BCSR | 2018-2019

Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion

Neoliberal

The first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard 2014) is the capstone of a twenty-year collaboration between scholars Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings on Walter Benjamin’s life, work, and critical legacy. The Program in Critical Theory brings them together with Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters for a discussion of the book’s implications for Benjamin scholarship. Critical Theory co-director Martin Jay moderates a conversation on the genesis of the project and the possibility of writing a “Benjaminian” biography.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

On Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life | Howard Eiland | 11/4/14

For his lecture “Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis?”, Étienne Balibar discusses connections and disjunctions between Michel Foucault and Karl Marx, using Foucault’s 1972 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive as an alternative lens for the question of “reproduction” and its relationship to class struggles. With Foucault and Marx as a starting point for a new confrontation, he also reconsiders the idea of “communism” today. Response by Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis | Etienne Balibar | 12/9/14


The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Banu Bargu, Response by Judith Butler | 2/27/15

In Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine attempts to contemplate the mystery of time and, in particular, the temporal embeddedness that makes human beings particularly unqualified to comprehend eternity. In this lecture, I will be tracing the same double imperative in the poetry of John Milton: apprehension in and of time while in the hope and before the judgment of eternity. In particular, I will be looking at the figurative and formal means by which Milton evokes the prior-and-yet-to-come that is at the heart of the world system to which he subscribes: to the mysterious overlay of time and timelessness that allows divine foreknowledge and free will among humans to co-exist in a non-contradictory relationship.

Linda Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015).  Among her earlier books, Magnetic North (2007) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Waterborne (2002) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both the Lenore Marshall Award and The Poets Prize. Gregerson has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Gregerson teaches at the University of Michigan, as Distinguished University Professor of English and Creative Writing, and is also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Milton and the Syntax of Faith | Linda Gregerson | 1/25/18

Linda Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015).  Among her earlier books, Magnetic North (2007) was a finalist for the National Book Award; Waterborne (2002) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep was a finalist for both the Lenore Marshall Award and The Poets Prize. Gregerson has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Gregerson teaches at the University of Michigan, as Distinguished University Professor of English and Creative Writing, and is also a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

A Poetry Reading | Linda Gregerson | 1/25/18

Gun rights are typically identified with the Second Amendment — a legal, indeed constitutional, prerogative. This lecture argues that they are better understood as part of a culture and a belief system, centering on ideas of innocence and legitimate violence. I argue that this belief system is apparent in the contemporary gun culture’s confidence in the ‘law-abiding citizen’ as a stable and fixed category, and then I seek to explore its origins. The claim is that gun rights, while modern in form and intensity, rest upon older narratives of national righteousness and popular sovereignty, among them, Puritan concepts of salvation and judgment. Although the more sophisticated defenses of gun rights cite natural law and the notion of self-defense as a universal right, I argue that gun rights remain a set of special privileges — almost a code of entitlement. To engage this culture effectively, we need better understanding of the particular theologies from which it has emerged.

Dominic Erdozain earned his PhD at Cambridge. He taught history, for six years, at King’s College London before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, where he works as a freelance writer. He is the author of The Soul of Doubt: the Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx and the editor of The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment. His next book, Arming Jesus: the Religion of the Gun in America, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

Innocence and Violence: The Theology of a Gun Culture | Dominic Erdozain | 1/31/18

Modern constructions of religious liberty often left atheists and nonbelievers out. Long after the ratification of the First Amendment, it remained an open question whether religious freedom included irreligious freedom. Counted an intolerable danger to the commonwealth, atheists were frequently denied equal rights and liberties; several states barred them from holding offices of public trust, and their competence as witnesses was routinely questioned. The picture changed dramatically in the middle decades of the twentieth century as the principle of neutrality—that the state was to treat believers and nonbelievers with impartiality—became the constitutional norm. Yet, in scoring a series of wins at the Supreme Court level, atheist plaintiffs only looked all the more intolerable. Dwelling on the experiences of a handful of atheist objectors in this heyday of secularist activism, the lecture examines just how limited the toleration of the irreligious remained in the 1960s and 1970s—and often still remains.

Leigh Eric Schmidt is the author of Village Atheists: How American’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton, 2016), as well as Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1995), and Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard, 2000).

Schmidt has appeared on a number of NPR programs and other radio shows to discuss his books, including All Things Considered, Voice of America, and Religion Matters. He has commented on current issues in American religion and culture for outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Presently the Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, he joined Washington’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in 2011.

Are Atheists Tolerable? American Nonbelievers and Irreligious Freedom | Leigh Eric Schmidt | 3/12/18

Most commonly attributed to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, pantheism teaches that what we mean by “divinity” is the immanent, creative-destructive power of the universe itself. God, in other words, is the universe. This heretical teaching infamously led to Spinoza’s excommunication in 1656 from his Jewish community in Amsterdam. In subsequent centuries, pantheism has suffered nearly universal rejection—usually in the form of ridicule—by western philosophers and theologians. This lecture will investigate the reasons behind this often panicked repudiation, suggesting that the horror over pantheism has less to do with theological orthodoxy or philosophical rigor than with a visceral reaction to matter, which is persistently racialized and feminized in the tradition that refuses to ascribe divinity to it..

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University; core faculty in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; and affiliated faculty in the Science and Society Program. She holds a B.A. in Religion and English from Williams College, an M.Phil. in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University, where she also received a Certificate in Comparative Literature and Society. Her research interests include continental philosophy, theology, gender and sexuality studies, and the history and philosophy of cosmology. She is the author of  Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Columbia University Press) and Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press).

Pantheist Monstrosities: On Race, Gender, Divinity, and Dirt | Mary-Jane Rubenstein | 3/15/18

Why should we pursue a critical theory of democratic protest? Assuming that we should, what would such a critical theory look like today? My paper considers both questions, offering some partial answers. On my understanding, critical theory addresses normative questions relating to the good life for humans, to the kind of society that would enable a good life, and to protest as a means for the social transformation required for this purpose. I see the modern democratic project—currently under threat—as one important vision of the good life in a good society. Focusing on civil disobedience as a form of democratic protest, I argue for an account of social transformation that is intimately linked to ethical self-transformation. This places me at odds with most contemporary configurations of critical theory, in which the connection between social transformation and self-transformation is dismissed or neglected. Though social transformation is the point of the protest, I claim that radical social transformation often calls for radical ethical self-transformation. The challenge here for critical theories is a double one. The theory must offer an account of ethical self-transformation that is normatively robust, in the sense of permitting evaluative discrimination between ethically good and ethically bad kinds of self-transformation. At the same time, the theory must be non-authoritarian, in the sense that it may not determine in advance what counts as ethically valid self-transformation, independent of the reflective experiences of the human individuals concerned; for this, a non-authoritarian conception of ethical validity (“ethical truth”) is required.

Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her current research interests centre on the relation between freedom and authority, and on related questions of protest, resistance and violence. Her next project will be a critical theory of the Anthropocene. She has published two monographs in critical social theory: Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press, 2006) and is the author of many articles in the areas of social and political philosophy. She is on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals, and has held visiting appointments at universities in the USA and Europe.

Co-sponsored by The Institute of European Studies (IES).

Radical Transformations of Self and Society... | Maeve Cooke | 11/14/18

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

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.