Science and Religion: Exploring the Harmonies
A few years ago, Lee Gutkind (founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine) and Issues editor Dan Sarewitz decided that a culture often divided by putative fault lines between science and religion might benefit from some new and different stories about their interrelations. If stories are especially good at making sense of the ambiguities and contradictions of the human condition, what stories might communicate a more complex and even fruitful relationship between science and religion? Several of them are in the Fall 2017 Issues in Science and Technology. These stories are the winners of a writing contest about the ways in which science and religion “productively challenge each other as well as the ways in which they can work together and strengthen one another.”
Editor's Journal
Editor’s Journal
Read MoreScience and religion have become opposing pawns in the divisive and ugly political game that mars the United States today.
Perspectives
Navigating an Uncertain Future for US Roads
The last time the automotive industry in the United States experienced rapid technological change was more than a century ago. In 1900, the industry (whose primary competitor was the horse) comprised 40%… Read MoreCharacter and Religion in Climate Engineering
A group of scientists at the University of Washington has proposed a field test of marine cloud brightening, during which saltwater would be sprayed into the air in an extremely fine mist.… Read More
Features
What Does Innovation Today Tell Us About the US Economy Tomorrow?
How does the future of technological innovation look for the United States economy? Experts disagree. Techno-optimists such as Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Martin Ford, and Ray Kurzweil claim that there are endless… Read MoreBeyond the Primordial Ooze
“Real” Americans and the supposed divide between science and religion. Jeff, John, Eldon, Dave, Ben, and Bruce meet most weekdays around the back table at the only McDonald’s in Ravenswood, West Virginia,… Read MoreThe Best Panceas for Heartaches
Standing before a crowd of listeners in 1914, the fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday took a few moments to ridicule what he considered to be science’s pretensions of being a new salvation. “People… Read More“Shuddering Before the Beautiful”: Trains of Thought Across the Mormon Cosmos
If then th’ Astronomers, whereas they spie A new-found Starre, their Opticks magnifie, How brave are those, who with their Engine, can Bring man to heaven, and heaven againe to man? —John… Read MoreDesigning Chestnuts
Read MoreResponses to “Philosopher’s Corner: Genome Fidelity and the American Chestnut” by Evelyn Brister (Issues, Summer 2017).
Search History
Some people go running or meditate; they recite mantras or affirmations, carry pictures of the saints. My brother used to keep one of those mini Zen rock gardens in his room as… Read MoreIs Precision Medicine Possible?
The future of health care is increasingly promised to rest on “precision” genomic medicine, based on the idea that what we are is in our DNA. The pervasiveness of this belief can… Read More“This Essentially Meaningless Conflict”
Marilynne Robinson’s accomplishments are impressive by any standard: she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, among other honors.… Read More
Real Numbers
Mixed Messages about Public Trust in Science
For many years, the scientific community has been wondering—and often worrying—about the extent to which the public trusts science. Some observers have warned of a “war on science,” and recently some have… Read More
Book Reviews
Managing Water Scarcity, or Scarcely Managing?
John Fleck’s Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West is a valiant effort to make sense of the behavior of water managers and politicians in the… Read More
A Silicon Valley Catechism
For over a decade, business books have exhorted managers to be “supercrunchers”—numbers-obsessed quantifiers, quick to make important decisions as “data driven” as possible. There is an almost evangelical quality to this work,… Read More