Home at the End of the World: Fear, Faith & Crisis of Community in Suburbs

The 2026 Peter C Schaehrer Memorial Lecture in Peace and Conflict Studies will be given by historian Kathleen Belew (Northwestern University), author of the highly acclaimed Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2019).

Home at the End of the World: Fear, Faith, and the Crisis of Community in American Suburbs
The 1990s are broadly recalled as a time of triumph for the United States: prosperity at home, the vanquishing of communism abroad, and the so-called end of history. But, simmering just under the surface, new fears—of "super predators," of moral degeneration, of violence against children, of toxic pollution, and of an ill-defined other—were beginning to crack society apart and define a new era in American politics. When two teenagers began shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, they brought an apocalypse into a community and a nation already primed for terror.

In this thrillingly unique history of the present, Kathleen Belew weaves together the stories of the rise of the religious right, the advent of Supermax prisons, rare child abductions and new paranoias surrounding childhood, and the dubious cleanup of superfund sites: developments happening within miles of each other in Colorado's Front Range communities. Told through the lives of individuals who experienced them firsthand, including the author, these parallel histories reveal an unprecedented shift in American life, away from community and toward the individual—and polarization. In Belew's telling, Columbine was the defining tragedy of this time, ushering in a new era of mass shootings and exposing Americans' old fears as largely misplaced. But now, faced with the very real danger of gun violence, a broken society was unable to respond.

In this dark moment, Belew also finds hope in paths not taken. If Americans of the recent past built institutions and drafted laws out of fear of each other, we can use this history to expand our ideas of what might be possible: more peaceful futures, stronger communities, and safer lives for all our children.