Berkeley Institute Graduate Conference 2016

Theology After Christendom In 1850, nearing the end of his writing career, Soren Kierkegaard published the book that he regarded as his most personal and his most important. Training in Christianity was his summation of “what it meant to be a Christian.” It culminated...

Saved By Poetry: The Message of T.S. Eliot T.S. Eliot’s poetry possesses exquisite music , formal experiment, and indelible images: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” He is arguably...

Although their view of reality does not seem to invite it, atheists often claim that they can be just as good and moral people as religious believers. Theists, on the other hand, will frequently claim the opposite. For them, it is not so much that we need the threat...

New medical developments conjoined with legal and cultural changes raise moral questions. Genetic engineering, cloning, physician-assisted suicide, body identity integrity disorder, and patient autonomy are a few of the controverted issues of our day. In this seminar,...

Has Liberalism Failed? Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents, on both the left and right, sometimes forget that...

Theology Amid the Revolution In the autumn of 1968, the world seemed on the verge of collapse. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the growing American entanglement in Vietnam, and the assasinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy left the entire Western...

Thinking with Bad Feelings Human life isn’t a safe space–and thankfully so. Bad feelings can lead to good thoughts, and losing one’s temper can be morally productive. This seminar will argue that human reactions like anger, hatred, envy, confusion, frustration,...