During 2021-2022, AHMA faculty members Susanna Elm (History/AGRS), Emily Mackil (History) and Duncan MacRae (AGRS) are leading a public course titled Voting the Divine: Collective Decision-Making and Religious Authority between Polytheism and Monotheism. It is a group of programs and events dedicated to exploring the relationship between religion and democracy in premodern Eurasia.
The programming includes a series of public lectures, as well as a graduate seminar and graduate student working group. Speakers include Clifford Ando (Chicago), Caroline Humfress (St. Andrews), Rob Gleave (Exeter), and Josine Blok (Amsterdam). In addition, the public course is sponsoring an outreach program to connect graduate student research on religion at Berkeley with local schools and community groups.
Voting the Divine is one strand of the Democracy and Public Theology program, organized by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, which has been supported with a $500,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.