OUR SEMESTER THEMES &
COMMUNITY READ

Our semester themes frame the core of our programming and anchor our community conversations. We are interested in questions that persist: we seek to take up new books revealing old ideas, and old books whose ideas strike us as profoundly new.

What themes will the Berkeley Institute have in the future? We welcome suggestions from students and faculty about what they’d like to discuss as a community. Not all our events necessarily cohere with a theme, but we are always in pursuit of thinking together as a community. The Berkeley Institute seeks to raise questions that religious and philosophical traditions have continually asked across centuries. We prioritize providing a book, our “community read,” for Berkeley Institute participants to read — free of charge to all students.

FALL 2024

RELIGIOUS LIFE AND THE UNIVERSITY

The Berkeley Institute is devoting the 2024 Fall Semester to thinking about “Religious Life and the University”: If we consider the religious life in broad terms – as a commitment to practices within a faith tradition — what does it have to offer the university? What does the university have to offer it? Is it possible to access the religious life through university education? Are the perceived inconveniences of the religious life beneficial or detrimental to the aims of education? How can the religious life and the intellectual life enrich each other? These questions often inspire programming at the Berkeley Institute. But this semester, we want to directly address the value of thinking about religious traditions within the university, even if one does not claim those traditions as their own.

Our Fall 2024 Community Read, Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, dramatizes the problem of relegating religious practice to a tool of personal achievement, especially in the context of university life. It provokes us to consider, among other things, the difference between acquiring knowledge and acquiring wisdom.

Spring 2024: Virtue and the Intellectual Life

  • The Berkeley Institute devoted the 2024 spring semester to thinking about “Virtue and the Intellectual Life” and the questions it raises: What virtues are required for developing one’s own ideas, for taking the ideas of others seriously, and for forming friendships based on intellectual pursuits? What habits of thought sustain good intellectual work, both in the university and outside of it? And how might cultivating a virtuous life also entail becoming a better thinker and learner?

    We asked these questions with the conviction that good intellectual work is not the product of innate abilities, but of disciplined behaviors and habits that allow for the acquisition of certain virtues. For example, learning to truly listen well to another’s argument is not an automatic capability, but requires routine, deliberate practice that develops humility, generosity and patience. This view assumes a difference between who we are and who we must be in order to do what we want to do (e.g. think well, be a good friend, understand the biochemistry of certain bacteria). How do we become the kind of person who does the stuff we want to do well?

    Our Spring 2024 Community Read was a collection of readings curated by the Berkeley Institute. It begins with a chapter from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, “On the Nature of Virtues.” We take MacIntyre’s survey of five different accounts of virtue within the Western tradition as a starting point for exploration, and we have paired each with secondary reading selections.

Fall 2023: Our Relationship with the Past

  • Our conversations explored "Our Relationship with the Past" and the questions it raises: What claim does the past have on us? What resources do intellectual and religious traditions offer us in the present? What is the shape of history and how do we understand the significance of individual human lives within it? How can we think about the past without merely idealizing or censuring it?

    These questions are perennial but have gained a special urgency today with concerns about how to interpret ("presentism" and revisionism), memorialize, and claim inheritance from the past. Our Community Read, Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin, helped us think through these questions.

Spring 2023: The Good Life

  • We devoted our 2023 spring semester to “The Good Life” and the questions it raises: What does it mean to live the good life? How do different intellectual and religious traditions apprehend it? Is the good life an end in itself? And, lastly, is the good life attainable despite the contingencies of human life? Our Spring 2023 Community Read helped us think through these questions together: Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry, Life on Mars (2011). You can access our Spring 2023 guide here.

Fall 2022: Commitment

  • Our conversations this fall semester delved into the nature of commitment and its demands. Taking as our starting point our Fall 2022 Community Read, Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, we explored what it means to commit to an idea, to a discipline or major, to a community, to a craft, to a life project, to a religion. We joined Pascal, and asked: How do we make the best decisions under conditions of uncertainty? And, how do we sustain those commitments once we’ve made those decisions? You can access our reading guide for Pascal’s Pensées here.

Spring 2022: Solitude, Community and Creativity

Fall 2021: Returning to the Pleasures of the Intellectual Life

  • As students returned to classes, we read Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz. Among other questions, we asked: how can one cultivate a contemplative life in science research? What kind of access to the inner life does studying poetry afford? How can museums and aesthetic appreciation can be an egalitarian experience of interior cultivation? And graduate students and faculty had dinner with Zena Hitz to discuss the value in and challenges to being “lost in thought” in contemporary academia.