Harry Hartford Capstone Project Prize Over recent years, there has been a significant focus on renewing the Trinity education so that students are better prepared for living and working in a rapidly changing world, and to reaching their potential as global citizens. Undergraduate students now undertake a Capstone Project, consisting of an independent piece of work completed in their final year, which provides them with the opportunity to integrate the knowledge, skills and competencies that they have developed across a range of subject areas in their four years of study. The School is delighted to announce the founding of a new prize – the Harry Hartford Capstone Project Prize – which will be awarded annually to the four best Capstone Projects in the disciplines of economics, philosophy, political science and sociology. Special consideration will be given to projects in the field of public policy, emphasising evidence-based research in the public domain. This pioneering award has been made possible thanks to the generosity of long-term School supporter Harry Hartford, BA Economics and Social Sciences (1982). Harry has been a lead supporter of the Trinity Student Economic Review (SER) and the annual Harry Hartford prize for a Junior Sophister student achieving excellence in economic analysis. Political Scientist Investigates Political Speech in Religious Sermons Dr Constantine Boussalis In the United States, religious organisations are a key site for political socialisation, information sharing, and mobilisation. Yet, mainly due to methodological constraints, scholars have been unable to engage in a broad evaluation of political discussions in religious environments. In a recently published article in Politics and Religion, Dr Constantine Boussalis in collaboration with Dr Travis Coan (University of Exeter) and Dr Mirya Holman (Tulane University) provide the first large-N study of political discussions in religious environments through an evaluation of more than 110,000 sermons by US pastors. Using machine-learning methods to extract the content of these sermons, the study finds that political messaging among American pastors is relatively widespread. The research indicates that just over a third of sermons contain some political content and seven of ten pastors give at least one sermon with a political focus with common topics including the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare and abortion. The authors also find that political and demographic factors influence the political content of sermons, with pastors in more affluent and liberal locales being more likely to communicate political messages. Dr Boussalis is Assistant Professor in Political Science and Principal Investigator of the NORFACE-funded project ‘Extreme Identities: A Linguistic and Visual Analysis of European FarRight Online Communities’ Politics of Identity’. His research focuses on the use of computational methods to study political communication across a broad set of domains. www.tcd.ie/political-science