Религиозные лидеры обсуждают поиск смысла и принадлежности в эпоху упадка традиционных ценностей

From time to time, The Conversation features interesting work our editors are involved in. Kalpana Jain, senior religion/ethics editor and director of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative at The Conversation, spent part of 2026 as a visiting researcher at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia – Malaysia’s national university. The piece below is excerpted from Jain’s Substack about one of her first stops after returning home, a Faith Angle gathering in Park City, Utah. Alongside experiencing the uniqueness and piety of Islam in Malaysia during the year, I had visited sacred spaces associated with a wide range of traditions – Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Christian – across the region. As I returned to my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, parts of me seemed to remain behind. Like many immigrants who live between worlds, I found myself asking: Where do I belong? That question was still with me when I arrived at the St. Regis Deer Valley in Utah for a gathering of journalists and scholars organized by Josh Good through the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program. The conference set out to explore how religious communities and convictions shape politics and public life in America. Yet beneath the discussions of religious disaffiliation, religious identity and the coming midterms lay a deeper concern: the search for meaning and belonging when many religious sources of moral orientation are declining. Religion is always in the room Richard Parker, who teaches at Harvard Kennedy School, set the intellectual framework for the discussion. He argued that religion serves a deep human need by helping people make sense of themselves and the world around them. Drawing on sociologist Peter Berger, he said that human beings create meaning in their world – the “nomos” – through language to create relationships; they also then create meaning through stories and shared obligations. This framework creates the foundation of how we should live. Yet human beings also confront what Berger called the “cosmos,” the physical world that exists outside us. Religion, Parker suggested, serves as a bridge between the nomos and the cosmos, connecting everyday life to deeper, existential questions. Through prayer and rituals, religion helps people find meaning in the face of uncertainty. It “stills our fear of being alive” and “stills our fear of being alone,” he noted. Drawing on philosopher Jürgen Habermas, he also added that religion remains important even in secular societies because it provides sources of moral purpose and hope. Parker’s argument resonated with me. The Hindu concept of dharma, for example, is sometimes loosely translated as religion, but it is more than that. Dharma is a moral order that encompasses ethical living and one’s obligations to family, society, nature and, ultimately, the world beyond oneself. In that sense, it echoes what Berger described as the relationship between the nomos and the cosmos. Read the rest of Kalpana’s piece here. More about Kalpana: A 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Jain pursued many social justice issues as a journalist at The Times of India. Her reporting in India led to many policy changes in the public health sector and won several awards. In 2019 she received a Pulitzer grant to pursue issues around rising Hindu nationalism in India. Jain has also worked as an editor, writer and researcher at Harvard University. Her case study on modern-day slavery is part of a Harvard course, and her book on the AIDS epidemic in India, “Positive Lives,” published by Penguin, is taught at many Indian universities. She holds a master’s in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and a master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School.