We are sorry but the event is sold out, and no tickets will be available at the door. We plan to release a video of the event in the coming days. You may sign up for the Renovatio email list if you would like to keep up with new releases of videos, essays, podcasts, and print editions.
Doors open at 6:15 PM and program starts at 7 PM. | 2401 Le Conte Avenue, Berkeley, CA
Enjoy tea and refreshments and browse the Zaytuna Bookstore before the program begins.
It wasn’t that long ago when most of polite society dismissed social conservatives for promoting traditional family values, but lately we’ve seen societal changes at blistering speed. We’ve arrived at a cultural moment when even some secularized intellectuals—agnostics and atheists, feminists and classical liberals, and even oracles of empirical science—are also on the frontlines attempting to stand their ground in the face of a sexual revolution, and to preserve traditional concepts of sex and gender from the arbitrariness of individual desire and a descent into meaninglessness.
We're indeed living in a strange new world. Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, we find things are reversed as if in a mirror, with nothing in its proper place. Our most prescient thinkers warn us that the very definition of the human being, of the self, is at stake.
How did this world come about? Did philosophy itself go awry, perhaps even through malicious intent? Why is this a phenomenon with distinctly Euro-American origins? How do we understand the chasm between the modern self, defined by a fealty to our individual will, and the traditional self, defined by our God-given nature?
Please join Renovatio for what we hope will be a stimulating and thought-provoking exchange between two theologians—Carl Trueman and Hamza Yusuf—who have devoted themselves to understanding the genealogy of the modern self and how we might preserve and protect our true selves.
Carl Trueman is a Christian theologian and the author of many books, the most recent being Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. He has taught in Britain at the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen and now teaches at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Hamza Yusuf serves as president of Zaytuna College and editor-in-chief of Renovatio. He has authored encyclopedia entries, academic papers, and articles on Muslim bioethics, legal theory, abortion, and many other topics. His books and translations include Purification of the Heart, The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi, and The Prayer of the Oppressed.