Berkeley Institute

We were so thrilled to kickstart our semester and host new and returning students and faculty at last week’s Opening Reception! ✨ Over a delicious dinner catered by Angeline's Louisiana Kitchen, we announced our semester theme of Human Dignity, outlined our upcoming programs, and connected with our community. 🌎 Looking forward to seeing everyone at our upcoming events! 👋

Announcing Fall 2025 Theme and Community Read! -

Announcing Fall 2025 Theme and Community Read! This semester, we will explore how people understand the world (and themselves) as either “disenchanted” or re-enchanted. We’ll examine the ways they seek meaning, whether through explanations that transcend the merely material, natural, and rational, or by rejecting such frameworks. In partic...

The Berkeley Institute is excited to announce its first-ever May Giving Challenge today. We are excited to join together as a community with the ambitious goal of raising $20,000 by June 30th. So far, our donors, alumni and friends have already raised $10,505 toward our $20,000 goal.

Since 2011, the Berkeley Institute has been asking the questions that are as important as ever in our contemporary moment: what it is we do in the university, what kind of thinking it nurtures in us, what kind of person that thinking makes us – and how such formation matters for our personal and collective future.

Join the Berkeley Institute community in keeping these questions – and answers – alive and vibrant in the lives of many. Join our May Giving Challenge today! binst.org/support

Earlier this month, we visited the study room at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) to look at several drawings and four paintings in UC Berkeley’s collection. The art on display prompted us to try on different modes of viewing: we were students of past material cultures, introspective receivers of devotional stories, and evaluators of a work’s cumulative effect. Each piece prompted us to adapt more than one point of view, and more than one mode of thinking.

Thank you, Alan Templeton, for leading this event on “Art as Contemplation.”

Earlier this month, we visited the study room at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) to look at several drawings and four paintings in UC Berkeley’s collection. The art on display prompted us to try on different modes of viewing: we were students of past material cultures, introspective receivers of devotional stories, and evaluators of a work’s cumulative effect. Each piece prompted us to adapt more than one point of view, and more than one mode of thinking. Thank you, Alan Templeton, for leading this event on “Art as Contemplation.”

Our Fall Matching Campaign Ends Tomorrow (12/17)! Donate here! binst.org/support

We are excited to announced that we've exceed our Fall 2024 Campaign goal of 30 new donors — thank you to the 45 new donors that have given to the Berkeley Institute!

We still have the availability to claim up to $30,000 in matching funds for all new and increased gifts given by tomorrow (12/17), thanks to the generous support of a donor. All gifts directly support our mission and the programming we provide free of charge for students and faculty. To those who have already donated, thank you!

Event Recap by Intern Dominic Vitz:
A conversation with Prof. Karl van Bibber and Haley Williams on Engineering, Ethics and Society

Professor Karl van Bibber and Haley Williams reflected on various nuclear matters and considered ethical frameworks required to think through the challenges they pose. As researchers and educators, they called our attention to the twentieth century philosopher Hans Jonas. He argued that “knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action.” Jonas prompts us to reimagine and reevaluate our existing ethical frameworks regarding issues such as nuclear waste disposal. Because the impacts of modern engineering can extend far beyond our lifetimes, might it require a new ethical paradigm? And, are our current predictive models themselves sufficient grounds for ethical decision making?

The intellectual work of engineers becomes further complicated by market logic and industrial trends that inform business decisions. For instance, Professor van Bibber mentioned the investments of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in nuclear power plants may fuel their ventures into artificial intelligence. Will this technology be accessible equitably within a future dominated by industry giants? Or will these projects spark further innovation?

A participant noted that once conversations around nuclear engineering enter the political sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on the issue’s ethical stakes. At what point, then, should ethical frameworks be introduced in the timeline, from an idea’s inception to its introduction into policy? Or, more generally, when must we consider ethics during our deliberative process? Haley envisions education as a potential, though not all-encompassing solution. How might the space of the university help train engineers to consider moral challenges of their research and work?

Haley’s words allude to a powerful resonance behind Jonas’ original lecture: Perhaps the ignorance of various nuclear matters’ temporality remains inescapable. How can we make more informed decisions once we have come to terms with the limits of our ethical decision making?

Thank you to Haley Williams and Professor Karl van Bibber for an enlightening conversation!

Event Recap: Iris Murdoch’s Ethics of Attention with Prof. David Marno

What we’re still thinking about:

An English student reflected after the seminar series that “Iris Murdoch sees realism as ethical, which has ramifications for analyzing novels as well as thinking more generally about the ethical importance of seeing ourselves and others clearly.”

Through her philosophy, Murdoch attempts to bring back the moral significance of vision. She appreciates the power of a technique like prayer, but asks in The Sovereignty of Good, “What becomes of such a technique in a world without God, and can it be transformed” to suit the moral life of a non-religious person? Seeing reality for Murdoch is crucial for making the right ethical choice, and this correct “seeing” can be practiced through looking at what she calls “great art” – people like Shakespeare and Titian – as our seminar participant reflected above.

Reflecting on this event in light of our semester theme “Religious Life and the University”, we continue to ask ourselves, “Is it possible to access the religious life through university education? Can religious traditions enrich both our learning experiences and moral lives without our necessarily being attached to those traditions?”

Thank you Professor David Marno for bringing Murdoch to the Berkeley Institute and puzzling with us through her philosophical thought experiment of “practical mysticism.”

Seminar Recap: “Is it Rational to Believe in Miracles?” with Professor Anselm Ramelow, O.P.

What we’re still thinking about: Prof Anselm started us off by posing that “before we look at the actuality of miracles, we have to look at the possibility of miracles.” That is, before we allow ourselves to say that we know a relic has healing capacities, for example, because a person was healed by it, we must first ask ourselves, “is it possible?”

We tentatively defined a miracle as a temporary suspension of a law of nature by a higher power. Then, we established that even in the case of miracles, reasoning and rationality is important, for, as C.S. Lewis also writes, “All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning.”

In the second session we asked about the actuality of miracles. Session one helped us see that miracles must be possible because the denial of them presupposes their possibility. But what about their actuality?

We discussed that new evidence is not contradicted by old laws of nature, and that it is possible to change your paradigm based on new observations. Professor Anselm writes about miracles and paradigms: “The old evidence will not contradict the new paradigm. Rather, it is suddenly evident what the evidence has meant all along… Having come to know God as someone who reveals himself in extraordinary events in history would not have led the apostles to disbelieve in a God who orders the ordinary course of nature according to predictable laws. In fact, it is the same care that leads God to reveal himself and to provide for us laws of nature that make our environment sufficiently predictable and intelligible” (“Not a Miracle: Our Knowledge of God’s Signs and Wonders”).

Thank you Professor Anselm for giving us these intellectually satisfying ways to dwell on the overlap between rationality and belief, between observation and faith, and for offering to our semester theme “Religious Life and the University” by showing us that intellectual and scientific rigor does not preclude faith in a higher power, not vice versa.