerous awards for her work on behalf of peace andwomen in church and in society.
       
A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Pennsylvania, she served as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization of the leaders/superiors of the over 67,000 Catholic religious women in the US, president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses, and was prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie for 12 years. Sister Joan received her doctorate from Penn State University in speech communications theory.