UUA President Peter Morales and the General Assembly Planning Committee are delighted to announce that Beacon Press author Eboo Patel has been named the 2013 Ware Lecturer for the UUA General Assembly in Louisville.

Dr. Patel is founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit building the interfaith youth movement. He was appointed by President Obama to the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and serves on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. Patel writes "The Faith Divide" blog for The Washington Post and has also written for the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, The Chicago Tribune, and other prominent journals. He has been featured on a range of media, including CNN Sunday Morning, NPR's Morning Edition, the PBS documentary Three Faiths, One God, The New Republic, American Public Media, the BBC, and CNN. Patel is a sought-after speaker whose addresses include the keynote speech at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum with President Jimmy Carter. He is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, which was the 2011-2012 UUA Common Read and 2010 winner of the prestigious Louisville Grawemeyer award in religion, and Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America.

An Ashoka Fellow, Patel was named by Islamica Magazine as one of ten young Muslim visionaries shaping Islam in America, was chosen by Harvard's Kennedy School Review as one of five future policy leaders to watch, and was selected to join the Young Global Leaders network of the World Economic Forum. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.