March is a big month for BCSR, and a great example of what we offer the campus and the public: innovative work on religion in its various forms and contexts, across geographies and through time. The NCAA tournament doesn’t have anything on our own “March Madness:”
We already started off with a bang with a great talk by Joseph Blankholm on Leaving Religion and Losing Culture: Secular Conversion among Hispanic Freethinkers, Black Atheists, and Ex-Muslims. We’re co-sponsoring Teena Purohit’s lecture on The “Protestant” Impulse in Modern Islamic Thought before we dive into the first of three multiday workshops in March, all supported by our Luce Foundation-funded Public Theology Program:
- Theology and Its Publics: March 9-10
- Religion and Humanitarianism in the New Age of Nationalism: March 16-17
- The Late (Wild) Augustine: March 16-17
In between the workshops we host the annual Berkeley Lecture on Religious Tolerance on March 12. This year Leigh Eric Schmidt asks Are Atheists Tolerable? American Nonbelievers and Irreligious Freedom.
That same week Mary-Jane Rubenstein visits us to discuss Pantheist Monstrosities: On Race, Gender, Divinity, and Dirt, also part of the Public Theology Program.
We round out our events lineup with two additional co-sponsorships: senior scholar Leslie Brubaker on The Princess and the Prayer Scroll and our own young postdoc, Yunus Doğan Telliel, on the Politics of Religion in Post-Coup Turkey.
Finally, just to make the month complete, we’re also funding summer research projects and offering support and mentorship to young scholars of theology.
No matter who wins the tournament, we’ll have survived our own “March Madness.” 🙂