Alexander John Paul Lutz

I am the Caucasus Editor at Lossi 36, a Junior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council (working mostly within the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute), and an incoming Master of Arts in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies (MAERES) student at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. I also hold a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) from Harvard Divinity School, where my area of focus was Religion, Ethics, and Politics, and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Mercer University, where I majored in International Affairs, Political Science, and History, and minored in Religion and Public Diplomacy.

My research examines religion and spirituality as spaces for the creation, legitimization, and contestation of visions of belonging, meaning, and purpose in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union—a traumatic event that shattered not just the Soviet political and economic order, but also popular confidence in the Soviet state’s answers to fundamental questions about collective identity, historical direction, and epistemological authority. Working primarily in the Georgian, Ukrainian, and Russian contexts, I study how religions and spiritualities have been invoked, interpreted, and at times, outright invented as actors across the post-Soviet space have worked to answer these fundamental questions and reconstruct their worlds in ways that reflect their interests, commitments, and imaginaries. I am especially interested in the relationship between religions, spiritualities, and nationalisms: how each constitutes and contests the other.

Vocationally, I hope to work on religious freedom and human rights issues in the post-Soviet space.

You can learn more about me here.