Welcome to the Walter H. Capps Center
Greetings!
We at the Capps Center invite you to engage our community in 2025. This will almost certainly be a year of challenges across numerous scales, with potential for threats to higher education and to the communities we serve. For our part, we see this as a time to consolidate coalitions and marshal our energies to protect what we value most, especially for those among us experiencing heightened levels of threat to their well-being. In this context, we welcome people from UCSB, the Santa Barbara community, and beyond as we seek to uplift best practices and inspirational ideas for sustaining free and open discourse on topics concerning ethics, religion, and public life.
In this spirit, we invite you to join us for the following Winter Quarter events:
- February 11: What Kaʻahumanu Taught Me: Kawaiahaʻo Church, Material Establishment, and the Limits of American Display, with Sally Promey (Yale) [Martin E. Marty Lecture on Religion in American Life]
- February 12: Repatriation Futures at UCSB and Beyond, with local, national, and global repatriation and burial protection experts
- February 18: Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the 21st Century: A Healthcare Perspective, with Randall Day, Michael Kinsella, and Pam Washburn (Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital) [Capps Forum on Ethics and Public Policy]
- March 6: Personhood: The New War over Reproductive Rights and Justice, with Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) [Capps Forum on Ethics and Public Policy]
In addition to our work on several ongoing initiatives, this quarter we are launching a project on religion and repair in Indigenous communities. This effort will include community members and scholars from a range of locations across the U.S. and will focus upon three interrelated themes: repatriation, land protection, and educational access. This program is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and will be inaugurated by two workshops this Winter and Spring, the first focusing on repatriation (for which there is a public event on February 12th—details above), and the second in May on land and education. Our hope is to build upon the outcomes of these convenings to sustain this important work over the next several years in conjunction with our partners.
In addition, we have added many new documents to our archival project, the Walter H. Capps Archives Online. We are digitizing materials from the Walter Capps Papers at UCSB’s Special Collections Library for viewing on our website. We will continue to add digitized archival materials regularly, with a focus on Walter’s publications and materials from his famous courses on the Vietnam War and “Voices of the Stranger.”
We have also added several videos to our YouTube page, including from our Celebration of Walter Capps’ Legacy and last quarter’s events. You can find other videos of past events on UCTV and UCTV’s YouTube Playlist.
Please reach out if you have questions for us and we hope to see you soon.
Sincerely,
Greg Johnson
Director
