
Alexander John Paul Lutz is (as of early 2026) a Max Kampelman Policy Fellow at the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a Junior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council(working mostly within the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute), and the Caucasus Editor at Lossi 36. He is also an incoming Master of Arts in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies (MAERES) student at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and holds a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) from Harvard Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Mercer University. His research explores 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 andeconomic 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, he studies 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. He is especially interested in the relationship between religions, spiritualities, and nationalisms: how each constitutes and contests the other.


