Faith in Context: Power, Peace, and Conflict

The Religion and Public Life (RPL) program’s 2025–26 offerings convened interdisciplinary conversations on the ways religion shapes social, political, and economic life.

Scripture, Secularism, and Statecraft featured three scholars who explored how religion’s authority and influence are manifested in contemporary political systems. The series opened with a lecture by Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who examined the U.S. Supreme Court’s evolving approach to church–state relations and its effect on how religions are protected or constrained in public life. He argued that the Court has shifted from separationist secularism toward “neo-preferentialism,” a judicial philosophy that privileges majoritarian religion—particularly Christianity in the United States.

Professor Jocelyne Cesari traced the shift from societies in which religion structured collective life to modern national orders that redefine religion as a more private matter. She asserted that the modern nation, even in supposedly secular societies, takes on many of religion’s moral and symbolic functions, promising salvation, demanding sacrifice, and sustaining forms of collective solidarity.  

The final lecture was delivered by Professor Alden Young, who spoke about how competing visions of Islamic authority, political power, and national identity have shaped Sudan’s modern history and contributed to its devastating current war. He pointed in particular to a long-running conflict between attempts to impose an Islamic political order from above and the view that only a genuinely Muslim society can create a legitimate Islamic state.

Together, Berlinerblau, Cesari, and Young showed how religion is actively and deeply embedded in legal systems, national identity, and struggles over state power. In doing so, the lecture series exemplified RPL’s mission to explore how religion is entwined with the social, political, and economic dimensions of human experience.