Winnifred F. Sullivan, professor and chair in the department of religious studies at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, will lecture at Washington and Lee University on Oct. 26 at 5:30 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library, with a reception at 5 p.m. prior to the lecture. Sullivan also is an affiliate professor of law at Maurer School of Law.Sullivan will speak on the “Politics of Religious Freedom Today: At Home and Abroad” and the lecture is free and open to the public. The talk is sponsored by W&L’s Religion Department.Sullivan, who taught in the Religion Department at Washington and Lee from 1995-2000, will examine “the persistent definitional ambiguity at the heart of religious freedom.” This ambiguity, she says, “has created a situation in which these laws, because they can’t be fairly and coherently administered, have become merely expressive. They are, in a sense, no longer law.”Sullivan is the author of “Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law” (2014); “Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution” (2009); “The Impossibility of Religious Freedom” (2005); and “Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States” (1994). “Each of earliest three books offers a close reading of the texts of a U.S. religion case using the resources of legal anthropology, socio–legal studies and the academic study of religion,” said Sullivan, “with a view to displaying the multiple and contending models of and discourses about religion.”Sullivan continued, “My fourth book portrays the chaplain and her ministry as a product of the legal regulation of religion and as a form of spiritual governance.”