In our interview with co-director Jonathan Sheehan and former co-director Mark Csikszentmihalyi, we discuss the origins of BCSR, what has been accomplished in five years of programming, and the bright future of the center. The interview is part of our ongoing series "Five Questions" which seeks to spotlight the individuals and moments that have made the first five years of BCSR a success. Listen here.

Arlie R. Hochschild | Professor Emerita of Sociology, UC Berkeley
Thomas W. Laqueur | Helen Fawcett Professor of History Emeritus, UC Berkeley
Thursday, February 7 | 5 pm | 220 Stephens Hall

Public University, Public Values is a new series of talks and conversations co-organized by BCSR and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. The series is prompted by the recognition that the current moment of crisis in the liberal democracies of Europe and North America is, among other things, a crisis of value. The “political” focus that has shaped the humanities and much of the social sciences over the past several decades has made possible an extraordinary body of scholarship and teaching.  Yet it has often left unexplored the moral terrain on which the current crisis has unfolded. The aim of the series is to open up new perspectives on how the humanities and the social sciences do, or don’t, help us develop our own moral and ethical vocabularies. Implicit in these conversations would be how we, as scholars and teachers, do or don’t include moral and ethical concerns in our teaching and—no less important—how these concerns might be placed in dialogue with the political emphases that have guided much of our work in the past few decades as a way of reaffirming the dynamism and importance of humanistic study for the larger social fabric... (more)

February 22-23 | 5-7 pm | 820 Barrows Hall

For the past two years, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, has convened a series of workshops and seminars concerning, broadly speaking, the place of theology in the university. From the outset, our goal was to challenge narrow conceptions of both secular learning and “theology,” in hopes of fostering robust conversation about the teaching of religion in the pluralist setting of the modern university.

,” the conference will assemble at Berkeley a group of talented and creative thinkers who we believe Theology and the Public UniversityOn February 22-23, 2019, we will be holding the culminating conference for the project. Entitled “are pioneering new ways of imagining theology, broadly construed.

There are three major inquiry-areas for the conference...(more)