Professor Elaine Howard Ecklund - Science and Religion in Global Public Life

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University

Event Details

Date: Tuesday 29 May 2018, 5.30 - 6.30pm

The lecture may be followed by questions. Latest finishing time is 7pm.

Venue: Meadows Lecture Theatre, William Robertson Wing (Doorway 4), Old Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG

Tickets are free of charge but need to be booked in advance.

Click here for tickets.

Lecture Abstract

Theologians have produced an impressive body of scholarship about scientific ways of knowing and particular religious traditions. Yet, for a fuller understanding of the relationship between religion and science, we need to consider how a range of contemporary people in different societies view the interface of science and religion. In this lecture, Elaine Howard Ecklund offers a social scientific approach to science and religion in global public life. She shares insights from twelve years of empirical research, including surveys of 18,000 scientists and members of different general populations, as well as 900 interviews, gleaned from four national and international studies. She maintains that ideas about religion and science as non-overlapping are inadequate, that even atheist scientists have a spiritual impulse, and that the independence and conflict models are primarily western models.

Lecture Video

Biography

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and founding director of The Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University, where she is also a scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Ecklund’s research uses social scientific methods to explore the public relationship between science and religion. Specifically, she has most recently studied how scientists in eight different nations understand religion and spirituality. To that end, Ecklund launched the Network for the Social Scientific Study of Science and Religion (N4SR) in 2011. In addition, through a cooperative project with the American Association for the Advancement of Science Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion program, she has studied how four different U.S. religious groups understand science.

Ecklund is the author of four books, and over sixty research articles, as well as numerous op-eds. Her latest book is Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think (with Christopher P. Scheitle, Oxford University Press, 2017). She has received grants and awards from organizations including the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, Templeton World Charity Foundation, and Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Her work has been cited over 3,000 times by national and international media outlets.