The Search for Belonging: Faith, Identity, and Public Life

From time to time, The Conversation shares interesting work created by our editors. Kalpana Jain, the senior religion and 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, which is the national university of Malaysia. The following text is an excerpt from Jain’s Substack newsletter. It describes one of her first stops after returning home, which was a Faith Angle gathering in Park City, Utah.

During her year in Malaysia, I experienced the uniqueness and piety of Islam firsthand. I also visited sacred spaces associated with a wide range of traditions, including Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Christian sites 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 two cultures, I found myself asking a difficult question: Where do I belong?

That question stayed with me when I arrived at the St. Regis Deer Valley in Utah. I was there for a gathering of journalists and scholars organized by Josh Good through the Aspen Institute’s Religion and Society Program. The conference aimed 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 upcoming midterms, lay a deeper concern. Many people were searching for meaning and belonging as traditional sources of moral guidance declined.

Richard Parker, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, set the intellectual framework for the entire discussion. He argued that religion serves a deep human need by helping people make sense of themselves and the world around them. Drawing on the work of sociologist Peter Berger, he explained that humans create meaning in their world. Berger called this created order the "nomos." People create the nomos through language to build relationships. They also create meaning through stories and shared obligations. This framework establishes the foundation for how we should live.

However, human beings also confront what Berger called the "cosmos." The cosmos is the physical world that exists outside of us. Religion, Parker suggested, serves as a bridge between the nomos and the cosmos. It connects everyday life to deeper, existential questions. Through prayer and rituals, religion helps people find meaning even when facing uncertainty. It "stills our fear of being alive" and "stills our fear of being alone," he noted. Drawing on the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, Parker added that religion remains important even in secular societies. It provides essential 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. It includes one’s obligations to family, society, nature, and, ultimately, the world beyond oneself. In that sense, dharma echoes what Berger described as the relationship between the nomos and the cosmos.