Month: October 2022

This Interdisciplinary Conversation was part of “Religion and Politics,” presented by the Humanities Research Center and the Division of Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with the Undergraduate Studies program.

Reported by Mateja Bokan, Class of 2026

The Religion and Politics lecture and discussion were the first opportunity for DKU students in Barcelona to experience the offerings of the University and the Humanities Research Center. Divided into two parts, the guest lecture and a live discussion, students were able to apply, reevaluate, and extend their knowledge on secularization using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as an example of how politics and religion work together in our society. Continue reading “Student Report: Religion and Politics – An Interdisciplinary Conversation”

This special lecture was part of “Religion and Politics” presented by the Humanities Research Center and the Division of Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with the Undergraduate Studies program.

Reported by Cody Schmidt, Class of 2025

Professor Robert Yelle, chair of religious studies at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, Germany joined Duke Kunshan professors Rasoul Namazi and James Miller on September 26 to present a lecture based on his writing “Hobbes the Egyptian: The Return to Pharaoh, or the Ancient Roots of Secular Politics.” A question-and-answer session was held after the presentation. The lecture was the first of a two-part series hosted by Yelle, Namazi, and Miller titled Religion and Politics, with its follow-up being held later that afternoon.

In his lecture, he examined Hobbes’s ideas of secularization and the story of Pharaoh from the Bible. Yelle began with the frontispiece for Leviathan. The “Mortal God,” a ruler physically made of his subjects and holding a bishop’s staff in one hand and a sword in the other, is depicted as standing over his country, wielding the powers of church and state. Yelle argues that this “Mortal God” is a representation of the book’s namesake, the Leviathan, a sea monster that aided in Pharaoh’s oppression of the Hebrews.

“The Leviathan was armed with the many bodies of the citizens, their heads here appearing [in the frontispiece] as scales. [This] had become an appropriate epithet for a king or a leader of an army… Hobbes meant to invoke Pharoah and, in fact, if you just look at the Hebrew Bible, there are various places where a clear identification is made between Pharoah and the sea monster.”

During Hobbes’s time of the English Civil War, this religious image of the oppressive Leviathan and Pharaoh would be used to justify the revolutionary acts occurring, using the Exodus as parallel imagery for their war. Hobbes provides a critique and reversal of this justification, which Yelle explains was to reject such religious political revolution and embrace the philosophy of social contract theory with a ruling sovereign power.

Continue reading “Student Report: Robert Yelle – Thomas Hobbes’s Radical Path to Secularization”

Q&A session with Maggie Li
Reported by Zishuo Wu, Class of 2024

Tonight’s first screening in the 2022 academic year, Ascension (Kingdon, 2021) is an Oscar-nominated American documentary depicting class inequality in China. After screening the splendid realistic observational documentary, the producer of Ascension, Maggie Li, was invited to the Question & Answer session hosted by DKU Humanities Research Center.

Maggie began this session by introducing her contribution to the documentary. “There exist two kinds of producers,” said Maggie, “the first kind invests money and contributes nothing else; the other kind works on every part of the production.” As a producer of the second kind, Maggie made sure everything in the movie was working — communicating with organizations, companies, and individuals about their appearance in the documentary, and proofreading the translation and edits made to the film. The production took four years in total. With almost everything done by only a team of three people, the success of the documentary is unbelievable. She also shared that she was majoring in nano-science, though ended up working in filming industries.

Below is the Q&A session with Maggie Li:  Continue reading “Student Report: Ascension 登楼叹 Q&A Session & Interview”