Humanities & Society

“Revitalizing Democratic Pluralism” will be the focus as political scholars Melissa Rogers and Peter Wehner take the stage for a public forum on polarized politics at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12, in Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium.

The legality, let alone the wisdom, of closing the southern border amid a partial government shutdown is called into question by Stephen Legomsky, an immigration-law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Emotions such as anger, fear, disgust and disillusionment can have dramatically different effects on voter apathy and turnout, said Alan Lambert, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Fueled by political rhetoric about dangerous criminal immigrants, many white Americans assume low-status immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Syria, Somalia and other countries President Donald Trump labeled “shithole” nations have no legal right to be in the United States, new research in the journal American Sociological Review suggests.

R. Marie Griffith’s new book analyzes how, and why, “sex divided American Christians and fractured American politics.”

As a student, Kurt Summers, BSBA ’00, was interested in business and public service. Throughout his career he has married those two interests. He did so most recently in 2014, when he became the treasurer for the City of Chicago.

One day, a law professor and a visiting scholar took a walk in St. Louis’ historic Forest Park. A friendship, partnership and a unique class called “Religion, Politics, and the University” followed, which takes a deep dive into how a diverse democracy can develop and be successful in a pluralistic society.

Childhood poverty cost the U.S. $1.03 trillion in 2015, about 5.4 percent of the gross domestic product, according to a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Given the chance to play Robin Hood, most Americans show little interest in taking from the rich and giving to the poor. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may explain why it’s so hard for voters in modern democracies to erase the economic inequalities that separate most citizens from the nation’s super-wealthy elites.

Half-century-old advice from Billy Graham, who died Feb. 21, was in line with cultural and sexual norms of the 1950s and later decades, when many of Graham’s contemporary evangelical preachers fell from grace after widely publicized extramarital affairs, says R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.