Thread by @AndrewAghapour

"Wait, religion and science?" people ask me. "Do those even go together?"

Yes they do. I study where they mix. Why? Because that's where things get real weird.

(A @Sacred_Writes #SmartInPublic thread.)

According to @pewresearch, the majority of Americans think religion and science are in conflict. We often see them as separate realms that only interact in intellectual skirmishes like the Scopes Trial. pewresearch.org/science/2015/1…

Yet, as this additional @pewresearch survey of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus shows, the "Conflict Thesis" is a particularly Western, Christian view.

Science and religion interact in many other ways that we don't want to miss.
pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archi…

Many scientists are also religious practitioners, for example, and vice versa. Check out @plmanseau's @RNS piece about Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister who advocated for inoculation.
religionnews.com/2020/04/30/wha…

There are also fields of knowledge where religion and science get all tangled up, like cosmology and multiverse theory. @janeforbrains has written brilliantly on this. I was so blown away that I had to interview her about it for @RDispatches:
religiondispatches.org/does-multivers…

Religion and science also get integrated into our everyday lives, as lenses we use to understand our worlds and bodies. This can be seen in the Bible Quilt by Harriet Powers,

https://twitter.com/AndrewAghapour/status/1377410023031107587

fields like astrology (which @SusCrockford, @AnthroOmri, and @aaolomi helped me understand here),

https://twitter.com/AndrewAghapour/status/1389705356700434442

or in the "complex, and often brutal, history of reproductive science" that @myrnperez writes about here and elsewhere with powerful clarity.
tif.ssrc.org/2020/07/31/rel…

Finally, there are so many religon/science intersections that are just delightfully strange. By studying them we can break our brains a little bit and expand our ideas about the nature of things.

This @andrewmarkhenry video on Magic did that for me:

So has @JohnModern's work on secularism and brain science,
tif.ssrc.org/2008/10/09/alw…

@beamarovich's writing on animal life,

religiondispatches.org/dogs-of-life/

and @AlanLevinovitz's deconstruction of "Natural" as a category, which I interviewed him about here:
religiondispatches.org/but-natural-is…

I could go on, but this is too long already. Want more? Many of these pieces were written for The Cubit, a project I co-edited (with the brilliant Michael Schulson) for @RDispatches. The archive is here:
religiondispatches.org/section/scienc…

Or come visit the @amhistorymuseum when the "Discovery and Revelation" exhibition (on religion, science, and technology in America) opens early next year. You can also preorder the exhibit book, which I helped write!
powells.com/book/discovery…

OR, last thing, subscribe to the @ministryofideas podcast and @andrewmarkhenry's Religion for Breakfast YouTube channel, two amazing projects that I'm proud to be working with on upcoming R&S stories.
youtube.com/channel/UCct9a…

Thank you to @mpgPhD, @BucarLiz, @HLuceFdn, and @Sacred_Writes for supporting public scholarship!