The Berkeley Democracy and Public Theology Program convened three faculty research projects to advance scholarship on the topics below:
1. Theology and the University: The English Department (David Marno, English)
Building on BCSR’s previous work on theology’s role in the modern university, this project will investigate the historical and current relationship of academic disciplines and departments to theology. One stage of the project will focus on the vexed relationship between theology and the academic study of English, asking, among other questions, what we might learn from English’s history and practices regarding the relationship between scholarship, theology, and democracy in the current moment.
2. Theology, Media, and Radical Politics in the English Reformation (Joanna Picciotto, English)
Interest in the democratizing potentials of social media (as well as their vulnerability to market capture and “bad actors”) makes this a propitious time to reexamine the Protestant Reformation as a print movement, the channel through which Luther’s contemporaries entered the age of mass communication. Of particular interest to this study is the case of seventeenth-century England, where religion changed more frequently than anywhere else in post-Reformation Europe, and the role of religion and media in the English Revolution.
3. The Political Influence of Theology (Robert Braun, Sociology)
Defying secularization theories, the political influence of theology has increased over the last few decades. Debates on religion often draw attention to how religion independently, or in combination with rising nationalism, gives birth to fundamentalist ideologies that undermine tolerance and democracy. However, a large body of academic research, varying from studies on present day Islamic mobilization in Indonesia to Catholic theology in the interwar Western-Europe, reveals a more nuanced relationship between doctrine and democracy.