March 2017
News and Events

Contents

Co-Sponsored Event

Pseudo-Arabic as a Marker of Christian Identity in Middle Byzantine Art and Architecture

"Things” can help us understand social identities, relationships, and practices in the medieval world, especially in situations where textual documentation is minimal or completely absent. This paper explores how pseudo-Arabic motifs on medieval Christian buildings and objects materialized social identities and spiritual authority among monastic communities across the eastern Mediterranean, thereby attesting to an interconnectedness that is only thinly documented in the written record. When contextualized within networks of religious, cultural, and political traffic, pseudo-Arabic “inscriptions” reify social affiliations and distinctions, although not always in a manner consistent with modern assumptions about linguistic identity in the medieval Mediterranean world. In Christian contexts, pseudo-Arabic could stand for the authority of ancient monastic communities in the Holy Land, a region where Arabic was not only the dominant colloquial language but also a language of Orthodox Christian theological discourse.

This event, part of the Dillenberger Lecture Series of the Graduate Theological Union, will be held at:

Doug Adams Gallery
2465 Le Conte Avenue
Berkeley, CA

Co-Sponsored Event
Spinoza's Tragic Resources

Russ Leo will present his research on the intersections between poetic and philosophical experiments in Anglo-Dutch contexts across the 1650s, 60s, and 70s, particularly the ways one might place Milton and Spinoza in conversation. This involves attention to Spinoza’s contributions to literary culture in Amsterdam and the Netherlands at large, as well as his debts to poets and poetics. For instance, while historians of philosophy often overlook Spinoza’s debts to theater, and misunderstand attempts by the Dutch dramatic society Nil Volentibus Arduum to write philosophical tragedy in the spirit of Spinozism, attention to a tradition of philosophical tragedy (in Latin and Dutch, across the 17th century) makes these developments and their larger import clear. Such work enables us to see different continuities and discontinuities across the period, challenging assumptions about Enlightenment and modernity.

The event will be held at D37 Hearst Field Annex.

Sponsored by: The Department of English; the Townsend Center for the Humanities; The Program in Critical Theory; the Medieval Philosophy Working Group, and; the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

BSCR Seminars in Art and Religion
Mecca's Perspective as Symbolic Form

The “Sacred” and the “Holy” (haram in Arabic and, to some extent, al-quds or al-muqaddas), are Semitic words (see Herem and Kadosh in Hebrew) denoting the act of separation, parting, or setting aside, and imply the apparent human faculty of setting distinctive borders between holy and profane zones. Constrained to time, these spaces become chronotopes. But, whereas the sacred space appears as totally autonomous and linked to the eternal, the profane zone seems to exist as bound to historical time. This supposition results in assigning terms such as “common,” “habitual,” and “ephemeral to historic times, as opposed to “pure” and “intact” designating the “Holy” as linked to everlasting time. This lecture analyzes varied iconic visions of the Haram (the sacred sanctuary) of Mecca. A close and attentive gaze at the late medieval and early modern images of Mecca suggests a crucial change and shift in the mode of the depiction of the holy sanctuary. Moreover, the earlier flattened and two-dimensional images of the sanctuary, which, as I argue, contributed to the hierophany of the sacred and suggested its relic character, were replaced by perspectival images that evoked veracity and authenticity and fixed the sacred space within its larger geographic setting.

Deadline: Summer Research Grants

Berkeley Public Theology Program

The Study of Contacts Between Cultures: The Case of Sino-European Encounters in the Seventeenth Century

This is the keynote lecture of the Translating Religion and Theology in Europe and Asia: East to West event; see additional programming below.

This presentation takes theories of communication and philosophy of alterity as a starting point to study the methodology of the history of contact between cultures. It first discusses three different frameworks that have been employed in the study of the cultural contacts between China and Europe in the seventeenth century: the transmission, reception and invention frameworks. Next, the presentation proposes a fourth framework, the interaction and communication framework, which develops the previous frameworks by stressing the reciprocity in the interaction between transmitter and receiver and centers around the notion of “in-­betweenness.”

Berkeley Public Theology Program

Translating Religion and Theology in Europe and Asia: East to West