By Jennifer DeBernardis (now van der Meer)
When I arrived at Trinity College, I didn’t have a master plan. I just knew I was looking for something that could hold the complexity of the world — the contradictions, the beauty, the conflicts between meaning and power. Comparative Religion turned out to be that container.
It wasn’t about belief; it was about systems of meaning. How humans across time and culture have built shared stories to explain the unexplainable, to organize power, to structure daily life. Studying Buddhism and Christianity side by side, learning from Islamic scholars, or tracing indigenous cosmologies — it taught me how worldviews shape worlds.
That training, strange as it might sound, became the foundation for everything I’ve done since, in business, design, finance, and systems change. Every spreadsheet hides a cosmology. Every valuation model encodes what we believe is worth pursuing, preserving, or extracting.
Majoring in Comparative Religion didn’t give me a single doctrine to follow. It gave me an ability to see through them all , to ask who benefits, what’s sacred, what’s desecrated, and what stories we tell to justify it.
And in a world remade by algorithms and markets, I still think that’s the most practical education imaginable.