Session Abstract

This panel explores history’s interdisciplinary relations by examining science and religion across many chronological and geographical settings and from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The study of science and religion traverses history of science, religious history, intellectual history, and cultural history, of course, but also political, social, and even economic history. It also brings history into dialogue with many other disciplines, including religious studies, science and technology studies (STS), philosophy, anthropology, and the area studies fields, as well as theology and the STEM disciplines themselves.

In this panel, four emerging scholars will discuss the past, present, and future of the study of science and religion with reference to several disciplinary approaches. This is an auspicious time to assess developments in the field. For decades, students of science and religion assumed these categories represented sharply delineated, pre-constituted essences. The field took much of its shape from the ambition to specify those essences once and for all. Practitioners focused on adjudicating claims of authority or authenticity or providing frameworks to facilitate the ‘coexistence’ of faith and knowledge. Most proceeded with specifically Euro-American prototypes in mind.

More recently, a younger generation of scholars has started to apply thoroughly constructivist perspectives from STS and religious studies. These perspectives hold that the categories of science and religion are inescapably contingent and function within specific historical constellations that condition their content, regulate their discourses, and govern their claims to social and intellectual authority. This emphasis on historical contingency necessarily expands the focus from Western Europe to international and transnational phenomena. It also links the field to emerging theories of secularization that stress the specificity of secularities in various contexts, and especially the dependence of secularities on previously dominant forms of religion.

The roundtable participants are well situated personally to explore interdisciplinary relations surrounding the study of science and religion. TJ Hinrichs of Cornell University teaches in both history and religious studies. She will focus especially on issues of boundary-drawing and boundary-policing between religious and medical fields in premodern China. Ahmed Ragab taught history of science before being appointed to Harvard Divinity School’s first chair of science and religion; he is also a trained physician. His presentation will discuss the interactions of medicine and Islam in the medieval and modern Middle East in relation to the development of various scientific and religious institutions. Jason Ānanda Josephson of Williams College works across religious studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. Trained as an historian of Japanese religion and science, he is now turning to the constitution of those categories in European thought. Andrew Jewett taught STS before receiving a joint appointment in history and social theory at Harvard University. His contribution will focus on the United States, where the meanings of science and religion have continued to evolve even as commentators have claimed to finally grasp their true essences. The panel will be rounded out by a commentary from Ronald Numbers, a top historian of science and religion who has been central in building up the field as an interdisciplinary research specialty.