As part of our tenth anniversary celebrations, we’ve launched a blog series to commemorate and reflect upon the work of the LSE Faith Centre over the past decade. For the first blog in the series, the founding director, Revd Professor James Walters, tells us more about how the LSE Faith Centre and LSE Religion and Global Society began, along with some of the highlights from his ten years here, and the challenges that lie ahead.
My name is Jim Walters. I founded the LSE Faith Centre in 2014 and then our research unit, LSE Religion and Global Society, in 2019. I first arrived at LSE as chaplain in 2010 after spending three years as a parish priest in North London and, prior to that, working in politics. Currently I’m the Director of the LSE Faith Centre and a professor in practice in the LSE International Relations department.
What is the Faith Centre?
The LSE Faith Centre has a mission to build relationships and transform attitudes across religious difference in order to form leaders for a more peaceful global society. On a day-to-day basis, the centre hosts the diverse religious activities practiced by LSE staff and students, from Catholic mass to daily Muslim prayer, Hindu worship (Arti) to Jewish study of the Torah. But bringing these groups together, we run extra-curricular programmes and events to promote religious literacy across world faiths and to foster leadership skills for dialogue and conflict transformation. In a world where religious conflict appears to be increasing, we seek to equip LSE graduates with the skills to build interreligious understanding and the conditions for robust religious pluralism.
Why was the Faith Centre founded?
When the new Saw Swee Hock Student Centre was planned, the decision was taken for the first time in LSE’s history to include a purpose-built facility for religious observance. LSE is a secular university, built (unusually at the time) without a chapel. But an institution as international as LSE has always had a wide range of religious believers, and the need to recognise and cater for these groups reflects a wider “post-secular” turn in the early years of the 21st century. In 1999, The Economist published God’s obituary. But by 2009, its editor John Micklethwait had co-written the bestselling God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. LSE was quite forward thinking in responding to these trends with a pluralistic and inclusive vision of religious engagement. We’ve woken up to the reality that religion hasn’t gone away; it persists in the world in forms both beautiful and ugly. The Centre recognises this ambivalence, seeking to support the flourishing of religious life in our institution while also responding to the grave challenges of pathologised religion and escalating conflict.
Do universities need purpose-built spaces for religious observance?
Most universities either think that religion is best ignored, or that it can be left to external religious groups (often through chaplaincy) to address. But in order to be genuinely inclusive, and also to respond to the kinds of religion-related challenges campuses have experienced since 7th October 2024, all higher education institutions need to take seriously the spaces that diverse religious observance requires and the opportunities they have pursue a constructive interfaith agenda. Universities shouldn’t shy away from the role they inevitably play in forming the character of young adults. An ability to engage with difference (including religious difference), in respectful dialogue, is crucial for everyone in today’s world and we should support the development of those skills as a core aspect of higher education.
And why was LSE Religion and Global Society founded?
There’s a lot of interfaith organisations doing fantastic work, but one of our selling points is that we are based in a world-class research university. We founded LSE Religion and Global Society as a partnership with the departments of Anthropology and International Relations to provide rigorous research to underpin everything that we do.
We’ve been very fortunate to receive support from the Templeton Religion Trust, most recently in the Global Religious Pluralities project which examines different themes in contemporary religious pluralism. We’ve looked at the role universities like ours can play in fostering interfaith engagement within civil society. We’ve looked at the role that women of faith play in peacebuilding. And we’ve given particular attention to the relationship between religion and the climate emergency. We believe that joint action to ensure the sustainability of the planet is a powerful vehicle for interreligious engagement. We also believe that faith communities have much to bring to the cause of climate action in terms of moral authority, sacred narratives of creation, and social movements to affect change. We recently published a summary report of our last project, available to read here.
How did the blog start?
The LSE Religion and Global Society blog began a few years before the research unit was launched, to shine a spotlight on the religion research that was already happening at LSE and to build our reputation as a convenor of discussion about religion in today’s public life. We were greatly encouraged by the then President and Vice Chancellor Craig Calhoun who is a sociologist interested in religion.
What have been some of your highlights over the last ten years of the Faith Centre?
As I look back I realise we’ve done some pretty crazy things! I was fairly naïve when I took my first interfaith group to Israel and Palestine in 2014. But these trips have really brought the challenges of religious difference into the sharpest possible focus. They have taught me a lot about sticking with insoluble disagreement and challenging ourselves to see the other perspective, even when events leave us feeling confused or enraged.
It also meant a lot to have the support of King Charles (then Prince Charles) who presented the certificates to our first cohort of Beecken Faith and Leadership students in 2015. And we’ve had the privilege of welcoming so many incredible speakers from different faith traditions to the centre. Bruno Latour, Charles Taylor, and Rowan Williams are certainly among my personal highlights.
What have been some of the challenges?
Universities don’t operate in the ivory towers that people imagine and escalations in religion-related conflict anywhere in the world can impact our campus and people’s willingness to engage in our work. Obviously, the Israel-Palestine conflict has been foremost among those. I understand people’s anger and fear, particularly in recent months. But as we see from so many previous conflicts around the world, sustainable peace will only come from dialogue. The friends I have made over the years in both Israel and Palestine know this to be true and thank us for attempting this work.
What inspires you while facing challenges like that?
I’ve had amazing students and amazing colleagues! I love catching up with our alumni and people who worked with me in the early years to see the amazing things they have gone on to do. It’s so great when someone says, “that experience helped me see things in a new way.” That’s what we’re all about.
Where do you see the Faith Centre in another ten years?
Regrettably it seems certain that the need for interreligious understanding is only going to grow in the years ahead. But I hope we will also see how religious perspectives can reframe major global challenges like climate change and provide new avenues for effective collaborative action. The LSE Faith Centre is already looking beyond our campus to partners around the world. I hope we can really build our capacity and work with others to offer a more hopeful future.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Religion and Global Society nor the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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