Science, Religion, and Secularity

Can the often-conflicted relationship between science and religion be seen in new light? In this volume, Ashley Lebner, Yunus Dogan Telliel, and their contributors show that engaging secularity and its constitutive relations can take science-religion debates onto new terrain.

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.

Ashley Lebner is Associate Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.

Yunus Dogan Telliel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA.