Scholar Harvey Cox, who chronicled the rising prominence of religion studies in his 2004 book When Jesus Came to Harvard, may need to compose a continuation: When Jesus Came to Harvard and Taught Science.
That is on the grounds that Harvard Divinity School, where Cox instructs, has acknowledged a blessing from graduate Richard T. Watson to make a Professorship of Science and Religion. The school is currently looking for a meeting educator in science-and-religion for the 2006-2007 scholastic year.
The arrangement, up until now, has caused few swells – an observable change from 2002, when the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics drew dissents in the wake of welcoming physicist and Anglican cleric John Polkinghorne to talk on savvy outline.
This time around, scholars were typically energized, Harvard researchers were standoffish however wonderful, and secularists attentively communicated a promising sign that such a residency may loan support to their causes.
The Watson residency is the most recent in a progression of comparably prestigious posts that started with Princeton Theological Seminary’s 1992 arrangement of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen as the primary James I. McCord Professor of Theology and Science. Oxford University took action accordingly in 2000 with the arrangement of John Hedley Brooke as its first Andreas Idreos Professors of Science and Religion. Others incorporate Marquette University’s 2001 naming of Jame Schaefer to a recently made science and religion residency and the 2005 arrangement of Andrew Lustig to end up Davidson College’s first Holmes Rolston III Professor of Religion and Science.
“The examination allow and blessing for a religion-science residency avow the continuous enthusiasm for relating the orders as a real field of scholastic request,” said Schaefer. “Harvard joins Princeton and other significant colleges on the planet in investigating the religion-science relationship prestigiously.”
The news goes ahead the heels of a $1.5 million allow from the Pew Charitable Trusts to a University of Missouri religion inquire about focus to concentrate the connection amongst religion and medicinal services, and different subjects. (See “Different schools empower discourse.”) It additionally comes as the John Templeton Foundation, which stores Science and Theology News, makes a concede to Harvard Divinity School and the college’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to concentrate the roots of philanthropic conduct and their relationship to science, religious philosophy and morals. The John Templeton Foundation has been making such allows to Harvard since the 1990s.
“I’m a major adherent to the suggestion that science and religion are integral and not opposing, and I am quite worried about the way that the world takes a gander at each in an unexpected way,” said Watson, an overseeing accomplice of Spieth, Bell, McCurdy and Newell Co., a Cleveland law office, and a chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio. “This blessing is intended to assault that contention.”
Greg M. Epstein, who as Humanist clergyman at Harvard has wound up at the focal point of such clash, responded to the news with alert. “I think considering science and religion is one that can prompt helpful scholastic grant and the improvement of a whole insightful group yet may not – relying upon how the venture is confined,” said Epstein.
