Why is the idea of conflict between science and religion so popular in the public imagination? The "conflict thesis"-the idea that an inevitable and irreconcilable conflict exists between science and religion-has long been part of the popular imagination. In The Warfare between Science and Religion, Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley have assembled a group of distinguished historians who explore the origin of the thesis, its reception, the responses it drew from various faith traditions, and its continued prominence in public discourse. Several essays in the book examine the personal circumstances and theological idiosyncrasies of important intellectuals, including John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, who through their polemical writings championed the conflict thesis relentlessly. Other essays consider what the thesis meant to different religious communities, including evangelicals, liberal Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Finally, essays both historical and sociological explore the place of the conflict thesis in popular culture and intellectual discourse today. Based on original research and written in an accessible style, the essays in The Warfare between Science and Religion take an interdisciplinary approach to question the historical relationship between science and religion. This volume, which brings much-needed perspective to an often bitter controversy, will appeal to scholars and students of the histories of science and religion, sociology, and philosophy. Contributors: Thomas H. Aechtner, Ronald A. Binzley, John Hedley Brooke, Elaine Howard Ecklund, Noah Efron, John H. Evans, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Frederick Gregory, Bradley J. Gundlach, Monte Harrell Hampton, Jeff Hardin, Peter Harrison, Bernard Lightman, David N. Livingstone, David Mislin, Efthymios Nicolaidis, Mark A. Noll, Ronald L. Numbers, Lawrence M. Principe, Jon H. Roberts, Christopher P. Scheitle, M. Alper Yalcinkaya

Jeff Hardin's No Other Kind of World explores our "need to witness miracles" within a world that too often favors "soapbox diatribes/or mournful tones." Perhaps we no longer recognize our own faces, unaware of what remains hidden inside, or just underneath, our landscapes or words. We wander an immeasurable world, one in which the Self attempts to know what knowing is, and calls out to others, searching for survivors this side of the millennium. Despite new threats of "a coming Inquisition," Hardin "charts a course toward mercy," seeking "the kind of understanding/that comes when two or more are gathered. IN THE PARK Seven boys seem to think they're birds. They caw and hoot, running beneath a stretch of thinned-out trees. They raise their arms to steer themselves toward each other and through this maze of limbs dipped low. Every minute growing louder seems to lessen. And we talk of a need to witness miracles, everyone flying so close at each other until the last possible moment, then veering . . .