Berkley Center

In a January 28 Faith and Culture conversation with Berkley Center Senior Fellow Paul Elie, Israeli author David Grossman discussed the joys and complexities of writing, how to portray conflict in novels, and the role his Jewish identity plays in his work.

Watch Berkley Center Director Shaun Casey present Carleton College’s January 18 weekly convocation, in which he examined ethics, international politics, and diplomacy. Casey also offered the 2019 Ian Barbour Lecture on Religion and Modernity on January 17, addressing “Competing Conceptions of Religion in American Foreign Policy.”

In a Brookings Institution podcast, Berkley Center Senior Research Fellow Peter Mandaville and Shadi Hamid discuss their new paper, which focuses largely on how both Saudi Arabia and Iran employ Islam as a soft power tool in the conduct of their foreign policy, and also touches on case studies including Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, and Indonesia.

In this review for the New Yorker, Berkley Center Senior Fellow Paul Elie takes a look at Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, describing it as "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours."