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October 2014
News and Events
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Contents
01) October 1 | The Catholic Invasion of China, 1841 - 2000 | David Mungello
02) October 2 | Workshop on the Logic of the ‘Shamsiyya’ of Katibi | Tony Street
03) October 15 | Tolerating the Church: Exploring the US Supreme Court’s Ecclesiology | Winnifred Sullivan
04) October 16 | Proving Religion: What Evidence is Relevant? | Colloquium | Winnifred Sullivan
05) Conference on Pre-Modern and Modern China Receives BCSR Graduate Student Event Grant
All events are free and open to the public.
For more information, visit bcsr.berkeley.edu.
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01) October 1 | The Catholic Invasion of China, 1841 - 2000 | David Mungello
Berkeley Public Forum on Religion
David Mungello, Professor of History, Baylor University
Wednesday, October 1, 5-7 pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley
The Catholic Invasion of China, 1841-2000 is a subject that has undergone a great reevaluation during the last half-century. In the 1960s, it was viewed as nearly synonymous with the experience of Western imperialism. The physical incursion into China of thousands of religious ended with the expulsion of the missionaries in 1951, but the mental framework that gave rise to this incursion persisted throughout the twentieth century. The anti-Catholic campaign of Communist persecution and imprisonment led to spiritual growth rather than decline, a development that was completely misread by most foreign journalists and academics. Viewed from a short-term historical perspective, the Catholic invasion of nineteenth and twentieth-century China was a very negative experience –a debacle-but viewed from a long-term perspective, the invasion contributed to the transformation of a mission church into an indigenous religion. In the process, the Catholic invasion enriched Chinese culture while the Chinese church enriched Catholicism and made it more universal. The present division between the patriotic and underground Catholic churches is likely to remain unresolved until there has been some accommodation between the twin issues of the Vatican’s foreign interference in Chinese affairs and the Chinese state’s restrictions on the free practice of religion. (Mungello)
 David Mungello has taught at colleges in Hong Kong, New York, Iowa, Düsseldorf and, since 1994, at Baylor University, Texas. He was one of the first foreign scholars to visit the former Jesuit Xujiahui (Zikawei) library, Shanghai in 1986 and he was in Beijing and Hangzhou during the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident. He has published eight books, including Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (1985), The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785 (2001), Drowning Girls in China: Female Infanticide since 1650 (2008), The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800 (2013), and Western Queers in China: Flight to the Land of Oz (2012).
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02) October 2 | Workshop on the Logic of the ‘Shamsiyya’ of Katibi | Tony Street
Tony Street, Director of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge
Thursday, October 2, 5-6 pm
254 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley
Dr. Tony Street, the Hartwell Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, leads four sessions on arguably the most important logic text of pre-modern Islam. The readings will be circulated in Arabic and in English translation. All are welcome to attend. To receive readings, please contact asad.ahmed@berkeley.edu.
Tony Street is the Hartwell Assistant Director of Research in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity and Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He finished his doctorate in 1988 on doctrines on the angels in the writings of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210), under the supervision of Tony Johns (ANU) and Georges Anawati (IDEO). Seduced by Razi's logical approach to theological problems, he began to work on Razi's logical writings, which ultimately led to work on Avicenna's foundational texts on logic. A leading scholar of his generation on Arabo-Islamic logic, Dr. Street has published a number of seminal studies on aspects of the logic of Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Razi, Tusi and Katibi.
Co-sponsored with the Mellon Foundation and the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
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03) October 15 | Tolerating the Church: Exploring the US Supreme Court’s Ecclesiology | Winnifred Sullivan
Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance
Winnifred Sullivan, Professor of Religious Studies and Law, Indiana University
Wednesday, October 15, 5-7 pm
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley
What is the church under modern secular law? Can it ever be constitutional for the US Supreme Court to refer to “the" church? Countless US laws give special legal privileges to churches—and, sometimes, by an imperfect analogy, to other religious groups or organizations. This lecture will explore the religious phenomenology—the political theology—of the US Supreme Court’s theory of corporate religious rights, setting its recent decisions in Hosanna-Tabor v EEOC and Burwell v Hobby Lobby in a longer historical and ecclesiological frame. (Sullivan)
 Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Affiliate Professor of Law at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author, most recently, of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, 2005), Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton, 2009), and A Ministry of Presence (Chicago, 2014).
The Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance is sponsored by the Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance.
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04) October 16 | Proving Religion: What Evidence is Relevant? | Colloquium | Winnifred Sullivan
Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance
Colloquium with Winnifred Sullivan
Thursday, October 16, 4-6 pm
3401 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
All talk of special accommodations for religiously motivated persons, or separation of religion from government, presumes a capacity to give an account of what religion is. Often what counts as religion in such situations is implicit, largely by assumed analogy to majority religious traditions; often it is strategically deliberately left ambiguous. We shout at each other about whether religion belongs or not in the public square and whether religious folks ought to have privileged exemptions from laws that apply to everyone else. But “religion” operates largely as a black box in these contests.
The familiar challenge of the incoherence of the category (at least to religion scholars) is explored here in the larger context of the crisis of the relevance and admissibility of expert evidence in the US courts. What evidence is relevant in proving religion? Subjective witness by a party? Testimony by a cleric? Authoritative religious texts? Expert reports by religious studies scholars? Who decides and how? What theories of law and of religion are implied by these various alternatives? (Sullivan)
Professor Sullivan's paper, "Proving Religion: What Evidence is Relevant," will be circulated two weeks in advance of the colloquium. To register and receive the paper, contact info.bcsr@berkeley.edu.
The Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance and colloquium is sponsored by the Endowed Fund for the Study of Religious Tolerance.
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05) Conference on Pre-Modern and Modern China Receives BCSR Graduate Student Event Grant
BCSR has selected “Between the Visible and the Invisible: Cosmology, Ritual, and Hermeneutics in Historical and Contemporary Chinese Worlds" to receive $1000 in graduate student event grant funding. The two-day event on November 14 and 15, 2014 presents the results of a yearlong interdisciplinary exploration by the Haas Junior Scholars Program of the Institute of East Asian Studies on the relations between ideas of cosmology, ritual practice, and classical scriptures in pre-modern and modern China. The conference is organized by U.C. Berkeley graduate students Jesse Chapman (East Asian Languages and Cultures) and Yueni Zhong (Art History). Papers discuss topics ranging from alchemy, meditative healing, and spirit possession, to textual exegesis, omenology, and state ritual.
BCSR’s Graduate Student Event Grants support innovative proposals for graduate student-led lectures, seminars, and conferences for public and campus audiences. U.C. Berkeley graduate students organizing Spring events are invited to apply by the next application deadline of Thursday, December 4, 2014.
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By connecting scholars, students, and the global community, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) fosters critical and creative scholarship on religion and activates this scholarship for students and the public at large.
To receive regular announcements about the BCSR, we invite you to sign up for our mailing list. For more information, or to make a donation, please visit our website.
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