Ford Rowan is the Director of Human Rights Ministries for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada. HRM is a shared ministry of Disciples Home Missions and the Disciples Center for Public Witness. Ford has also been authorized by Disciples Justice Action Network to speak about human rights issues on behalf of its members and leadership team.
In his first career as a journalist, Ford was a national
security correspondent for NBC News who covered the war in Lebanon in 1978, the
Watergate trials, and the Three Mile Island nuclear incident. He was also a frequent panelist on Meet
the Press. Later, in the
mid-1980s, he was the host of the weekly PBS program, International Edition.
In his second career as an attorney and consultant his
clients included 7 of the largest 20 companies on the Forbes 500. He advised on
alleged financial fraud, food safety controversies (including mad cow disease),
adverse effects of pharmaceuticals, environmental crimes, international trade
disputes, SUV rollovers, silicone breast implant litigation, the aftermath of
the Valdez oil spill, the 9/11 air disasters and five explosions at chemical
plants and refineries. He consulted
in eleven countries, including China, Turkey, Venezuela, France and Tanzania.
Now he is a volunteer member of the International Dialogue
Initiative, an effort of Muslims, Jews and Christians who have worked for four
years to promote peace in the Middle East. He has co-chaired the Committee of
Seventy of the Washington National Cathedral. He chairs the National Center for Critical Incident
Analysis, which assisted the National Governors Association and the US
Department of Health and Human Services before and during the pandemic.
Rowan has taught conflict resolution and negotiation for ten years at George
Washington University where he is Professorial Lecturer in Organizational
Sciences. He
is a graduate of Tulane University and earned his law degree at
Georgetown. He is a believer in life-long education and has
studied on a part-time basis for three decades. He has graduate degrees from Johns
Hopkins (behavioral science), American University (political science), Syracuse
University (interdisciplinary social science) and a doctorate in public
administration from the University of Southern California. In recent
years he has completed master's programs at St. John's College (the "great
books" program) and at the Ecumenical Institute at St. Mary's Seminary,
Baltimore (theology).
Since 1999 he has volunteered in the ecumenical Kairos Prison Ministry,
and, based on his first-hand experiences of prison life, has developed both a
heart for incarcerated persons and a passion for criminal justice reform. He also has a passion for justice in other areas of human rights, including abolishing torture, preventing gun violence, ending human trafficking and defending the rights of indigenous peoples.
Rowan is on the board of St. John’s College, the
Catholic Community Foundation of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Berman
Institute of Bioethics of the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of four books
and recently contributed a chapter on the ethics of health crises in Deception, edited by Brooke Harrington and published by
Stanford University Press in 2009.
He and his wife, Patricia, an attorney who retired from the
U.S. Justice Department, live in Annapolis, Maryland. They have three grown children and three grandchildren.
