A Tribute to Walter H. Capps: Scholar Teacher Public Servant
Ethics, religion, and public life affect democratic society in important ways. Walter H. Capps was a professor of religious studies at the U...
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Walter H. Capps Center (Video)
The Capps Center at UCSB presents public lectures that seek to advance discussion of issues related to ethics, values and public life, and to encourage non-partisan, non-sectarian civic part...
Episodes
20 of 120 episodes
From Talking Tools to Metahumans: Social Interaction Semiotic Skill and the Authority of AI Chatbots
As chatbots trained on Large Language Models become more sophisticated, their responses can sometimes seem uncanny, as if they come from a s...
Religion in Motion: The Identity and World-Creating Powers of Religious Action
What does it mean to rethink religion from the ground up? University of Colorado's religious studies professor Sam Gill draws on biology, ph...
E.J. Dionne - Are America’s Religious Wars Ending?
E.J. Dionne asserts that after three decades during which conflicts over religion played a tremendous role in American politics, the country...
Jonathan Alter: Election 2008
Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter discusses why the 2008 presidential race is of such historic significance. Series: "Ethics, Religion and P...
Water Wealth and the Ancestral Circular Economy with Kamanamaikalani Beamer
The extractive linear economy and policies focused on endless growth have produced unparalleled socioeconomic inequality and the climate cri...
Indigenous Religious Traditions and Law in the Current Political Moment
How are Indigenous communities in the U.S. facing challenges to their ways of life in the current political moment? Focusing on questions co...
Righting Wrong When Sorry Isn’t Enough: Constructing an Asian American Theology of Reparations with Grace Yia-Hei Kao
How should federal governments attempt to right, or at least remedy, past wrongs? Is it appropriate for victims of group-based harms or thei...
Making a Refuge of Resistance: A History of the U.S. Sanctuary Movement with Lloyd Barba
Is sacred space protective space? This question lies at the heart of the Sanctuary Movement. From the 1980s to the present, this practice ha...
Repatriation Futures at UCSB and Beyond
What are the future horizons for indigenous repatriation work? What are best practices in repatriation settings, and how might they inform r...
Personhood: The New War over Reproductive Rights and Justice
What’s next for the battle over abortion? In this lecture, Mary Ziegler argues that undoing Roe v. Wade was never the endpoint for the antia...
Falling in Love with Nature: The Values of Latinx Catholic Environmentalism
Through a focus on Spanish-speaking Catholics, Amanda Baugh sheds light on environmental actors hiding in plain sight. Drawing from ethnogra...
Dodging the Sisters: Why Queer Nuns Keep Going Viral
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence went viral in conservative media in June 2023 when the L.A. Dodgers announced plans to honor the local h...
From the Reagan Revolution to the Trump Insurrection: The Role of the Religious Imaginary in American Politics
How did Ronald Reagan’s vision of the American Dream lead to Donald Trump’s success? Looking back to 1983, Diane Winston, professor of journ...
Disenchantment of the World or Fragmentation of the Sacred with Philip Gorski
The modern world is not disenchanted. On the contrary, it is full of gods and heroes and myths and magic. In this talk, Philip Gorski sketch...
The Value of Public Service
This program discusses humanist and scholar Walter Capps’ political career and the ongoing value of public service. The panel discussion fea...
Anti-Asian Hate Racial Trauma and Posttraumatic Growth
In this program, Russell M. Jeung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, explores COVID-19 racism against A...
Teaching Ethics and Civic Values
This program discusses humanist and scholar Walter Capps’ teaching of ethics and civic values in the classroom and beyond. The panel consist...
Remembering the Vietnam War Class
This program discusses humanist and scholar Walter Capps’ famous course on the Vietnam War and its impacts. The panel consists of former U.S...
Democracy is Born in Conversation
Alessandro Duranti, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, presents archival footage he filmed of Walter Capps' 1996 camp...