Belief & Technology in an Evolving Age

As AI continues to take a front seat in American daily life, questions surrounding its morality remain: Should AI moral codes evolve from just one faith tradition or many? How are leading tech companies navigating not just new moral possibilities but also restraints when tools like Claude and ChatGPT answer spiritual questions? Will technology change the way religion is practiced?    This episode features a recorded conversation from The Aspen Institute’s Religious Pluralism at 250 conference in September 2026. David DeSteno, Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, moderates a panel with Meghan Sullivan, Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy, at the University of Notre Dame, and Michael Sacasas, Executive Director of Christian Study Center of Gainesville.

What can happen when the government partners with faith-based groups to do social good? In this conversation, Jedd Medefind and Melissa Rogers, who led faith-based partnership efforts under Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden, trace the history of the White House faith-based office and how each president’s personality and experience shaped it. They discuss constitutional guardrails, the value of religious literacy in government, and why faith-based organizations offer something bureaucracies cannot: motivation, community, and spiritual meaning. This podcast was recorded during the first convening of Aspen Religion & Society's inaugural class of Religion Fellows. The fellows' questions tackle today’s partisan divide over religion and how faith-based nonprofits should talk about their faith.

Can more faith—not less—heal our public life? For a century, scholars argued that shrinking religion's public role would make politics calmer and more rational. In the last few decades, American religious participation has fallen faster than at almost any point in the nation's history, but our politics has only grown more polarized. What happened? In this episode, we sit down with Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid, an evangelical and a Muslim, friends and collaborators across deep difference, to discuss their new book, which makes the case for religion as a constructive force in democracy. Find their book Can Religion Save Democracy? here.

In this episode, two eminent philanthropy leaders, Daniel Stid of the American Enterprise Institute and David Nassar of the John Templeton Foundation, discuss how charitable giving in America has transformed over the past three decades. Their wide-ranging and insightful conversation traces philanthropy's turn toward "outcomes-oriented" giving, the growing influence of effective altruism, and how funders interact with religion and religious communities. The discussion also tackles a deeper tension: as funders seek measurable impact, are they inadvertently narrowing the diversity of ideas they can pursue?  Daniel and David explore the questions of philanthropic pluralism, the declining share of everyday Americans who give to charity, and why religious organizations, sometimes overlooked by secular funders may hold an underappreciated key to civic renewal.   What “The Wire” Has to Teach Us about Nonprofit Performance Measurement Aspen Institute Generosity Commission Report

For decades, Americans have debated what kind of relationship there should be, if any, between religious institutions and public schools. Can schools honor the diverse religious beliefs of a student body without prioritizing one tradition? If religious institutions can use their resources to bolster public schools, should they? In today's conversation, we're joined by Bryant Jensen of Brigham Young University and Irvin Scott of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They've coauthored a report, which argues that partnerships with faith communities can enrich student learning opportunities, especially for those in disadvantaged communities. They advocate for a "third way” that avoids the two extremes of endorsing religion in schools, on one end, or entirely excluding it from the work of schools, on the other. In this episode, we'll delve into what this "third way" relationship between faith institutions and public schools could look like, and what benefits it could bring to students, educators, and faith leaders.   Read the report here: https://wheatley.byu.edu/0000019c-fd37-d3b9-a1dc-ffffc6470000/faith-in-educational-renewal-religion-as-a-resource-to-transform-learning-opportunities

In this episode of the Faith Angle podcast, Religion & Society Director Josh Good sits down with three contributors to the new book Modeling Religious Pluralism: Cultivating Religious Equity in Today's World (Oxford University Press)--Simran Jeet Singh, Assistant Professor of Interreligious Histories at Union Theological Seminary, Diane L. Moore, Co-Director of Religion and Public Life at UTS, and Asma Uddin, Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law. Together they explore why religion so often gets overlooked in public life, and what it means to move beyond mere "tolerance" and toward genuine pluralism. The panel unpacks religious literacy as a framework for understanding faith's internal diversity, its constant evolution, and its deep entanglement with politics, law, and culture.

To comply with a flurry of Executive Orders issued in January, many colleges throughout the country have been renaming, restructuring, or altogether eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming. These DEI initiatives have been divisive for years. Their proponents see them as essential to ensuring fair treatment for minority students and rooting out prejudice in the academy. Their detractors see them as stifling free speech and academic debate. Emma Green, journalist at the New Yorker, and Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, discuss the genesis of DEI, where it went wrong, and what might replace it in our search to create a flourishing multicultural society.   Links:   What Comes After D.E.I.? by Emma Green   Harvard, Public Trust, and a Warning for the Nonprofit Sector by Eboo Patel

Journalist Jon Rauch’s smart new book from Yale University Press, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, offers three provocative and insightful essays. Though an outsider to Christianity—as he tells his long-time friend Pete Wehner of the Trinity Forum, Jon is a “gay Jewish atheist born in 1960”—Jon’s new treatise follows a dozen books, and hundreds of articles, covering topics from free inquiry to gay marriage, political realism to happiness, and the constitution of knowledge to matters of American political economy.  The book explores the history and implications of three modes of the Christian faith in America. The first Jon terms Thin Christianity, embodied by mainline Protestantism. The second is Sharp Christianity—really MAGA white evangelicalism, what Jon calls a “fear-based” church. But the third chapter, Jon makes a case for Thick Christianity, exemplified by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and other creative exilic religious minorities who have made peace with the fact of pluralism and the democratic opportunity of compromise and negotiation—the principles James Madison also affirmed. He calls this book a sort of atonement for his past arguments that American society, and its political system, would be better without the influence of religions convictions. What changed for Jon? Partly it was his realizing that religion is a load-bearing wall, in any democracy. But partly it was an emergent friendship with Pete Wehner and with other thinking believers who have enlarged Jon’s vision.   Guests Jonathan Rauch Peter Wehner   Additional Resources “Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy,” by Jonathan Rauch “Let It Be: Three Cheers for Apatheism” by Jonathan Rauch "Evangelicals Made a Bad Trade" by Peter Wehner    

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Brad Fulton, professor of Nonprofit Management and Social Policy at the O’Neill School of Public Affairs at Indiana University, alongside Amber Hacker, Chief of External Affairs at Interfaith America. Our guests discuss the role of religious giving in philanthropy and the surprising trends that emerge from the underlying data. Out of the $557 billion dollars given annually in the United States to charities, twenty percent of the funds come from foundations. Does religious commitment influence that giving? Do we know from available data that generosity makes a person healthier or happier? Does the generation a person’s born into—say, a Boomer vs. a Millennial—impact giving patterns? They also discuss new networking tools as it relates to philanthropic giving.    Guests Dr. Brad Fulton Amber Hacker   Additional Resources “Religious Organizations Crosscutting the Nonprofit Sector,” by Brad R. Fulton “Faith-Based Public Foundations: Identifying the Field and Assessing its Impact,” by Allison Ralph and Brad R. Fulton “Money, Meet Meaning,” by Amber Hacker and Tom Levinson

In this episode, we are joined by Jaweed Kaleem of The Los Angeles Times alongside Knox Thames, author of the new book Ending Persecution: Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom. Knox reflects on his long career advancing the cause of religious liberty around the world, including in the some of the world's most repressive contexts. Our guests assess the current state of religious freedom across different contexts, from India to Israel and Gaza, and reflect on how the eroding of religious freedom often serves as a "canary in the coal mine" for the loss of other fundamental human rights.    Guests Knox Thames  Jaweed Kaleem   Additional Resources  Ending Persecution: Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom, by Knox Thames "France Struggles to Confront One of Its Biggest Taboos: Race," by Jaweed Kaleem "Swastikas, bullhorns, guns: Antisemitic Incidents in U.S. Hit 43-Year High," by Jaweed Kaleem