The World of the Early Christians: Lessons for Today   Doru Costache   In a previous essay I have mentioned my recent book, Humankind and the Cosmos: Early Christian Representations, published by Brill in July 2021. In researching the topic and in writing the book, I have been amazed by the variety of early Christian attitudes and approaches to the nature and the universe, especially by the anchoring of those attitudes in the multidisciplinary soil of philosophy, science, scriptural interpretation, spirituality, and theology. The fact that the scientific culture of that age—from the second to the early fifth century—has become obsolete is of no consequence. What matters is the interest of the early Christians in comprehending reality, together with the fact of doing so at the nexus of

The World of the Early Christians: A Complex Worldview   Doru Costache   The task of summarising how the early Christians represented reality is not easy. The writers of that era did not produce systematic discourses “On the World,” their interests being elsewhere. Yet the world as they perceived and inhabited it is very much present in their writings. It is from there that we learn the extent to which the early Christian experience—unlike modern urban societies—included the environment and reached towards the broad expanses of the cosmos. Another aspect worth noting is that, regardless of how nontechnical the writings of the early Christians were, many of their works incorporated scientific information, by the standards of those times. This information often was presented as a cultural given, shared

The Joy of Religion: Exploring the Nature of Pleasure in Spiritual Life Ariel Glucklich Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020   The Joy of Religion is a book that combines religious-historical description with evolutionary-psychological analysis in order to explain the complex manners of controlling and enhancing pleasure in religious history and in social evolution. All religions describe spiritual experiences as pleasant, and the goal of the religious pursuit as profoundly joyful. But many religions also condemn sensory pleasures and the desire for objects of pleasure. In this book, I resolve this apparent contradiction by showing how religious practices that instill self-control and discipline transform one type of pleasure, novelty pleasure, into the pleasures of mastery and play. Using historical data and psychological analysis, I detail how the rituals,

Science and Religion Per Se John L. Schellenberg   The term “religion” as it appears in the phrase “science and religion” is, for those who hear or use the phrase, quite commonly tied to particular examples of human religious life. As is well known, because the various intellectual activities that evolved into our field were carried out against a broad background of Christian influence, it was natural, early on, to think specifically of Christian examples. And inquiry concerning science and religion under these circumstances assumed a corresponding shape, with much discussion of what the best results of science meant for a proper understanding of Christian religious life and for the possibility of rational participation in it. Attention was also given, more abstractly, to what sciences such as physics

Reimagining ISSR Muzaffar Iqbal The immediate impetus for this blog is the November 2021 post by Fraser Watts (“Cross-cultural Issues Regarding ‘Science and Religion’”), wherein he expresses reservations about calling ISSR a society for “science and religion”. The concerns raised there are a continuation and expansion of what Watts had expressed in his July 2020 blog (“What is ISSR For?”). Both posts are essentially concerned with the self-claimed identity of ISSR “wanting to be an international and multifaith society.” This introspection by a founding member of ISSR, who is also its current Executive Secretary, signals a possible opening of space for reflection and self-critique, which will, one hopes, lead to certain changes in its programs and activities. The concerns raised by Watts are so fundamental that one wonders

Cross-cultural Issues Regarding “Science and Religion”   If ISSR was starting from scratch, and if I was part of a discussion about what it should be called, I would have reservations about it being set up as a society for “science and religion”.     Both of those terms are somewhat problematic, but the problems are greater for “religion”. It is a term that seems to have changed its meaning quite radically in the latter part of the 19th century, and which also means different things in different faith contexts. The problems associated with the term have been set out by scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Nicolas Lash, but those working in science and religion have not generally taken much notice of their critique of the concept