Berkley Center

Senior Fellow Jocelyne Cesari joined an episode of the Fighting Terror podcast, sponsored by the Countering Extremism Project, to discuss the concept of blasphemy in Islamic theology, its historical roots, and how some Islamist extremist groups use blasphemy to further their agendas and mobilize followers, as well as the implications for societal cohesion.

Senior Research Fellow Julia Watts Belser was featured in Tablet magazine to discuss her new book Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023) and how she uses Jewish texts to contextualize and craft new conversations on disability.

Writing a Daily Comment for the New Yorker, Senior Fellow Paul Elie discusses the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Dead Man Walking based on Sister Helen Prejean's 1993 book of the same name. The company also performed excerpts at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison about 30 miles north of New York City, accompanied by a chorus of incarcerated men.

As a product of the Berkley Center's Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power project, this volume edited by Senior Research Fellow Peter Mandaville explores how states across multiple regions and a diverse range of faith traditions incorporate religion as an aspect of their foreign policy, with case studies that illuminate various cross-national patterns as well as continuities and discontinuities.