2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Vancouver I will demonstrate the connection between text and visual image
by examining a particular image and its accompanying text in early editions
(1561 to 1584) of Eden’s Arte of Navigation alongside the textual emendations
that mark the image’s disappearance in a later edition (1596). I will also argue
that the multi-layered and moveable visual images in this text may be the
most important element in facilitating the student navigator’s progress from
student to practising mariner because they occupy a position between mere
representation and three dimensional model. By examining the relationship
between text and image, between image and reader, we can enhance our
understanding of the development of literate practices among a class of artisans
more devoted to the life of the hand than to the life of the mind.
Edward␣ B. Davis Messiah College
Science and Religion, Chicago Style:
Liberal Protestants and Science in the Age of Bryan
In February 1922, William Jennings Bryan’s popular assault on evolution went
upscale, when the New York Times published his essay, “God and Evolution.”
This drew almost immediate responses from biologist Edwin Grant Conklin,
paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Protestant pastor Harry Emerson
Fosdick. Shortly after this, the essays by Conklin and Fosdick were reprinted
as the inaugural numbers in what would become a series of nine “Popular
Religion Leaflets” on “Science and Religion,” published between 1922 and
1931 by the American Institute of Sacred Literature, a correspondence arm of
the University of Chicago Divinity School. Shailer Mathews supervised the
series and wrote one of the pamphlets himself Fosdick later wrote a second.
The other five were written by prominent American scientists: Robert A.
Millikan, Kirtley Mather, Edwin Frost, Michael Pupin, and Samuel Christian
Schmucker. A tenth pamphlet, co-authored by Mathews, Arthur Holly Compton,
and Charles Gilkey, is closely related but not actually part of the series. Although
the pamphlets were underwritten by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and distributed
very widely, they are virtually unknown to both historians of science and
historians of religion. This paper tells how the pamphlets were found, sketches
their history, and analyzes their highly interesting content, placing them in the
larger context of the history of Christian thinking about science.
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Edward␣ B. Davis Messiah College
Teaching Religion and Science
In the past few years, dozens of historians and philosophers of science
(including the author of this paper) have developed courses on religion and