PAST EVENTS
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Facilitator: Alan Templeton
Offered: Spring 2025Participants explored several drawings and four paintings in UC Berkeley’s collection, taken out of storage for this occasion and placed in conversation with the Berkeley Institute’s semester theme, “Varieties of Thinking.” The four paintings, produced between 1630–1750, revealed multiple facets of their subjects. The group discussed the kinds of thinking that art invites us to engage in and consider what each painting requires of us—how long we must look to decipher and fully appreciate what each work offers.
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Facilitator: Professor Brian Green
Offered: Spring 2025Artificial Intelligence offers to make life easier by helping to bear its cognitive load. While this made sense in some cases, it clearly did not in others. As free and thinking beings, participants considered how to determine when AI should or should not be used. The discussion explored why it is acceptable to outsource some cognitive tasks but not others, and how to preserve human agency and freedom—both one’s own and that of others—in the face of overly helpful AI. The talk presented principles for thinking about the respective roles of humanity and AI in the future.
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Facilitators: Professor Karl van Bibber and Hayley Williams
Offered: Fall 2024The extraordinary breadth, interconnectedness, and speed of technology development posed severe challenges for its responsible use. Disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, and quantum information evolved at a speed that outstripped the normal pace of moral reflection and the construction of ethical frameworks required to promote human welfare and prevent catastrophe. A particular case of interest was the renaissance of nuclear technologies in general and the revolution in small modular reactors in particular; these held immense potential to supply the planet’s burgeoning energy needs while decarbonizing the atmosphere. At the same time, a host of issues arose, including the potential for proliferation leading to new nuclear weapons programs around the world, accidents and their long-term consequences, and the disposition of nuclear waste. More recently, questions emerged about fair and equitable access to nuclear power in light of big tech companies buying up future capacity to power their AI data centers, with their boundless energy needs. This talk reflected on these nuclear matters and the ethical frameworks required to think through the challenges they pose.
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Offered: Fall 2024
This series explored the contours of faith in God both within and outside religious tradition. Participants considered what commitment to belief looks like in individual lives and within communities, and whether belief precludes doubt or might instead be strengthened by it. The series paired these questions with screenings of The Tree of Life (2011) and Of Gods and Men (2010), which examined belief amidst uncertainty and tumult.
Screening: The Tree of Life
Facilitator: Cameron Hughes
Directed by Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life follows a family in 1950s Texas, focusing on the eldest son, Jack, as he journeys through childhood, loss of innocence, and disillusioned adulthood while attempting to reconcile his relationship with his father. Feeling at odds with the modern world, Jack seeks answers to the origins of life and the possibility of faith.Screening: Of Gods and Men
Facilitator: Angelina Wilson
Directed by Xavier Beauvois, Of Gods and Men portrays a community of eight French monks at the Monastery of Notre-Dame de l'Atlas in 1996 Algeria. Threatened by fundamentalist terrorists during the Algerian civil war, the monks face the difficult question of whether to remain with their community or return to France. -
Facilitator: Alan Templeton
Offered: Spring 2024This event offered a closer look at five paintings in UC Berkeley's collection. Participants delved into different facets of virtue through depictions of famous scenes and figures from the Christian tradition. The underlying themes were universal—kindness, generosity, contemplation, tenderness, and bravery. These works were created both as beautiful decorations and as aids to prayer and reflection. Together, the group brought them to life through shared discussion and careful looking.
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Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher
Offered: Fall 2023In their most monumental novels, Invisible Man and The Outsider, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright both took themselves to be responding to, among other things, the question of Black Americans' relationship to the Western world. Their thematic and stylistic responses to this question were very different, as was the reception of their novels: Ellison’s won the National Book Award, while Wright’s was critically panned, even by his close friends.
This talk delved into the context of this motivating question and the significance of their respective responses. Particular attention was given to the metaphor of the “underground,” which gave different shapes to both novels and to the question they raised: can one ever really step outside of culture and the intellectual traditions that shape it? And what consequences does that have for the task of thinking and living?
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Facilitators: Professor Matthew Vernon and Professor Katie Peterson
Offered: Spring 2023Since the Revolution, Americans have drawn on the Middle Ages to imagine the nation's place in world history, from Thomas Jefferson's obsession with all things Anglo-Saxon to the poetry and fiction of the nineteenth century (e.g., Walt Whitman's “Song of the Exposition” and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), which used the medieval period to understand the ruptures of the Civil War and modern industrialism.
But these American “medievalisms” have often been considered the purview of white writers and thinkers—sometimes even a way to limit Americanness to a white, “Anglo-Saxon” racial identity. Less known or understood were the many ways African Americans like Charles Chesnutt and W. E. B. Du Bois similarly repurposed the heritage of medieval Europe. As Professor Vernon writes, African Americans “also read the texts of the Middle Ages but they approached the study of the Middle Ages as a strange sort of inheritance, one in which they could dimly see the outlines of their own struggles and envision alternative means of reading their existence within the United States.”
This event explored why it has been important to Americans to trace their language, culture, and history back to a medieval past, how Black Americans used that past in their own literary and intellectual work, and what the relationship between American history and the medieval period can teach us about the study of history more generally. -
Offered: Spring 2023
This film series explored whether the good life is free of illness, pain, and want, or whether it might instead be found in the midst of them. Across three films screened during the spring semester, participants considered how technological progress, human vulnerability, and the limits of earthly life shaped competing visions of what it means to live well.
Screening: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Referenced by Tracy K. Smith in Life on Mars, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey explores existential questions related to humanity’s relationship with technology and the mysteries of the universe.Screening: The Great Beauty
At his lavish 65th birthday party, the film’s protagonist, Jep Gambardella, receives shocking news that compels him to contemplate a life that transcends the glamour and decadence of his lifestyle in Rome.Screening: Capernaum
A 12-year old Lebanese boy sues his parents for the "crime" of giving him life and forcing him to endure life in the Beirut slums. -
Facilitator: Professor Steven Justice
Offered: Fall 2022The Pensées of Blaise Pascal are notes for a book he never wrote; they are by turns brilliant and baffling, inspiring and provoking. Among those that have provoked readers most are some that devalue life in this world and urge a frankly self-interested pursuit of life in the next. This event took a closer look at these difficult and unfashionable thoughts, which suggest that a principled and generous commitment to our present life might require both a clear view of its limitations and our self-interest.
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Offered: Fall 2022
This series explored what it looks like to commit to a craft and to the development of a mode of expression and meaning-making. Participants considered what this kind of commitment demands, what it requires over time, and how sustained commitment to a craft can transform a person. Events in the series addressed these questions with artists working in a range of mediums.
Love and Trouble: Commitment to Craft in the Life of the Artist
Facilitators: Professor Katie Peterson and Professor Young Suh
This conversation examined what it means to make a commitment to life as an artist and how such commitment resembles other forms of commitment. Writer Katie Peterson and photographer Young Suh reflected on the nature of craft and the purpose of a medium, the artist’s studio, the importance of routine, the reality of doubt and self-questioning, returning to one’s practice and principles in a time of crisis, and the vexed and necessary nature of ambition. The event included writing exercises and opportunities for discussion and participation.Commitment to the Creative Life
Facilitators: John Walker and Pamela Walker
This discussion explored what a commitment to the craft of theatre and animation entails and how such commitment might shape one’s inner life. Pixar producer John Walker and actor, writer, and director Pamela Walker reflected on what their respective crafts teach about how we ought to live, considering the relationship between artistic discipline and personal formation. -
Facilitator: Professor Carolyn Chen
Offered: Spring 2022“Work Pray Code explored how tech companies were bringing religion into the workplace in ways that replaced traditional places of worship, blurred the line between work and religion, and transformed the nature of spiritual experience in modern life. […] but […] our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere were paying the price.”
Professor Chen’s work invited participants to consider the role of work in their lives and how workplace structures shape spiritual development and social commitments.
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Facilitators: Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin and Dr. Matthew Crawford
Offered: Spring 2021What does it mean to feel at home in the world? What role does friendship play in this? And what role does solitude play? In his work on belonging, Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin showed that the healthy human self is not tightly bounded, but distributed among a network of friends. Drawing on classical philosophy, literature, and contemporary science, Dr. Corbin argued that a contemporary epidemic of loneliness might be addressed through a deeper understanding of the role of solitude in human relationships.
Dr. Matthew Crawford (author of Shop Class as Soul Craft) joined Dr. Corbin in conversation to consider why and how solitude might serve as an antidote to consumerism, loneliness, and polarization—and as a path back to authentic friendship. -
Facilitator: Cassandra Sciortino
Offered: Fall 2021What does it mean to make and protect a space for works of art and to spend time with them in contemplation without concern for advantage or gain? This seminar considered how the museum as a space of leisurely contemplation could return visitors to their bodies, dignify them, and lead to deeper connection with themselves and others. Art historian Cassandra Sciortino led a tour of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, discussing nineteenth-century museum reformers such as John Ruskin and exploring how themes from Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought might be engaged within the art museum.
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Facilitators: Professor Katie Peterson and Jesse Nathan
Offered: Fall 2021This conversation between poets Jesse Nathan and Katie Peterson explored what the “inner life” means for a poet and how one might speak of the “soul.” The discussion considered whether poetry could help recover the inner life and how it relates to religious practices such as prayer and worship. Participants reflected on what the idea of the inner life might offer during periods of social upheaval, climate crisis, and pandemic. Nathan and Peterson read poems, discussed their own work, and invited conversation with attendees.
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Facilitator: Professor Zena Hitz
Offered: Fall 2021Graduate students and faculty were invited to discuss the impediments to cultivating an intellectual life in the contemporary university. Do we have time for thought and study that isn’t purely for professional utility? How does one cultivate the inner life—both the intellect and the soul—with such demands? Is there a way to energize our professional tasks with the curiosity that led us into our fields in the first place—or can such curiosity only be found in leisure? During this event, participants thought together about such questions, with the assumption that conversations like these are a good place to start.
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Facilitators: Professor Karl van Bibber and Elliot Rossomme
Offered: Fall 2021Drawing on Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought, this seminar examined ways that learning can become a tool in the pursuit of status, wealth, justice, or other social ends. Professors Karl van Bibber and Elliot Rossomme reflected on how scientists encounter pressures both similar to and distinct from those faced by scholars in the humanities. Together, participants considered whether, why, and how space for contemplation might be sustained within scientific research.
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Facilitator: Professor Robert Russell
Offered: Spring 2020Where do science and religion fundamentally agree? Where do they fundamentally clash? This dinner talk with theologian and physicist Prof. Robert Rusell introduced students to some of the most pressing issues in the dialogue between religion and science. It discussed recent debates in cosmology as well as continuing controversies in evolutionary theory.
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Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher
Offered: Spring 2020Rather than provide any academic cheat codes, this dinner talk asked: what are the most important things that Berkeley students want to learn, and what are the myths that get in the way of learning those things? Participants brainstormed their own manifestos for student life.
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Facilitator: Professor Steven Cortright
Offered: Fall 2019It's common to hear from religious believers that many "secular" political values function like "religious" dogmas. "Woke" culture, in particular, often appears to have its own faith, its own evangelism, and its own penitential practices. In this dinner talk, Prof. Steven Cortright asked if these charges have any merit and whether the ancient spirituality called "gnosticism" might be at the root of modern progressive politics.
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Facilitator: Dr. Brian Green
Offered: Fall 2019 -
Facilitator: Professor Karl Van Bibber
Offered: Spring 2019 -
Facilitator: Professor William Mahrt
Offered: Spring 2019 -
Facilitator: Professor Jonathan Sheehan
Offered: Spring 2019From the beginning of the Christian tradition, sacrifice has been its stumbling block, both the theological center of its doctrines, yet often in deep tension with its practice. This dinner talk with historian Jonathan Sheehan explored how Christians have come to rethink its understanding of sacrifice, and in the process came to discover that things they had taken to be central to their faith did not, in fact, seem to belong there at all.
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Facilitators: Cassandra Sciortino and Dr. Matthew Rose
Offered: Spring 2016Beauty is something most of us experience intensely but struggle to understand reflectively. We glimpse beauty all around us: in nature, art, the human body, and even in the rules of thought and number. But what can we say, if anything, about the character of beauty as such? This talk sought to understand beauty as the “splendor of form” and its properties of integrity, proportion, and simplicity, and to discuss how beauty might guide us into a deeper knowledge of love, nature, and revelation.