April 2017
News and Events

Contents

Dangerous Belief? Xin 信 in Occult Anecdotes in Tang and Song China

In recent research on the concept of 信, “belief,” in Song dynasty (960-1279) China, I have discovered a surprising pattern in twelfth-century occult anecdotes (narratives told as true, recording human interactions with gods, ghosts, and other spirits): it appears that both “believing” and “disbelieving” a proposition or representation from another being, human or spiritual, were treated as unreliable and dangerous by the anecdotes’ tellers, while terms meaning “suppose,” “suspect,” “take it to be that…,” which seem to refer to developing a view not from another’s proposition or representation but from one’s own observation of one’s situation, are treated as yielding views that are much more reliable, though far from infallible. At Berkeley, I will present new research examining whether the same interesting pattern holds in parallel sources for the previous major dynasty, the Tang (618-906), or whether it is a product of change between the two periods.

Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance:
Living with Difference: Shared Religious Sanctuaries in the Ottoman Lands

In this talk, I will discuss the sharing of sacred sanctuaries by the three great monotheistic religions across the Mediterranean, with particular examples from the history of the Ottoman Empire. At first sight, sharing the same sacred sites would seem impossible in a monotheistic world characterized by total submission to a single God. And yet in the Mediterranean world it is not unusual for followers of different religions to frequent the same shrines. In the past, and even today, numerous believers — Jews, Christians and Muslims — have prayed together in the holy places of another religion. Shared sacred sites are... (more)

New Directions in Theology Grants for Second-Year Graduate Students

BCSR is offering up to four grants in the amount of $5,000 each for graduate students in their second year of study in 2017-18.* New Directions grants are provided by BCSR through the Public Theology Program, a critical three-year research initiative funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Grantees participate in a cohort of early-career students from diverse disciplines to explore the place of theology in scholarship and public life. Theology is here meant broadly as the constellation of conceptual commitments and modes of inquiry that together enable communities to investigate and understand the world in religious terms... (more)

What Comes After the Critique of Secularism?

This workshop gathers scholars who are interested in the myriad recent critiques of secularism spanning a variety of academic fields: history, political science, anthropology, comparative literature, etc. Our aim is to discuss the various motives for these critiques, their implications, and what alternatives, if any, they put forward. What implications, for instance, does the critique of secularism have for the writing of history or the study of political theory, African American Studies or comparative literature? What comes after the critique of secularism? The ultimate goal is not to defend or critique so-called secular studies. Rather, it is to discuss where this field might be heading.

For more information, visit the workshop's event page.

Making Religious Peace: A Historical Perspective

Between 1529 and 1651 six major clusters of religious war engulfed Europe. Most of these wars ended in some form of political compromise, but even in the exceptional cases religious war eventually yielded to religious peace.  Though historians traditionally focus on the wars, this presentation will focus on the broad and durable pattern of religious peace that followed.

Today, with headlines suggesting a new era of religious war on an even broader scale, religious peace seems elusive, if not impossible.  The evidence from European history, however, suggests otherwise. Using photographs to illustrate what religious peace actually looked like in early modern Europe — shared churches, nominally hidden worship spaces, clandestine sites for ritual practice, and the like — this presentation will show how it is possible to envision and to work for a more peaceful future.