Reason and Faith: Questions of Political Theology
GERMAN 16SC
When you first came to Stanford, you may have come from a household in which religious observance played a role, or you may have had friends in high school who identified with faith communities. You or your friends may have wondered how to navigate between religious backgrounds and entering a university where primacy is placed on the secular pursuit of knowledge. While there are opportunities to find religious affiliations at Stanford, the challenge of navigating between faith and reason, or between religion and science, is not new.
This tension sits at the foundation of Western philosophy. In this Sophomore College seminar, we will explore it through an encounter with the writings of the philosopher Leo Strauss, a German Jewish thinker who fled Nazi Germany and later contributed significantly to political philosophy in the United States. Strauss is especially known for his analysis of the enduring conflict between reason and revelation. He places this question of philosophy and religion in relation to our core challenge of how to live together with laws, governance, and authority. This field of study is “political theology,” which means how religious ideas and traditions shape political structures.
Our normal schedule will include meeting seminar-style meetings in the mornings. There will be time in the afternoons for you to do your reading assignments, followed by group meetings where you can work on your writing assignments together. These assignments include reading responses as well as journaling, to record your personal response to the issues of faith and reason. This will be a chance, in other words, for you to study the texts by Strauss and others but also for you to explore your own relationship to the important topics around religion in contemporary life.
We will read several of Strauss’s key texts, such as “Athens and Jerusalem,” “What Is Political Philosophy?” and “Progress or Return?” These works will be framed by adjacent texts that illuminate the same problem from different perspectives, including Plato’s Euthyphro, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Pope Benedict XVI’s “Regensburg Address.” Together, these readings invite students to think carefully about the limits of reason, the claims of faith, and the tensions that arise when philosophical inquiry confronts religious commitment.
In addition to these core texts, you will read some fiction, including Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead as summer reading to set the stage. It presents a letter of a congregationalist minister in Iowa to his son, reflecting on family history stretching back to the Civil War and the politics of abolitionism. During the course of our time together in September, we will look at some additional literature and view a set of films that explore faith, reason, and politics. How does belief respond to doubt? Is reason compatible with religion? How can political choices follow from religious teachings?
Potential Field Trips
- Local religious institutions such as St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, the Graduate Theological Union and Muslim Zaytuna College in Berkeley
- Exhibits of Sacred Art at Legion of Honor in San Francisco, or The Tech in San Jose, as schedule aligns
Potential Guest Speakers
- Peter Thiel on religion in Silicon Valley
- Condi Rice on faith and the university
- Rushain Abbasi on political theology
Potential Student Projects
- Academic writing on the Strauss texts
- Research on Strauss’s impact on US intellectual life
- Journaling about their own thoughts on religion
What Comes After SoCo
Students may wish to submit their work to a new student online journal, supervised by Dr. Starkman, called “Welcome” for student writing about faith topics.
Meet Your Instructors
Professor Russell Berman
Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, appointed in the departments of German Studies and Comparative Literature. He received Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching (2013) and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (2014). In 2011, he was the President of the Modern Language Association (2011), he served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State (2019-2020), as a member of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, and a member of the National Humanities Council. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. For many years he served as the Editor of the journal Telos, a quarterly journal of critical theory. His interests include literature and culture, both from German-speaking Europe as well as the Middle East; international relations and foreign policy; cultural theory; religion and culture.
Dr. Ruth Starkman
Dr. Ruth Starkman teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and with Professor Berman in a Stanford ESF course called "What Can You Do for Your Country?" Her areas of specialization include political philosophy, ethics, and technology, with a particular focus on how emerging technologies shape moral reasoning, public life, and democratic institutions. She also teaches Biomedical Ethics and AI Ethics, and has taught courses on Great Books, Political Theology, Love and Faith.