Professionally, Bob Chodos works as a writer, editor and translator. He has also been an active member of Temple Shalom, Waterloo Region’s Reform Jewish congregation, for more than thirty years, and has participated in a number of interfaith organizations and dialogue groups.
From 1987 to 1997 he was the editor of the award-winning Canadian Jesuit magazine Compass, and subsequently co-authored a biography of the prominent Canadian Jesuit Bill Ryan. He also was editor of the Canadian Forum, a member of the editorial cooperative that published the alternative Canadian newsmagazine Last Post in the 1970s, and an editorial board member of the groundbreaking multifaith publications Vox Feminarum and Voices Across Boundaries. Since 2003 he has been managing editor of Inroads: The Canadian Journal of Opinion. His books have covered topics such as the Canadian Pacific Railway, Canadian influence in the West Indies, relations between Quebec and the United States, and globalization. He has also edited numerous books written by other people, most recently Shiv Talwar’s The Common Ground, Vol. 1.
At Temple Shalom he has been principal of the religious school, congregation president, chair of the ritual committee and a lay service leader, and as a member of Interfaith Grand River he helped produce a book to mark the organization’s tenth anniversary (2011) and a special issue of the theological journal Consensus, and participated in the organization’s successful effort to end the distribution of Gideon Bibles in public schools. He has reviewed a manuscript for the Dalai Lama, lit Chanukah candles in a mosque, co-led a bar mitzvah service with a Unitarian minister, and said the mourner’s kaddish in front of an altar to the Goddess Brighid.
Bob Chodos lives in New Hamburg, Ontario.