OUR SEMESTER THEMES &
COMMUNITY READ

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.

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.

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.

What is the difference between loneliness and solitude? Is cultivating one’s inner life a narcissistic endeavor? Why do religious and philosophical traditions conceive of it instead as a return to community? What kinds of intellectual creativity are generated from solitude and from community, respectively — and when does technology inhibit both? And how might contemporary workplace and academic culture risk instrumentalizing and misusing the practices of solitude and contemplation that religious traditions have developed? Our community is pairing these conversations with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, considering Rilke’s advice on solitude and creativity against his own youthful idealism.

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.

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. 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.