Upcoming events
Compassion Beyond Borders: Spirituality, Migration and Moral Courage in Public Life
Speaker: Scott Warren, geographer and humanitarian aid volunteer
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
3-4:30 p.m. MST
Drawing on his experience as a humanitarian aid volunteer, educator and defendant in a landmark religious freedom case, Warren reflects on what it means to act with compassion when moral conviction collides with state power. Warren will explore how spirituality—beyond formal religious affiliation—can compel acts of care for migrants in the borderlands and beyond, and how humanitarian acts can be criminalized, contested and defended in federal court. This lecture invites the community to consider migration, law and humanitarian aid through the lens of moral courage and to grapple with what our deepest values demand in moments of human suffering and political conflict.
Held in partnership with the Civil Rights, Migration and Workplace Law Initiative at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law; Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies; School of Transborder Studies; School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning; Committee for Strategic Charter Initiatives in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change; and No More Deaths at ASU.
Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Spirituality and Borders
Speaker: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
4:30-5:45 p.m. MST
Everyone has a border story, but for American borders, there is more going on than meets the eye. At times, the United States ferociously enforces its borders, while at other times it circumvents or ignores them. U.S. borders are present and absent, avowed and deferred, enforced and erased, here and there and nowhere. They are solid and specific but also often hard to locate. U.S. borders are sometimes located far from the line one might draw on a map, either projected far around the globe or brought deep inside the country. Drawing on Professor Hurd’s new book “Heaven Has a Wall,” this lecture explores the paradoxes of creation, enforcement, suspension and refusal of our American border religion.
Course information
Spirituality in America
Instructor: Terry Shoemaker
Examine the emergence of spirituality in North America:
- What is spirituality?
- Is spirituality a new phenomenon?
- Why is spritiaulity appealing now?
- What is "spiritual but not religious?"
The Spiritual Quest
Instructor: Tracy Fessenden
General Studies: HU, C
Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious”— the fastest-growing religious demographic in the nation today, and one of the largest—stand in long, rich traditions of like-minded seekers throughout the world. This course considers the literature and practices of spiritual seeking over centuries, from ancient mystery religions to movements for justice and flourishing in the present.
Spirituality in America class: immersive, field observation trip to experience the spiritual offerings of Sedona, Arizona - Spring 2023
Support the initiative
Spirituality is often seen as a deeply personal matter, and as a result, it has been overlooked as a resource when thinking through our world's most pressing challenges. Your support for this fund helps to create transformative and innovative ways to share knowledge related to spirituality and its place in public life among our communities.
Previous events
Mysticism and Philosophy (and Possibly Music)
Speaker: Simon Critchley
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Why mysticism? It has been called “experience in its most intense form,” and in his new book the philosopher Simon Critchley poses a simple question to the reader: Wouldn’t you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn’t you like to be lifted up and out of yourself into a sheer feeling of aliveness, both your life and those of the creatures that surround you? If so, it might be well worthwhile trying to learn what is meant by mysticism and how it can shift, elevate, and deepen the sense of our lives.
The Missing Middle: Cosmopolitics of Spirituality in Arizona
Speaker: Susannah Crockford
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
An intriguing exploration of spirituality in Arizona, based on 13 years of in-depth research. Susannah Crockford challenged common ideas about spirituality—often seen as either apolitical or left-leaning—by exploring how spiritual beliefs and political views are deeply connected. Discover how different perspectives shape people's understanding of the world and their place in it.
Work, Pray, Code: Silicon Valley Spirituality
Speaker: Carolyn Chen, University of California, Berkeley
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Silicon Valley Tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that replace traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity. But, are our religious traditions, communities and public sphere paying the price? Chen discusses her more than five years of in-depth engagement with Silicon Valley and her exploration of spirituality among the best and brightest of the tech world.
Is There God After Prince? Icons in an Age of Last Things
Speaker: Peter Coviello, University of Chicago
Thursday, April 4, 2024
What can it mean to love the things we love (books, records, people) in a time of disaster, an era of ends? How do our icons speak to us—what news can they deliver—during planet-sized calamity? Taking a cue from the death of Prince, the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, this lecture considers the icon as a herald of possibilities lying just beyond the secular perimeter of the knowable and known. All manner of things find us through our icons. This talk wonders over the fate of our devotion to them in this time of crisis and collapse—an age of Last Things.
Conspirituality in the Time of Plague: Dispatches from the Front
Speaker: Sam Kestenbaum, journalist covering religion in America
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Scores of churches closed during COVID-19, but contrary to predictions that religion would diminish, the pandemic led to a peculiar efflorescence of religious life. A faith-healing TikToker gained a fandom by performing miracles on screen; a religion-and-politics roadshow toured the country, bringing doomsday prophets, January 6 rioters and anti-vaxxers together in harmony; and at New Age fairs and conventions, the yoga and wellness crowd absorbed QAnon gospel while shopping for sage and crystals. Drawing from reporting done for outlets like The New York Times and the Washington Post, this talk offers a picture of a multi-faceted spiritual convergence born in the time of plague.
*Conspirituality is the merger of conspiracy theories with religion or spiritual belief.