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March 2016
News and Events
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Contents
01) March 3 | New Directions in Theology Graduate Student Grants Applications Due
02) March 8 | The Mongols and the Church of the East | Joel Walker
03) March 10-11 | Western Ottomanists Workshop
04) March 11-12 | Conference | Christianity and Capitalism
05) March 16 | Keynote Lecture | Bureaucracy and Salvation: Chinese Ways to Divinization | Vincent Goossaert
06) March 17-18 | Workshop | The Reception and Impact of “Theology,” Religion,” and “Philosophy” in East Asia
07) March 30 | Film Screening and Discussion | If I Give My Soul: Pentecostalism in the Prisons of Rio | Andrew Johnson
All events are free and open to the public.
For more information, visit bcsr.berkeley.edu.
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01) March 3 | New Directions in Theology Graduate Student Grants Applications Due
BCSR is pleased to announce a call for applications for the 2016-17 New Directions in Theology Graduate Student Grants, an opportunity offered through the Public Theology Program. A $5,000 grant will be awarded to incoming first-year and continuing second-year students from a variety of disciplines. Grantees participate as a cohort in biweekly meetings convened by BCSR faculty, receive intellectual guidance on research projects, and contribute to the building of a unified community of inquiry on the Berkeley campus in public theology. Applications for second-year graduate students are due on March 3. For more information, including application guidelines, visit: bcsr.berkeley.edu/news/.
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02) March 8 | The Mongols and the Church of the East | Joel Walker
Berkeley Public Forum on Religion
Joel Walker, Jon Bridgman Endowed Associate Professor of History, University of Washington
Tuesday, March 8, 5-7 pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
 Recent scholarship has drawn renewed attention to the prominence of Nestorian Christians in the Mongol Empire (1206-1368). Drawing upon a broad range of primary sources in Syriac, Latin, Turkish, and other languages, this lecture explores the role of the Ongut Turks of Inner Mongolia in the articulation of religious identity in the Mongol world.
Co-sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies Mongolia Initiative.
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03) March 10-11 | Western Ottomanists Workshop
Thursday, March 10, 3-7 pm
Friday, March 11, 8:30 am-6:30 pm
3401 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
An annual gathering of Ottoman specialists from the West coast, held this year at Berkeley, featuring a keynote panel about Ottoman history and transnationalism, and papers on religion, culture, and politics from all regions and periods of Ottoman history.
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion; Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Center for Armenian Studies; Center for Middle Eastern Studies; and the Department of History.
For more information, contact Christine Philliou at philliou@berkeley.edu.
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04) March 11-12 | Conference | Christianity and Capitalism
Friday, March 11, 1-5 pm
Saturday, March 12, 9:30 am-4 pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley
A conference presented by the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, with support from Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. Click here for a complete conference schedule.
For more information, visit rems.berkeley.edu.
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05) March 16 | Keynote Lecture | Bureaucracy and Salvation: Chinese Ways to Divinization | Vincent Goossaert
Translating Religion and Theology in Europe and Asia: West to East
Vincent Goossaert, Directeur d'études, Sciences religieuses, École Pratique des Hautes Études
Wednesday, March 16, 5-7 pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
 The earliest Chinese documents show that dead humans could become (under certain conditions) ancestors, or else suffering, possibly malevolent, and ultimately forgotten ghosts. The late Warring States period saw the more or less concurrent emergence of two new postmortem destinations: one is direct access to transcendence via self-cultivation techniques, the other is promotion into the ranks of the otherworldly bureaucracy. While initially opposed, these two options became over the following centuries intermingled in many ways, as the divine bureaucracy continued to expand, to gain complexity, and to incorporate those who had attempted to escape it. This presentation will argue that the aspiration to become a god (divinization) has ever since played a key role in Chinese religious, intellectual, and cultural history.
The Goossaert lecture is part of the workshop, Translating Religion and Theology in Europe and Asia, which brings together scholars to re-interpret the role that East Asian traditions have played in Asia and the West. The lecture launches the 2016 session on “The Reception and Impact of ‘Theology,’ ‘Religion,’ and ‘Philosophy,’ in East Asia,” held on March 17 and 18. For the workshop schedule, visit bcsr.berkeley.edu/special-event-web-page.
Translating Religion is a project of the Public Theology Program, a critical research initiative of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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06) March 17-18 | Workshop | The Reception and Impact of "Theology," "Religion," and "Philosophy" in East Asia
Translating Religion and Theology in Europe and Asia: West to East
Thursday, March 17 and Friday, March 18
9 am, 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Translating Religion and Theology in Europe and Asia is a two-part workshop series that explores the genealogy of the terms “religion” and “theology” in Europe and East Asia. The 2016 workshop, West to East, is primarily concerned with cultural flows from west to east, considering the translation and appropriation of the terms religion and theology in East Asia, and the significance of these categories on politics, society, and intellectual life. The two-day session on “The Reception and Impact of ‘Theology,’ ‘Religion,’ and ‘Philosophy’ in East Asia” is concerned with how these terms, alongside conceptions of national character, universal science, and a secular state, played a crucial part in state formation in Japan and China beginning in the nineteenth century.
The workshop session follows a keynote lecture by Vincent Goossaert, Directeur d'études, Sciences religieuses, École Pratique des Hautes Études, “Bureaucracy and Salvation: Chinese Ways to Divinization,” on Wednesday, March 16, 5-7 pm, 3335 Dwinelle Hall.
For the workshop schedule and list of speakers, visit bcsr.berkeley.edu/special-event-web-page.
Translating Religion is a project of the Public Theology Program, a critical research initiative of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
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07) March 30 | Film Screening and Discussion | If I Give My Soul: Pentecostalism in the Prisons of Rio | Andrew Johnson
Berkeley Seminars in Arts and Religion
Andrew Johnson, Filmmaker and Co-Director
Response by Laura Graham, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Iowa
Wednesday, March 30, 5-7 pm
Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Center, UC Berkeley
 The documentary If I Give My Soul began the day that co-director Andrew Johnson checked into a Brazilian prison, where he would spend two weeks living as an inmate. He ate the same food, slept in the same cells, and went through the routines as if he were incarcerated in an effort to see prison from an inmate’s perspective. During this process, Andrew was brought face-to-face with two powerful forces in the prisons: narco-trafficking gangs, and Pentecostal Christianity.
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