Society News
New Members for ISSR
The following were elected to ISSR membership in 2009:
Professor Gennaro Auletta,
Aggregate Prof.,
Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy
Dr. Francisco Ayala,
Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences,
University of California, Irvine, USA.
Professor Bernard D’Espagnat,
Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics,
Paris-Sud University, France.
Professor Maurice A. Finocchiaro,
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA.
Prof. Joel B. Green,
Associate Dean for the Center for Advanced Theological Studies and Professor of New Testament Interpretation,
Fuller Theological Seminary, USA.
Professor Makarand R. Paranjape,
Professor of English, Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.
Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn,
Chairman,
The Kuhn Foundation, USA
Revd Prof. Michael Reiss,
Assistant Director and Professor of Science Education, Institute of Education,
University of London, UK.
Revd. Prof. Michael Spezio,
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Scripps College, Claremont, California, USA,
Visiting Faculty in Social and Affective Neuroscience at Caltech, Pasadena, California, USA.
ISSR at the Parliament of the World's Religions
ISSR will be well represented at the Parliament of the World's Religions when it meets in Melbourne this December. All of the proposals submitted on behalf of the ISSR have been accepted for the major program. There will be four sessions at the Parliament with ISSR members strongly represented; also, at least six ISSR members will be on the program as well.
Of 1450 proposals submitted by various bodies and individuals, only about 450 were accepted, the vast majority of which are heavily focused on interreligious dialogue from within religion. The ISSR sessions, by contrast, are influenced by a science-and-religion approach that each session chair had to remold to fit with the character of the Parliament.
LeRon Shults has organized two sessions on “Transforming Compassion in Science and Religion,” which are intended to contribute to the growing interest in integrating inter-religious dialogue with inter-disciplinary dialogue. Compassion is a value that is central to many of the world’s religions and a phenomenon that can be studied from a variety of scientific perspectives. Our strategy is to provide a context within which different voices can come together around the shared concern to understand and facilitate empathy and altruism across religious and other significant boundaries. The word “transforming” in the title indicates that we are interested both in transforming the way we think about compassion through listening to one another as well as in facilitating compassion that is actually transformative of the human condition. The first session will begin with a panel of three scientists (biologist, psychologist and economist), briefly answering: "how does your discipline help us understand and foster compassion?" The second session will have a panel of representatives from different religious backgrounds (Muslim, Hindu, Christian), offering reflections on how our traditions help us understand and foster compassion. In each case, the panels will be followed by small group exercises (e.g., fishbowl, brainstorming, interactive case studies) in which audience members discuss initial reactions and implications. The session will conclude with broader interaction among the panel participants (scientists and religionists) as we explore practical ways to further the conversation and promote compassion.
Philip Clayton also organized three sessions on behalf of the ISSR and for which the Society is listed as the official sponsor. These sessions have three goals: to introduce people to science-religion dialogue across the world's religious traditions; to show how this dialogue can actually help to reduce interreligious tensions rather than increasing them; and to demonstrate why the global environmental crisis requires close partnerships between scientific knowledge and the motivating power of the world's religious traditions.
The organizers have arranged these three ISSR sessions as a special block program on the first full day of the Parliament, December 5th. The ISSR representatives will be joined at the first session by Dr Peter Doherty (Nobel Prize for Medicine), who will present data on global climate change. At the final session they will dialogue with religious activists in the environmental movement, hoping to show how partnerships with scientists are crucial to the success of the movement.
ISSR member Sol Katz, who played a central role in coordinating between the Society and the Parliament's leaders, spoke of the challenges, but also of the importance of ISSR involvement in the world's largest gathering of religious leaders. He wrote, "In the end I think we will make a significant contribution to this auspicious event."
New resources for the study of Science and Religion
As a resource for all involved in the Science and Religion field, a new website - International Science and Religion News - has been developed by ISSR to give coverage of forthcoming events and recent publications in the field. In addition, the possibility of a new journal - ISSR Abstracts and Reviews - is being explored.
ISSR makes a public statement on "Intelligent Design"
Questions frequently arise in public debate that require analysis and information based on the field of science and religion. Hitherto, however, statements from scientific bodies and religious groups on such issues have tended to lack impact because of the widespread perception that those who have published them are either under-informed in one field or the other, or else are unrepresentative of the consensus of the best scholars in the field. In this context, the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) - as a "learned society" made up of the world's leading experts in the science and religion field - is in a unique position to make the kind of impact that other bodies usually fail to make.
A particular example of the kind of question that requires the kind of expertise that ISSR can provide is that of the status of the concept of "Intelligent Design." On this question, a team of ISSR Members from relevant disciplines has now, after consultation with all ISSR Members, drawn up a statement that can be found through a link on the homepage of this website. The concept of intelligent design is, according to the statement, "neither sound science nor good theology."
The most immediate response to the statement's publication was from the influential think-tank, Ekklesia, which welcomed the statement as "a very important development" because the concept of intelligent design is, according to its spokesman, "a serious category mistake in both theological and scientific discourses. It brings the proper engagement of religion and science into disrepute, and benefits those who wish to pursue dubious ideological agendas at the expense of a common search for truth and wisdom."
ISSR statements on other topics are now actively being developed.
ISSR Science and Religion Library
There is at present no publicly-accepted set of volumes that comprises an essential reference library in the science and religion field. Moreover, many centres of intellectual activity lack the resources and/or the strategic vision to acquire substantial holdings in this area. The Templeton Foundation, recognizing that the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) is uniquely positioned to judge and contextualize the literature of the field, has now given the Society a grant to tackle this issue.
Under the leadership of Professor Pranab Das of Elon University, with Tom MaCkenzie as Programme Manager and Sharon Mellul as Project Assistant, the Society's members are to be consulted, in order to choose between two and three hundred volumes to constitute an "ISSR Library."A companion volume of reviews of all these works - "The ISSR Companion to Science and Religion Studies" - will also be prepared by selected Members and be available as a stand-alone introduction to the literature of the field.
In the first phase of the project, funded by the Templeton Foundation, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred sets of volumes will be made available on a competitive basis, free of charge, to high impact institutions in targeted (mainly less developed) countries.
Further details of the project may be found on its website: www.issrlibrary.org.
ISSR Research Professorships and Postdoctoral Fellowships
One of the concerns of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) is that the basic infrastructure of science and religion studies in the academic world is not yet satisfactory, partly due to the way in which interdisciplinary studies do not fit neatly into existing academic categories. Because of this problem, the Society is actively exploring schemes for both Professorial and Postdoctoral Fellowships in the field. In both categories, its Executive Committee believe, the expertise and administrative framework that ISSR can provide makes it the ideal body to tackle existing shortcomings in these areas.
Future ISSR Conferences
Future conferences are being actively planned for 2010.
A conference in Oxford, England, will, it is hoped, be hosted by ISSR and a local organization in 2010, to mark the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. Looking further ahead, the possibility of a conference in Alexandria, Egypt, is being actively explored. |
