Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (JD, PhD, University of Chicago) is Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies, and Affiliated Professor of Law in the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009), and A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (Chicago 2014).

This paper explores how chaplaincy works in the United States—and in particular how it sits uneasily at the intersection of law and religion, spiritual care, and government regulation. Responsible for ministering to the wandering souls of the globalized economy, the chaplain works with a clientele often unmarked by a specific religious identity, and does so on behalf of a secular institution, like a hospital. The sometimes heroic but often deeply ambiguous work reveals contours of contemporary spiritual life, the politics of religious freedom, and the neverending negotiation of religion's place in American institutional life.