Description:

Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus was a refugee.” For Professor Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the standoff makes explicit a longstanding truth: borders are religious as well as political objects.

Join us for a Buffett Book Talk with Hurd on her forthcoming Heaven Has a Wall (University of Chicago Press, June 2025), which argues that Americans share a bipartisan border religion, complete with an array of beliefs and practices that include a reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration and an eschatological foreign policy. Through an analysis of the many ways the United States creates, enforces and ignores borders at home and abroad, Hurd offers a bold new perspective on the ties that bind American religion, politics and public life.

The program will feature comment from and discussion with Barbara Sostaita, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and William Calvo-Quirós, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of American Culture at the University of Michigan. A reception will follow.

Co-sponsored by the Global Religion & Politics Research Group, Middle East & North African (MENA) Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science and Religious Studies at Northwestern University.

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About the Author

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She studies the public and political careers of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the international politics of secularism and religious freedom, American borders, and US actions in and representations of the Middle East. She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, June 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including, most recently, At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group and is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program.

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated at this time.