SEMINARS & WORKSHOPS
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Spring 2025
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Facilitators: Dr. Monica Mikhail, Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P., and Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher
Last offered: Spring 2025The Undergraduate Working Group is an opportunity for undergraduate students and recent graduates to discuss the necessities of deep thinking and good intellectual work. "On Friendship” aimed to provide students with resources for understanding the value of all kinds of friendships they will encounter throughout their undergraduate career. Through conversations with Senior Fellows and faculty, we discussed the value and contingencies of friendship. Some questions included: What is the nature of friendship? Does it require necessary conditions? Are there evaluative measures to determine whether a friendship is worthwhile? And, what social value does it offer and what ends does it serve?
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Facilitator: Professor Kristen Primus
Last offered: Spring 2025Descartes designed his Meditations to be thought with, or meditated upon: we readers are not just supposed to follow the Meditator's reports of his cognitive maneuvers, assessing the arguments he's making and eventually witnessing his arrival at the utmost certainty about foundational metaphysical matters—we're supposed to engage in the thinking for ourselves and bring ourselves to the very same certainty. In our meetings, we read the first few Meditations aloud, slowly and meditatively. We reflected on the argumentative moves of the Meditations as well as the distinction between merely understanding how an argument is supposed to go and accepting an argument in a more wholehearted way.
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Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher
Last offered: Spring 2025The usual default goal of our academic work is a completed project: a gradeable paper, a publishable article, a conclusive argument. But academic work – and the intellectual life more broadly – requires more maintenance, cultivation and wandering than that which can be readily turned into a legible product. The seminar focused on so-called “half-baked thoughts” – provisional, nascent thinking, the trying on of ideas, or the thinking of thoughts that one may not be committed to. Loosely-held, incomplete thoughts do not have an immediate value in an economy of content production, but nonetheless have a necessary role in an intellectual life – no matter how derivative, repetitive, unfinished or private they may be. We considered the theory and practice of provisional thinking from Roland Barthes and Blaise Pascal. Then, the seminar turned to discuss the habits and practice of this undervalued kind of thinking. How can we deliberately engage and embrace thinking that may have nothing immediately to “show” for it? How can we nurture and enjoy an intellectual life that is not wholly tethered to the production of academic content?
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Facilitators: Dr. Monica Mikhail and Jared Brunner
Last offered: Spring 2025What does the act of walking make possible for our thinking? How can walking serve as a form of engagement with cultural and philosophical ideas? In this two week seminar, we discussed the physical and intellectual task of walking described in Francis Petrach’s “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux” and Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City.” Through these readings, we will consider how a philosophy of walking can further our thinking about ideas, our environment, and ourselves.
Fall 2024
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Facilitators: Professor Steve Justice and Professor Lara Buchak
Last offered: Fall 2024A lot of people think it should be hard to be a Christian and a college student. Is it? Should it be? And in any case, how can you do both well? In this two-day retreat, Professors Lara Buchak and Steven Justice offered intellectual and practical perspectives on Christians’ relationships with ideas and arguments, with professors and peers, with churches and pastors, and with the choices they face in their own lives. This retreat offered an opportunity for students to reflect together on what it means to be faithful to the choices we've already made.
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Facilitators: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher, Professor Miguel García-Valdecasas, and Dr. Monica Mikhail
Last offered: Fall 2024"On Integrity” provided students with resources for understanding what it means to be a person of integrity in both personal and professional contexts. Through conversations with Senior Fellows, we discussed habits of thought, work, and behavior that ground our ability to act with integrity in all areas of life. Some questions we discussed were: What does integrity require of us? Is it possible to be the same person — to act in the same way — at home, in the classroom, and with fellow students and faculty? What is the value of — and challenges to — living with integrity? And how do we practice living honestly, in both private and in public?
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Facilitator: Professor David Marno
Last offered: Fall 2024Iris Murdoch’s philosophy is the most influential modern defense of the view that the beautiful and the good are ultimately one. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is that in her account, acts of attending to beauty contribute to moral improvement. In fact, these two descriptions might be seen as different interpretations of Murdoch’s work, with the first focusing on the role of moral realism in her theory and the second invested in the question of practice and particularity. In this seminar, we talked about the relationship between these two interpretations. What is the good and how does it relate to the beautiful? How do we motivate ourselves to be better, and how do we translate our moral ideals into practice? What is the role of literature and the arts in Murdoch theory, and how do they compare to religion? And, last but not least, what do we, distracted habitants of the 21st century, make of the emphasis she places on attention?
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Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P.
Last offered: Fall 2024Can we study science at a modern university and believe in miracles at the same time? Modern people, including believers, can be embarrassed by miracles, fearing to be accused of superstition or unwarranted credulity. Can it be ever rational to believe in miracles? We read two texts and considered the following questions: What are miracles? Can they violate laws of nature? How can we know that they have occurred? What do they tell us about God, about the world and ourselves?
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Facilitator: Dr. Monica Mikhail
Last offered: Fall 2024How do social scientists recognize the “sacred” and make it legible to others? What are the essential characteristics of religion for social scientists? And how does a particular mode of inquiry shape the arguments one can make about religion and the religious life? In this seminar, we explored these questions by discussing two distinct sociological and philosophical frameworks for understanding religious experience. We read excerpts from two foundational figures in the study of religion — Emile Durkheim and William James — and explored how the sacred is defined, categorized, and apprehended according to their respective disciplines.
Spring 2024
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Facilitators: Professor Katie Peterson and Professor Young Suh
Last offered: Spring 2024We know about physical habits, like running or eating greens, and moral habits, like prayer or good actions. But what about aesthetic habits? These can be understood as habits of beauty: ways of placing ourselves in the path of aesthetic experience for the sake of self-investigation, healing, and even grace. In this workshop, participants shared examples of artists who worked with aesthetic habits and explored rituals that might deepen one’s relationship with beauty. Writing and thinking exercises framed aesthetic habits and their potential uses. The discussion also considered philosopher Elaine Scarry’s suggestion that contemplation of beauty might lead one toward justice. The workshop was timed with the Christian liturgical season of Lent, drawing on its traditions of directing the soul toward God through daily habits.
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Facilitator: Professor Miguel García-Valdecasas
Last offered: Spring 2024All of us would like to be remembered as good persons, but a good person has virtues of character—dispositions to behave well in all circumstances. Some of these virtues are intellectual, concerning how we nurture our intellect: what information we seek, how we use it, and whether we direct it toward our own flourishing and that of others. This seminar discussed the importance of intellectual virtues and why we should pursue them. The first session examined Aristotle's notion of virtue and its contemporary relevance, while the second session focused on specific intellectual virtues such as autonomy, tenacity, courage, humility, and open-mindedness. Participants considered the contexts in which these virtues have the most value and how pursuing them might help one become a more proficient thinker.
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Facilitators: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher, Professor Kristen Primus, Professor Chiyuma Elliot, and Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P.
Last offered: Spring 2024The Undergraduate Working Group provided undergraduate students and recent graduates with opportunities to discuss the necessities of deep thinking and good intellectual work. The Spring 2024 working group, Virtuous Living, explored approaches to cultivating virtue when engaging with intellectual content, fellow students, and faculty within the classroom. Through conversations with Senior Fellows and faculty, participants discussed and practiced what is required when we take thinking, learning, and one another seriously. Some of the guiding questions included: What does it mean to seek to live a virtuous life as an undergraduate student? How does the pursuit of virtue shape the ways we listen to and engage others? What virtues undergird intellectual friendship, and what practices does it require? The group took as a starting point the shared goal of cultivating virtues for life within and beyond the university.
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Facilitators: Natalie Runkle Griffioen, Jared Brunner
Last offered: Spring 2024Undergraduate and graduate students participated in a semester-long discussion series on the virtues that help us think with historical interlocutors. In each session, a facilitator introduced a historical thinker they studied as part of their academic work. Participants considered how to engage past thinkers whose ideas might feel distant or challenging, and what virtues are required to thoughtfully engage their work. Discussions explored how striving to understand the best version of another’s arguments might cultivate virtues that enable us to think well with others. The group also reflected on how our own historical moment and our moral or religious commitments can both shape and enrich the ways we engage with thinkers from the past.
Fall 2023
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Facilitator: Professor David Marno
Last offered: Fall 2023Although we often imagine that Shakespeare ended his career with The Tempest—breaking his staff and drowning his book like Prospero—he actually concluded his career by returning, in his last active year as a playwright, to the genre with which he began: the history play. Yet Henry VIII was unlike anything he had written before. In focusing on England’s most divorce-prone king, Shakespeare and his co-author John Fletcher chose a period uncomfortably close to their own, perhaps explaining the play’s overt propaganda. Amidst the pageantry and celebration of both the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, the play invited reflection on what it means to turn the recent past into “history.” Participants discussed how history appears from different vantage points—below, above, and from the perspective of the audience—and how Shakespeare and Fletcher negotiated the demands of the present with traces of the past. The seminar explored what happens when the past is not neatly separable from the present.
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Facilitator: Professor Kristen Primus
Last offered: Fall 2023This seminar examined different approaches to studying the history of philosophy. Some historians of philosophy prefer to adhere closely to texts, while others pursue more speculative reconstructions of arguments. The group discussed the tension between treating philosophical texts as historical artifacts and engaging them as active participants in ongoing philosophical conversations. Through these discussions, participants considered the merits and limitations of various methods and reflected on whether the distinction between historical and contemporary philosophical work is, in the end, as sharp as it seems.
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Facilitators: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher, Dr. Monica Mikhail, Alan Templeton, Professor Katie Peterson, Professor Karl Van Bibber
Last offered: Fall 2023The Undergraduate Working Group provided a space for students to engage in deep intellectual inquiry. This working group offered students tools to harness the possibilities of their undergraduate education and reflect on the habits that support rigorous thought. Through conversations with Senior Fellows, participants explored how personal commitments inform academic work, what role creativity plays in intellectual life, and what different forms of thinking allow us to understand and create.
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Facilitators: Natalya Nielson, Helia Pouyanfar, Ryan Reyndolds
Last offered: Fall 2023Undergraduate and graduate students participated in a semester-long discussion series on the relationship between religious traditions and intellectual work. Facilitated by graduate students and recent graduates, the series explored how religious beliefs, ideas, or concepts might implicitly shape one’s research or creative practice. Participants reflected on the implications of these influences for good intellectual work and considered what resources various religious traditions offer to help scholars and artists become the kinds of thinkers they aspire to be.
Spring 2023
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Facilitators: Professor Katie Peterson and Professor Young Suh
Last offered: Spring 2023The seminar explored what it means to seek the Good Life as an exile from one’s homeland and to speak in a language that is not one’s own. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, born in Korea in 1951 during the Korean War, emigrated to the United States in 1962. Her book Dictee served as an artistic response to living as a Korean woman and artist in the West during a time when Korea was still rebuilding after decades of colonization and war. In Dictee, Cha juxtaposed poems, historical documents, personal reflections, and photographs across three languages—English, Korean, and French—to create a self-portrait formed through multiplicity and tension. The seminar discussed writing as an act of speech grounded in personal experience and shaped by historical forces, as well as the struggle to narrate life from within one’s own body. Participants engaged with Cha’s work as readers, viewers, and writers, reflecting on how the act of speaking relates to the possibility of the Good Life and what it means for an exile to find a voice.
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Facilitator: Dr. Monica Mikhail
Last offered: Spring 2023This seminar investigated what it means to live a good life when the condition of living is inseparable from dying. Participants examined how anthropological attention to death illuminates the contingencies of life as differently experienced across contexts. In the first session, discussions focused on the questions that arise for anthropologists studying the boundaries of life and the possibility of a good life in situations where such a life seems unattainable. The second session considered excerpts from ethnographies of communities living amid disaster, exploring how the intrusion of dying into everyday existence reshapes our understanding of what constitutes the preconditions of a good life.
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Facilitators: Professor Kristin Primus, Professor Karl Van Bibber, Professor Carolyn Chen, Professor Joanna Picciotto, Professor Drew Jacoby-Senghor
Last offered: Spring 2023Undergraduate and graduate students took part in a semester-long conversation with UC Berkeley faculty on disciplinary approaches to “The Good Life.” Participants explored what different academic disciplines can teach about meaning, fulfillment, and well-being, and where the limits of disciplinary knowledge might lie. The discussions invited reflection on what intellectual tools each field offers for understanding and pursuing a life well-lived and what aspects of human experience remain beyond their reach.
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Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher
Last offered: Spring 2023Reading poetry (and literature broadly) doesn’t make us better people; it doesn’t necessarily reveal the secrets to living well; and it doesn’t even provide accurate information about the world or the experience of others. Sometimes it is enjoyable to read, but just as frequently it doesn’t bring pleasure, peace, or anything else. What is the use, then, of poetry in a life well-lived? In this reading group, we thought about these arguments in relation to poems in Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars.
Fall 2022
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Facilitator: Professor Elizabeth Kovats
Last offered: Fall 2022This seminar sought to develop a foundational understanding of commitment, both as a concept and as a component of a life well lived. Why does it, often, induce fear? And, perhaps surprisingly, how does it foster belonging, agency and freedom? Would a commitment to something intangible, such as one's imagination, compel thinking/acting that is distinct from that of a commitment to a personal/social relationship? Through shared discussion, participants worked toward a collective definition of commitment and its role in shaping human experience.
Spring 2022
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Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P.
Last offered: Spring 2022This seminar examined the reciprocal relationship between humans and technology—how we create it, and how it in turn shapes us. Participants discussed the profound transformations brought about by technological change, from the expansion of accessible resources to the reordering of everyday life under new technological paradigms. Guided by selected readings and a documentary, the group reflected on how technology reconstructs our relationships with others, the world, ourselves, and the divine.
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Facilitators: Professor Chiyuma Elliott and Professor Katie Peterson
Last offered: Spring 2022Taking its title from Lucille Clifton’s poem “We Do Not Know Very Much About Lucille’s Inner Life,” the series drew inspiration from African American poets who engaged the Western intellectual tradition—particularly the Bible—in creative and subversive ways. Participants read and reflected on these poets’ works to explore new formal, technical, and conceptual approaches in their own writing. The workshops, co-sponsored by the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative and the Berkeley Institute, invited students to think deeply about interiority, tradition, and creative transformation.
Fall 2021
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Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P.
Last offered: Fall 2021This seminar explored the universal reality of suffering and the human struggle to understand it. Participants reflected on the nature and meaning of pain, suffering, and evil, considering questions about their causes and compatibility with the existence of a good God. Through selected readings and discussion, the group examined how the inability to comprehend suffering can deepen it, and how philosophical and theological perspectives might help illuminate its place in human experience.
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Facilitators: Professor Lara Buchak and Professor Steven Justice
Last offered: Fall 2021This seminar considered what it means to be both a Christian and a college student, and whether such a balance should be difficult. Professors Lara Buchak and Steven Justice offered intellectual and practical reflections on how Christian students navigate their relationships with ideas and arguments, with professors and peers, with churches and pastors, and with the personal choices they face in academic life. The discussion invited students to think about how faith and scholarship can inform and challenge each other in the context of university life.
Spring 2021
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Facilitators: Professor Karl van Bibber and Dr. Elliot Rossomme
Last offered: Spring 2021This seminar examined the complex and evolving relationship between Christianity and modern science, challenging the popular notion that the two are inherently in conflict. Participants explored how scientific developments, such as evolutionary theory, quantum mechanics, and modern cosmology, interact with classical Christian doctrines of creation, evil and suffering, divine and human agency, and the ultimate future of the cosmos. Taking as a starting point the assumption that both scientific and theological perspectives offer valuable insights, the group discussed how each framework can enrich the other. Each meeting focused on a distinct topic, guided by short readings that framed conversation and reflection.
Fall 2020
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Facilitators: Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P. and Dr. Matthew Rose
Last offered: Fall 2020This discussion group introduced participants to the foundational ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential thinkers in Western thought. The sessions focused on Aquinas’s understanding of human happiness and the moral virtues, helping first-time readers approach his writings with confidence. Participants explored how Aquinas conceived of the moral life as part of the rational creature’s journey toward its ultimate end and true happiness.
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Facilitators: Miguel Samano and Joseph Rodriguez
Last offered: Fall 2020This reading group explored key essays by philosopher Charles Taylor on human nature, culture, and Christianity. Known for his broad intellectual range and accessible style, Taylor’s work provided a point of entry into discussions that bridged the humanities and the sciences. Participants examined his major ideas and their continuing relevance to contemporary questions of meaning, belief, and modern life.
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Facilitator: Dr. Cassandra Sciortino
Last offered: Fall 2020This seminar examined the depiction of the Virgin Mary in European painting from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into modern movements. Participants considered Marian art through both theological and art-historical lenses, discussing how images of Mary have reflected changing devotional, cultural, and artistic contexts across centuries.
