Science, Religion, and Secularity
The View from Relations
Science, Religion, and Secularity
The View from Relations
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Description
This volume provides a fresh perspective on the often conflicted relationship between science and religion by exploring how the concept of secularity can help us rethink how these domains relate to each other.
Increasing antagonism towards science and scientists in the twenty-first century is often explained simplistically by pointing to the rise of religiously-underpinned right-wing movements - a narrative that reinforces the idea of an age-old and inevitable clash between science and religion. This book shows that engaging the concept of secularity, which has been understudied in scholarship on science and religion, helps take the scholarly debate into productive new directions.
Focusing on contemporary issues in the study of science and religion, including UFOs, cognitive science, decolonization, the Covid-19 pandemic, and religious nationalism, the contributions in this volume consider how people support, reject and grapple with common secularist ideas. They argue that the conditions of secularity both produce and are produced through relationships - those between humans as well as those that humans have with animals, matter and the divine. Moving beyond the individualism that is typically privileged in the West, this relational perspective assumes that the web of secularity, religion and science is open to constant negotiation and transformation: people and knowledge keep changing in relation to the world.
In foregrounding relationships and their capacity for change, this volume raises important questions about the political dimension of research on science, religion, and secularity. At a time of science denial and ecological crisis, it invites us to think about how humans can live with each other - and with non-humans - in better and less destructive ways.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Ashley Lebner (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Yunus Dogan Telliel (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
Section I: In Times of Transition: Interrogating Secularism, Questioning the Individual
1: Wonder and Monstrosity: On Science as Religion, with Continual Reference to Einstein, Mary-Jane Rubenstein (Wesleyan University)
2: Faith in Science, Stephan Palmié (University of Chicago)
3: De-Extinction: A Modern Curio, Lisa H. Sideris (University of California, Santa Barbara)
4: Sickularism: An Alternate Story of “Man” in the Age of the Virus with a Crown, J. Brent Crosson (University of Texas-Austin)
5: Neural Networks: Imaginary/Biological/Artificial, John Modern (Franklin & Marshall College)
6: Saucers, Saints, and Scientists: The Uncanny Challenge of UFOs, Hussein Agrama (University of Chicago)
Section II: Secularist Post/Colonizations and What Comes Next
7: Relating to Rocks: The Geological Secular, Comparative Religion, and Charles Lyell's Visits to Niagara Falls, Pamela E. Klassen (University of Toronto)
8: Exposure and Devotion in Mexico City, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts (University of Michigan)
9: Performance and the Syneasthetic Field: Non-secular Thoughts on Senses and Absences in the Afterlife, Abou Farman
10: Specters of the Sacred: Cultivating a Counter-Colonial Imagination, Banu Subramaniam (Wellesley College)
11: Waiting for Science: Synecdochal Misrecognition and the Rationalist Placebo in India, Jacob Copeman (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and John Hagström (PhD, University of Edinburgh)
12: The Wonders of Materialism: Relationality and the Question of the More-Than-Human in Religious Naturalism, Carol Wayne White (Emeritus, Bucknell University)
13: Interview with Talal Asad (Graduate Center of the City, University of New York)
Product details
| Published | Sep 03 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 304 |
| ISBN | 9798216383758 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 8 bw illus |
| Dimensions | 9 x 6 inches |
| Series | Religion and Science as a Critical Discourse |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |

























