Monthly Archive for September, 2010

By Nathan Schneider, in The Immanent Frame

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is a distinguished literary scholar at both Brown and Duke, who, since her undergraduate days, has had a special interest in the uses and misuses of scientific psychology. Her latest book, which stems from her 2006 Terry Lectures at Yale University, is Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (Yale, 2009). It explores the ways in which contemporary cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are being called upon to, once and for all, explain religion. Also, don’t miss her contributions to The Immanent Frame’s discussion “A cognitive revolution?”

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NS: Natural Reflections has been the subject of a lively debate (here and here) on Stanley Fish’s blog at The New York Times. Have you found the exchange productive?

BHS: One-shot retorts, or seesaw exchanges on blogs, are rarely models of intellectually productive discussion, but Stanley Fish’s columns attract thoughtful readers, and I found the responses to his column on Natural Reflections instructive. Two related anxieties were repeatedly voiced on the basis of Fish’s description of my evenhanded—or, in fact, determinedly symmetrical—treatment of religious beliefs and what we take as scientific knowledge. One is that I am flattening out important differences between them. The other is that I’m refusing to take a stand on a major issue of our time, and thus—wittingly or unwittingly—giving aid and comfort to the wrong side.

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By Michael D. Jackson, Harvard Divinity Bulletin

The day was hot. Trudging up the long avenue toward the university, I kept to the shade. The figs and eucalypts reminded me of Australia, bark stripped and straggling, or littering the dry ground. The oaks, myrtles, and phoenix palms took me back to the south of France. I imagined that I could feel at home here, this commingling of antipodean, Mediterranean, and American flora, this winterless climate. But the buildings, colonnades, tiled terracotta roofs, and open courtyards were a less congenial mix. Inexplicably, Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais had been made strangers to one another, standing alone rather than grouped as they are in Calais and London, willing hostages prepared to give their lives to save their besieged city. At the entrance to the university there was an inscription dedicating the campus to the memory of Leland Stanford, Jr., “born to mortality. . . passed to immortality,” a mother’s undying love metamorphosed into an institution of timber beam, plaster walls, reinforced concrete, and carved stone.

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