Description
In 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, established a new Center for the Study of Religion. A joint initiative of the deans of humanities and social sciences, the Center brings together scholars from departments as diverse as Anthropology, Linguistics, History, English, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, Political Science, Philosophy, and Near Eastern Studies. Because UC-Berkeley does not have a department of religion, the dozens of faculty whose research concerns religion have always been housed within other departments. The Center’s goals are to encourage individual scholarship, to build collaborative research teams and networks, to support energetic conversations about religion, and to produce workshops, seminars, conferences, and other public events that will bring these conversations into the wider world.
Shortly before the Center’s launch, and in conjunction with the Luce Foundation’s 75th anniversary initiative, UC-Berkeley approached the Foundation regarding possible support for a major multidisciplinary research initiative, focused on “religion in the world.” Although the project was not selected for support within the context of the 75th anniversary initiative, a new proposal to Luce’s Theology Program grew out of the earlier inquiry, and was funded in 2015. Central to the project has been an engagement with one of the most important and yet, in public universities, under-investigated aspects of religion: theology. Through a program in “public theology” that has anchored the work, Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) has sought to develop a space for the study of theology in the public university. Building on this recent work, the Center now seeks to extend and refine its attention to theology, through a project focused specifically on theology and democracy.
The project will respond both to recent developments in the humanities and the social sciences and to challenges currently faced by democratic societies around the globe. Early scholars of democracy studied different constitutional designs, presidential or parliamentary forms, and federal or unitary structures, primarily in various countries of the modern West, without paying particular attention to the complexities of the religious and cultural traditions of those same countries. One reason for this was that most early Western democracies were relatively homogeneous, in some cases as a result of the powerful coercive homogenizing processes following the rise of the modern state system.
Today, democratic governments around the globe manage societies that are broader and more diverse. Studies of democracy have begun to follow suit, as scholars have questioned conceptions of religious traditions as merely superstitious and uniformly exclusivist, and responded to the resurgence of religion by rethinking both secularization narratives and democratic theory. Despite these developments, the relationship between democracy and theology remains undertheorized, in part because of the limitations of our conceptions of theology itself. As the co-directors of the BCSR write in their proposal, “In order to give fresh force to the question of the relationship between theology and democracy, we need to develop a more capacious, interdisciplinary and pluralistic understanding of theology as it has influenced and continues to influence democratic practices.”
BCSR’s proposed project responds to this challenge by seeking to develop integrated research, curricular programs, and outreach, all of which will relate to its signature initiative, a “public course” in democracy and theology – a sequence of public lectures and seminars that will span across three years and involve a novel type of collaboration between Berkeley faculty and students on the one hand, and non-academic publics on the other. Annual themes will include the theological contexts and motives for voting in both ancient and modern societies, the role of religious institutions and accommodations in American healthcare, and the relationship between theology and republican politics in the past and present. In response to the current COVID-19 crisis, and in conjunction with the launch of the public course, Berkeley will host a one-semester “religion and pandemic” virtual public forum in fall 2020.
Alongside the activities of the public course in democracy and theology, BCSR will also continue a series of activities related to its wider work on theology and the public university, including a working group on theology in the curriculum, a multidisciplinary public theology inquiry group, and a range of new and ongoing collaborative research initiatives. The Luce Foundation’s grant would fund small stipends for speakers and faculty conveners of the public course, provide awards for graduate students participating in the public course, fund collaborative research projects related to the project’s core themes, and support a postdoctoral fellow and a part-time project coordinator.
