Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion

To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American public discourse at all, they are usually invoked either to justify military intervention in the Middle East for the sake of their “religious freedom,” or they are cited as potential exemptions to policies intended to restrict asylum-seekers from Muslim-majority countries. This binary frame rests on a wide-spread assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable to the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West, an assumption that many Christians from the Middle East reject. In this talk I draw from ongoing ethnographic research with diasporic Syriac Orthodox Christians in the Netherlands to show that it is this very binary framing which poses an existential threat to their 1800 year old tradition. In my fieldwork, I document how second- and third-generation Dutch-Syriac Christians intertwine political activism with liturgical performance to “save” Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe. Through their activism, I argue, they innovate a defiantly immodern convergence of kinship, liturgical sound, and religious ethics in open repudiation of the ethical failures of Western Christianity and European secularism.

Sarah Bakker Kellogg (UC Santa Cruz, 2013) is a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

How to Sing with Syriac Christians (and Why)... | Sarah Kellogg | 4/10/18

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools — from education to propaganda to terror — to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. Smolkin’s A Sacred Space is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. She argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev — in a stunning and unexpected reversal — abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life.

Victoria Smolkin is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University.

A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism | Victoria Smolkin | 4/11/18

In mid-August Jason Klocek, a former BCSR grant winner and now Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Global Religion Research Initiative at Notre Dame, walked us through the aforementioned aspects of his scholarly development, part of his wider journey from coal-town Pennsylvania to Berkeley, with stops in Crete, Turkmenistan, and Washington D.C. along the way.

Klocek also discussed his choice of, and work at, Berkeley, including the role of faculty mentorship in his decision to come to campus, and the impact of chance and failed grant applications on the ultimate shape of his dissertation, "The Cult of Coercion: Religion and Strategic Culture in British Counterinsurgency," which analyzes the perception of religious insurgents by British leaders in three postwar case studies: Cyprus, Mandatory Palestine, and Kenya. Jason has also kindly shared his thoughts on the future of religious studies and offered some useful advice to young scholars studying religion.

You can listen to these conversations, as well as Jason's thoughts on the potential policy applications of his work, in their entirety below, or in thematic segments on our YouTube and SoundCloud pages.

Abstracts of Jason's publications and working papers, as well as more information on his book project and teaching, are available at https://jasonklocek.weebly.com

Best of luck to Jason!

#ReligionInTheWorld

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. bcsr.berkeley.edu | @ucbreligion

5 Questions Interview | Synagogues with Cemeteries, Secret Mosques... | Jason Klocek | 9/10/18

In the second installment of our 5 Questions series, we asked recent Berkeley alum Jason Klocek how he came to his work on religion and what brought him to Berkeley. He describes his travels in Crete and Turkmenistan, and the direct experiences with religious diversity and conflict, as well as the intellectual questions that brought him to the PhD.

Jason Klocek is a Global Religion Research Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. More on Jason and his work is available at https://jasonklocek.weebly.com 

#ReligionInTheWorld

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. bcsr.berkeley.edu | @ucbreligion

5 Questions Interview | A Winding Path to the PhD... | Jason Klocek | 9/10/18

As part of our 5 Questions series, Jason Klocek walks us through his dissertation, including his methods, findings, and the deliberate and chance circumstances that led him to analyze the perception of religious insurgents by British leaders in three postwar case studies: Cyprus, Mandatory Palestine, and Kenya.

Jason Klocek is a Global Religion Research Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. More on Jason and his work is available at https://jasonklocek.weebly.com

#ReligionInTheWorld

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. bcsr.berkeley.edu | @ucbreligion

5 Questions Interview | The Cult of Coercion: Religion and Strategic... | Jason Klocek | 9/10/18

As part of our 5 Questions discussion with Jason Klocek, we asked him about the future of both his work specifically, as well as religious studies more broadly. He describes his plans to integrate case studies of Iraq and Afghanistan into his book project, and to finish parallel work on Islamic governance of cities. He hopes data will be used modestly, and appropriately, in future religious studies work.

Jason Klocek is a Global Religion Research Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. More on Jason and his work is available at https://jasonklocek.weebly.com

#ReligionInTheWorld

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. bcsr.berkeley.edu | @ucbreligion

5 Questions Interview | The Future: Iraq and Afghanistan... | Jason Klocek | 9/10/18

Wrapping-up our 5 Questions conversation, Jason Klocek advises students to think broadly about interdisciplinarity—both intellectually and in practical terms. 

Jason Klocek is a Global Religion Research Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. More on Jason and his work is available at https://jasonklocek.weebly.com

#ReligionInTheWorld

The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) advances creative and critical scholarship on religion. bcsr.berkeley.edu | @ucbreligion

5 Questions Interview | Advice for Young Students Studying Religion | Jason Klocek | 9/10/18

5 Questions Interview |  BCSR Co-Founders: Jonathan Sheehan and Mark Csikszentmihalyi | 11/27/18

To truly understand the current political landscape, we may need new ways — and a new willingness — to confront the question of “values.” How can scholars in the humanities and social sciences contribute to these efforts? If humanistic study is to make a contribution to public life, do academics need to confront the subject of values through their writing and teaching?

The series Public University, Public Values is prompted by the recognition that the crisis in the liberal democracies of Europe and North America is, among other things, a crisis of values. The “political” focus that has shaped the humanities and much of the social sciences over the past decades has made possible an extraordinary body of scholarship and teaching — yet it has often left unexplored questions of morality and ethics. In a series of probing conversations, faculty members explore what it might mean to integrate a consideration of values into their public-facing work.

Kicking off the series, Arlie Hochschild (Sociology) and Thomas Laqueur (History) discuss the contributions that academic scholars can make to the public understanding of truth and its relation to politics.

Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita of sociology at UC Berkeley, studies the rise of right-wing ideology. In her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award, she conducts extensive interviews of Tea Party enthusiasts in Louisiana as she tries to scale an “empathy wall” to learn how to see, think and feel as they do. She argues that underneath the Tea Party’s hostility to government intervention lies a “deep story” of alienation, loss of honor, and a hidden social class war.

Thomas Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Professor of History emeritus at UC Berkeley. His work on the body and gender, on death and dying, and on sex has mapped out a provocative set of arguments that have opened up new subjects for study. His books include The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, and Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.


Sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

The Politics of Truth: A Way Forward | Hochschild and Laqueur | 2/7/19

Yunus Dogan Telliel, Assistant Teaching Professor in Humanities and Arts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, presenting "The Rise of the Theologian: Translation and the Vocation of Theology in Turkey"

Susannah Heschel, Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, presenting “'There Is No Such Thing as Jewish Theology': Protestantism and the Jewish Theological Allergy"

Theology and the Public University, Day 1 | Session 2: Telliel and Heschel | 2/22/19

Daniel Hershenzon, Associate Professor of Literature, Cultures, and Languages, University of Connecticut

This talk explores the entangled experience of Muslim and Christian captives and by extension the connected histories of the Spanish Empire, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers in the 17th-century. It argues that piracy, captivity, and redemption shaped the Mediterranean as an integrated region—at the social, political, and economic levels. The history that emerges of the captivities of Christians and of Muslims is both local and Mediterranean. It offers an analysis of competing Spanish, Algerian, and Moroccan imperial projects intended to shape Mediterranean mobility structures. Simultaneously, the project reveals the tragic upending of the lives of individuals by these imperial maritime political agendas. Reconstructing the webs that linked captives, captors, masters, kin, and rulers, we can see both the political economy of ransom and the processes by which these actors sought to shape it. These multiple cross-maritime interactions do more than counter an image of a declining 17th-century Mediterranean dissolving into nation-states. They force us to rethink early modern Europe and its others and to question how transnational maritime networks shaped seemingly European territorial identities.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History.

Captivated by the Mediterranean: Early Modern Spain... | Daniel Hershenzon | 3/4/19

For the past two years, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, has convened a series of workshops and seminars concerning, broadly speaking, the place of theology in the university. From the outset, our goal was to challenge narrow conceptions of both secular learning and “theology,” in hopes of fostering robust conversation about the teaching of religion in the pluralist setting of the modern university.

On February 22-23, 2019, we held the culminating conference for the project. Entitled “Theology and the Public University,” the conference assembled a group of talented and creative thinkers who we believe are pioneering new ways of imagining theology, broadly construed.

Three major inquiry-areas anchored the two-day conference:

Theology and the History of Learning: historical settings and genealogies of the interrelationship of theology and the modern landscape of university learning: the formation of seminaries, theology faculties in historical relationship to other university faculties, religion in public and private universities, comparative historical dimensions, legal and political contexts.

Theology and Modern Secular Disciplines: with particular focus on the modern research university, an investigation of the particularity of theological learning in relationship to contemporary university disciplines, including but not limited to religious studies; comparative work on the varieties of theological learning in universities/seminaries/divinity schools; connections and tensions between secular and theological modes of inquiry; specificity of the public university in these discussions

The Limits and Possibilities of Theology in a Pluralist World: exploring how theology translates, or does not translate, across religious worlds; alternative vocabularies for the religious imagination; relationships between theology and other forms of religious knowledge and experience; theology in and beyond a Christian setting; provincializing theology; theology and inter-religious debate; what would theology have to be, to be in a public university?

The Berkeley Public Theology Program invites innovative thinkers and public figures to Berkeley to reflect on the past, present, and future of theological inquiry. Such lectures spark scholarly conversations on campus and place Berkeley at the center of global conversations on religion and public life.

Theology and the Public University, Day 2 | Session 3: Furey and Carter | 2/23/19

Theology and the Public University, Day 1 | Session 4: Moosa and Magid | 2/22/19

Theology and the Public University, Day 2 | Session 1: Viswanathan and Salvatore | 2/23/19

Theology and the Public University, Day 2 | Session 4: Marsh and White | 2/23/19

The Bible sometimes plays a major role in current, political discourses, especially in the United States. As a project, public theology supports efforts to let the Bible speak to contemporary, public concerns. But using the Bible in this way involves many potential traps. How can a 2000 year old book provide guidance for social and political challenges? Should it do so at all? This lecture argues that to use the Bible in social and political discourses without attending to its historical framework, and without dealing rationally and critically with its texts, will neither do a favor to theology nor to the public.

Konrad Schmid is Professor of Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Judaism at the University of Zürich.

Critical Public Theology: How to Use and Not Use the Bible... | Konrad Schmid | 3/7/19

What's Theology Got to Do With It? An Eighteenth-Century Chinese Emperor Debating Religions and Christianity

In his Lettres chinoises, indiennes et tartares, Voltaire republished “a note by the good Kangxi Emperor to the Peking Jesuits” as follows: “The emperor is surprised to see you so stubborn in your ideas. Why would you worry so much about a world where you have not been yet? Enjoy the present. Your God must be pained by your preoccupations. Isn’t He powerful enough to exercise justice without your meddling?”  To Voltaire this was a proof of the superiority of Chinese wisdom over Christianity. This was, however, also a first intimation of the crumbling of imperial patronage towards the missionaries and their religious ideas.

By 1724, the Yongzheng Emperor, Kangxi’s son, further hardened the imperial stance. He issued a formal prohibition against Christian propagation in the provinces, eliciting, once again, Voltaire’s admiration. Nevertheless, Yongzheng officially retained the missionaries to serve in Beijing as scientific and artistic experts, and allowed them to keep the capital’s churches open. In part because his policy was ambiguously forbidding and allowing Christian activities in the same breath, foreign and Chinese underground priests secretly continued in their technically illegal undertakings in the provinces.

The simultaneous formal prohibition of Christianity and retention of the foreign priests at court stemmed from both pragmatic governance considerations and the pursuit of Yongzheng’s religious ideology of unification of the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism), ultimately a move towards the unification of all religions. Archival materials recording the proceedings of several audiences with the missionaries offer us glimpses of imperial personal views on religions and Christian theology in intimate settings, and uncover little known aspects of the emperor’s understanding of religion, and ultimately, of Chinese and European views of the divine.

Eugenio Menegon is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Boston University, and Collaborative Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. He has published extensively on the history of Chinese-Western relations, and is the author of Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2009), which was the recipient of the 2011 Levenson Prize in Chinese Studies (Association for Asian Studies). His current book project is an examination of the daily life and political networking of European residents at the Qing court in Beijing during the 17th-18th centuries.

The Berkeley Public Theology Program invites innovative thinkers and public figures to Berkeley to reflect on the past, present, and future of theological inquiry. Such lectures spark scholarly conversations on campus and place Berkeley at the center of global conversations on religion and public life.

What’s Theology Got to Do with It?... | Eugenio Menegon | 3/13/19

Haroon Mirza will examine how ideas seeded in the counterculture movement of the 1960s are now solidifying in contemporary culture and the influence that has had on his work. A London-based artist with a diverse multimedia practice, Mirza will touch on subjects that resonate with his broad interest in the creative history of the Bay Area including computing and AI, psychedelics research, pacifism, anti-capitalism, human rights, and spirituality.

Haroon Mirza has won international acclaim for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. He devises kinetic sculptures, performances and immersive installations, such as The National Apavillion of Then and Now (2011) – an anechoic chamber with a circle of light that grows brighter in response to increasing drone, and completely dark when there is silence. An advocate of interference (in the sense of electro-acoustic or radio disruption), he creates situations that purposefully cross wires. He describes his role as a composer, manipulating electricity, a live, invisible and volatile phenomenon, to make it dance to a different tune and calling on instruments as varied as household electronics, vinyl and turntables, LEDs, furniture, video footage and existing artworks to behave differently. Processes are left exposed and sounds occupy space in an unruly way, testing codes of conduct and charging the atmosphere. Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound, and music and draws into question the categorization of cultural forms. “All music is organized sound or organized noise,” he says. “So as long as you’re organizing acoustic material, it’s just the perception and the context that defines it as music or noise or sound or just a nuisance” (2013).

Haroon Mirza was born in London, UK in 1977 where he lives and works. He has a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art, an MA in Design Critical Practice and Theory from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK (2007).

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art Practice Wiesenfeld Lecture Series, the Institute of South Asian Studies, and the Asian Art Museum.

The Berkeley Seminars in Art and Religion invite distinguished artists and scholars to share their creative and critical work on the connection between artistic expression and religious thought and practice with UC Berkeley students, faculty, and the wider Bay Area community.

The Creative Repercussions of Counterculture | Haroon Mirza | 4/3/19

With Jan Joosten, Regius Professor of Hebrew, University of Oxford

At some time after the end of the First Temple period, the religion of ancient Israel became independent of the nation. Language and texts are key to this change. Hebrew turned into a sacred language, not one learned from one’s parents, but from the study of ancient texts. The process didn’t come to full fruition until after the fall of the Second Temple. But its earliest effects can be traced already in writings of the exilic period. This linguistic development is rooted in a profound change affecting Judean religion. Before the fall of Jerusalem, the cult of the God of Israel was part and parcel of a national existence with strong territorial and cultural components. In exile, worship of this same God was motivated differently, with the reference to ancient texts—history, law, and prophecy—taking on a new and ever-increasing role. The result was a new phenomenon in the ancient world.

Jan Joosten studied theology in Brussels and Princeton, and Semitic languages in Jerusalem. He earned a PhD in Semitic languages at the Hebrew University in 1989, a ThD at the Protestant Faculty in Brussels in 1994, and a HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) in Strasbourg in 1994. He taught at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Strasbourg for twenty years. In 2014 he was appointed Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford, and Student of Christ Church. He is Editor-in-chief of Vetus Testamentum since 2010, president of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies since 2012, and honorary member of the Academy of Hebrew Language.

Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley Near Eastern Studies, and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

The Invention of Religion: Jews in Babylon... | Jan Joosten | 11/19/19

The Christian campaign against secular Communism was a defining phenomenon in Europe’s modern history. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to uncover its many roots—especially in anti-Semitism—and to chart the vast intellectual production and political mobilization it inspired. This talk will add to this burgeoning work by exploring the role of Protestant anti-Catholic polemics in shaping anti-secularism. I will show how crucial anti-Catholic tropes from the late nineteenth century, according to which Catholicism denied free will and enslaved individuals psychologically, resurfaced as a crucial anti-Communist trope in the twentieth century. By tracing this genealogy, I will investigate how intra-religious concepts were utilized to explain allegedly secular movements.

Udi Greeberg is an associate professor of European history at Dartmouth College. He is the author of the prize-winning The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), as well as many articles on European thought and politics. He has also written for The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, and other publications.

The Anti-Catholic Origins of Anti-Communism | Udi Greenberg | 2/25/20

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.