Science & Faith Integration

Janel Curry, President of the American Scientific Affiliation, sits down with Dan Hummel to discuss the importance of integrating Christian faith alongside professional and intellectual lives. 

Learn about Janel Curry & the American Scientific Affiliation

Read Janel's book: Reading Hong Kong, Reading Ourselves

With Faith in Mind is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin, and hosted by Director of University Engagement Dan Hummel and Executive Director John Terrill. Jesse Koopman is the Executive Producer. Upper House is an initiative of the Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation.

Please reach out to us with comments or questions at podcast@slbrownfoundation.org. We'd love to hear from you. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and welcome to With Faith in Mind. I'm Dan Hummel, today's host, and the Director of University Engagement at Upper House. This episode is part of our series on Christian education at the Crossroads, and we're welcoming Dr. Janelle Curry to the show. Hi, Janelle.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Hello, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

It's it's gonna be a great uh conversation here. So today we're exploring the intersection of science and Christian education through the lens of the American Scientific Affiliation, a key institution that connects scientists who are Christians across the world. Janelle Curry is the president of the American Scientific Affiliation, a post she assumed just a few months ago in October of 2022. A little more about Janelle. From 2012 to 2019, she was a provost at Gordon College. Before that, she spent 16 years at Calvin College, now Calvin University, as a professor and dean. She finished her time as the biker chair in Christian Perspectives on political, social, and economic thought. That's a lot of thought, by the way. That's a very uh broad.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

The title was way too long.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Uh and finally, Janelle runs her own consulting firm, helping higher education institutions restructure and professionally develop. And actually, that's not finally. There's one more uh uh detail that Janelle told me right before we started recording, and that is she's actually spent time in international or or uh non-American uh institutions of higher education, including Forming Christian College in Pakistan and a couple schools in Hong Kong. So uh very uh very experienced in the higher education space, uh not just in the US. Um so Janelle, really excited to get to talking about the American Scientific Affiliation. We'll call that the ASA uh from now on since it's a mouthful. And uh, but first I wanted to just ask you uh a personal question. Uh when I Google your name, uh under it uh it says you're a geographer. Uh that's sort of the the way Google identifies who you are. So I wondered just if you had a a story about why you uh became a geographer, what drew you to that particular field?

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Oh, I I would say, well, as we say with geographers, you're born a geographer. You don't become a geographer, it chooses you. So I would say I was somebody who always loved both social science and natural science. And so I always had a struggle trying to decide which direction to go. So actually, as an undergrad, I was a political science major and um still wanting to have more natural science, but I couldn't fit it in. So I did a term of service with the Mennonite Central Committee in southern Louisiana, working for a Native American tribe, and I ended up meeting some geographers who were there doing research. And then it's like, this is what I want to do. So so then from there, I went to grad school at the University of Minnesota, and it was like from day one, it felt like this is such a good fit because I can do science and I can do social science. It's about how people actually live their lives in a kind of concrete context that really drew me. So I call it on the ground. What is life like on the ground?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Yeah, that's very interesting. It's an interesting field that has a lot of um interdisciplinary relevance. A lot of other disciplines, I think, find what geographers do interesting. The one um uh I'm a historian by training, so I don't have as much experience with geography, but there is a famous in the sort of Christian academic world here at UW, there's a famous geographer, John Alexander, who is actually the chair of the geography department, that I ended up actually leaving that post to lead uh intervarsity Christian fellowship. But um uh that's right. He's always he's always uh given me a warm spot for the geography department here and UW it has a quite uh reputation for environmental science and related fields. And so geography is always in the mix there here at on our campus too.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Well, and I would say University of Wisconsin also has had good urban planning, which is tied to geography and also rural, rural sociology. So in many ways, it's been one of those institutions that has had that strong collection.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Excellent. Well, from a from a U of M uh grad, I will take that compliment and run with it. Um okay, well, thanks for sharing about uh that uh love of geography you've you've developed. Um okay, I want to turn to the ASA, and um, it's a really interesting organization. And I wondered if uh you could just lay out for our audience uh what the ASA does, particularly what are its initiatives, uh services, and activities, and maybe even just start, how do you introduce it to someone who hasn't heard about it before?

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah, I say the ASA is a professional society of Christians who are in the social and natural sciences. So it's equivalent to a lot of other professional societies, so it's a membership organization and our goal is to serve our members in their growth in their understanding of faith and science, and also professionally and as scholars, and and to create a fellowship for those people as well. So from its beginning, it's really had those emphases professional society for the development of the integration of faith and science, um, and serving its members. So it's really the members that we want to see grow in order to serve the church and science and society.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

That's excellent. That's a good overview. Who who is a member of it? Like how how would you describe um, I don't know what the key sort of demographic markers would be, but uh, you know, what are the scope of the different disciplines and and otherwise?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

I think that's what makes it different than a lot of professional associations in that it's pretty broad. So you have to have a bachelor's degree at a minimum in an area that is a social or natural science. Or it there's some of the humanities that are included when you have philosophers of science, historians of science, theologians who are interested in these questions. So, but in terms of discipline, you know, it goes everything from nursing and doctors to physicists and astrophysicists. So it's pretty broad within that larger umbrella. There are some that are larger than others at different times in its history, but it but all of those people are welcome.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Does it do the members tend to work in uh Christian higher education, in public higher education, in secondary education? Where are most of the members coming from?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Yeah. It's all over the place. So there are a substantial number that are in Christian higher education, but for example, in the DC area, a lot of them are involved in government contracts and research or institutes, and the same like in New Mexico, where you have um some of the government labs. And then we really have a growing number of people who are in the pharmaceutical industry. So it's interesting. It's really across the board. And then a few, a few educators in the mixed and people in the medical profession. So it's really pretty, pretty broad, but it's historically there have been more people that come from the Christian colleges, but I think that that's one of these shifts that we're going to be seeing is more diversity in terms of where people come from. And we have lots of engineers in the mix, too.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Yeah. When you talk about sort of more diversity uh on the horizon, is that um I'm sure it's a confluence of factors, but is that something the ASA has been searching out, or is that a reflection of changing dynamics in higher education or the education space?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

I think I think all of the above, right? I mean, clearly the change in higher ed means that I don't see the same opportunities in the future for people to be teaching in higher ed, or it's not going to have the same kind of attractiveness. So one of the things in the ASA that we've been really talking about is how we're going to find the next generation because it may not be through Christian higher ed. So we've been in conversations with um Christian study centers as a partnership to help them see um the ASA as a place they can pass students off to when they graduate. So if they don't go into higher ed and they go into industry, they have a place to nurture them for the rest of their career in their faith and their discipline.

unknown 9:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

So we see that that that relationship is going to become more and more important.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah, and that I mean it it's a it's got a similarity to um uh to things happening in the humanities as well, where at least at the PhD level, so many of the people getting PhDs are not going to be um professors uh just because of the the job market. And so they're going to be moving into you know alt-ac uh alt academic jobs or or or hey, I'm one of those people. I'm now working at a Christian study center after getting PhD in history. So um that's really interesting, and that that that makes a lot of sense. Um one question I wanted to ask. Uh you're the president of the ASA. Uh what does that mean? What what does your day look like um as the president of a of an organization like this?

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Sort of like being a provost where your kids say, What is a provost? What is what is it you do? Right. Yeah, right. I you know, as a president, you try to keep your eye on the long view. So it's ensuring that the that that you're always looking at concrete that you're implementing concrete strategies and planning that arise out of your mission, but have the future in mind. So when we're talking about demographic shifts, that's really what you're that's one of them you're talking about. Where are the people that would benefit from ASA? And so what are our strategies for implementing those? So keeping that long view in mind. And then then I think as a president, you're really culture-making that you're building the values of the organization into everything that it does. So I and in some ways that's again keeping your eyes on the prize, right? What's the central mission and how do you keep those values central? And that is sometimes articulating them, going to local chapters and talking about them in the published material. And then clearly making sure that the organization financially and institutionally survives. So you're always involved in that. And then one of the probably the greatest joys of my job is just meeting the ASA members and hearing their stories. So I get to travel around the country and meet them and also talk to other people from other organizations about how to expand our impact together. So it's it's that kind of networking piece. And I I think that's probably the most fun of everything because I like to find out about people and what they're working on.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Is there a particular part of the country or the world that you try travel the most in in this job as president, or is it um uh uh pretty equally distributed across the different regions?

SPEAKER_01 12:32

It's probably equally distributed. I just take the opportunities that are there. So over Christmas I was visiting family in Arizona, but it gave me a chance to visit two different chapters there and an older member as well, and I'm planning really uh a whole trip to the Indiana area, so it's close by, so I'm trying to develop those. And I just had um coffee with the West Michigan leader, ch chapter leader this morning. So it's all all over the place, and of course, with email, you can do that. And like I've given uh a talk to the Red River chapter because of virtual nature of what we can do. I can also drop in on chapters that are around the country.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

Right, right. Yep, that's a big difference than even maybe five or ten years ago for presidents of these kinds of organizations. Yeah. Well, uh speaking of uh a major technological uh change, uh, I did want to get into the history of the ASA and go back to just understand where it came from, why it was founded, and how it's developed. So um again, putting on your sort of uh assuming you're talking to someone who doesn't know a lot about the ASA but asks sort of where did it come from? Uh how do you how do you tell that story?

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah, the ASA was formed in 1941 with a group of men who were scientists who came out of the evangelical community. And I think it was born out of a desire and a need for that group to come together on a regular basis to explore issues of faith and science. And so it, you know, just started out of an informal meeting and then became an organization. And early on, it established the tradition of an annual meeting where people give papers and um publications and that really has continued, and local chapters, so those have been the the important components of the ASA through the through the whole history, and really the mission has not changed over time, but it's maintained that, you know, COVID has opened up a whole new world, you know, because now we've done online annual events, we have virtual events, we have online discussion groups, and all kinds of opportunities for people.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

When um you talk about that earliest generation, um my I know a little about this history, I don't know uh nearly as much as you, but my sense is most of the people who would have founded the ASA were academic types, uh you know, bookish types. And you you've talked about how the the membership now is really diverse, even in the types of industries it's in. Has that been uh like how how early on in the ASA did it branch out from um sort of these these more sort of philosophical or theoretical questions of faith and science into broader topics that might include others, uh not just uh you know professors?

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, I think it's always been pretty broad, and maybe it came out of a Christian desire to serve. So one of the founders was an engineer. And also used, okay. Yeah, and as you read through the newsletters over all of those years, you know, there's a strong mission interest. So it always had a lot of people who were in missions. And also, you know, how one of one of the phrases in the newsletter, one of the categories early on was was what ASA are doing or how to how to start something. So it's about how to start movements, interest in the environment, interest in the issue of nuclear war, interest in discussing war in general. So it's always had that kind of applied technology as well as the very theoretical in and which is if you went to an annual meeting, you would find different um sections or different topics. So people migrate to what they're interested in.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Right. Very interesting. Um well, I I think uh you know, just looking from the outside, one of the key roles the ASA plays is as a convener of Christ of scientists and Christian faculty. And I wonder if you could just give some general thoughts, remarks, descriptions of uh what the tension points are between uh uh, or or maybe in this is just what the topics of conversation are uh between uh scientists who are Christians. Uh what um what do they talk about? You mentioned a few of the more historical ones, you know, nuclear war, uh other things like that. But what what are the perennial issues that come up that people want to explore and and talk about, even debate? Um I'm not exactly sure how heated it gets at an ASA meeting, but um, yeah, we'd just love to get a sense of that.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Well, of course, origins has always been one that's been part of it. But right now, I would say um one of the hot topics is artificial intelligence. And so we're having a workshop next summer with some members around artificial intelligence, and some of our members are speaking quite broadly on that topic. So I think it it depends on those things, and then also a lot of people coming next summer are giving papers on environment-related topics. But on the other hand, we have the last meeting last summer, there were a lot of social justice topics about how does science interact with issues of social justice, but then a wonderful talk about the the concept of emergence, of seeing the world not as divided into little pieces, but rather they come together in a way that is unique, that is more than the sum of their parts. So, how do we take that that scientific concept and understand it in the context of faith?

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Very interesting. Are there any other issues that um come up uh on a regular basis? And one I was just thinking of this before our conversation. I wondered if you know issues around like bioethics come up. Yeah, or issues around genetics. Um and and when we when we talk about this, uh I'm just trying to understand uh how the ASA uh functions. Is this are these sort of general conversations? Do you have like working groups that consistently explore uh some of these um issues, or is it more sort of like uh plenary uh type conversations?

SPEAKER_01 19:49

It in the past there have been throughout its history, sometimes there'll be working groups around a topic. And right now I'm thinking about trying to find some funding that would just bring disciplinary groups together to talk about what is the cutting-edge topic in our discipline. At at right now, at this point, we don't have those those um what were they? They were called something. They were like working groups that were brought together. But you know, it's a member association, so in some ways it's the programming is driven by the members themselves because they present the papers, the annual conference has a program committee, and the local chapters also develop their own programs. So in so it's more amorphous that what becomes a cutting-edge topic rises out of those um member member interests.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Yeah. And when we talk about cutting edge topics, um, I think there's a few ways I at least think about that. One is within the guild of scientists, there are you know these issues that become very interesting, very pressing. People are thinking new things about them and offering their perspectives. And then there maybe is another another way to think of cutting edge, which is thinking of the broader um church world or just the broader society, what are the issues that are bubbling up uh over and over again that need to be addressed by expertise? On that second front, uh what do you what are you seeing? What are the things that um the church, if we want to say that, or even society more broadly, are looking to scientists to help, you know, understand and think through?

SPEAKER_01 21:38

I you know, I think one that's clearly important is the issue of human sexuality.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

You know, so at our meeting last summer we had a presentation that was just trying to look at the science. What does the science tell us without withholding your judgments? Right? What it Doesn't say what should you do, but what does the science tell us? And that's about the culture of the ASA of trying to be honest about what it is we know and what we don't know. And being able to sit with that and and talk about that without um drawing a judgment or leaping to a theological decision on what everybody should do. So so it was a good meeting for starting that conversation, and then we've had more conversations about that as part of uh our diving deeper online program where we discuss an article on a topic, and what there was an article on related to human sexuality, and there's been an ongoing discussion around it.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Yeah, I I imagine that's a hot uh a hot topic for a lot of different reasons, including the investment of the scientists themselves. I'm sure there's a you know, there's a sense that um uh everyone has a stake in that in that uh discussion, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

And and of course, people at the meeting, it it touches their own lives.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Exactly. Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Their own families. So I guess the the culture of the ASA should be one where we can talk about that and also talk about how it touches your own family.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

And be able to sit with that and say, and I don't know.

unknown 23:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

I don't know what to do. Right. And and get prayer for that.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Yeah. Um, well, we we talk a lot in this series about uh education being at the crossroads. And and one way is is how we've just talked about sort of these new issues that um uh professors and universities are trying to tackle. Um, another way is through the actual industry of higher ed is at a crossroads. And I wonder if uh you could talk about how the ASA is thinking about it. We talked a little about that, about the shifting uh sort of demographics of who's who's in the ASA. But returning to that again, how do you how are you thinking about is your leadership of this organization, how are you thinking about uh professional development for the next generation of scientists who are Christians?

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Oh, that's a great question. You know, I don't I don't know that we've thought about it like I think about it as a provost. You know, because as a provost, you're very focused on how how do you help the faculty understand who the students are that are in the classroom? So so I think for the ASA, it's more of a question of how do we create an organization that allows the the people who are becoming scientists, which who come from a broad range of backgrounds, how do we become an organization where they feel like they are part of it? Or as a colleague of mine would say, and allow them to move the furniture around. Not just join us, but to shape the organization. And so I think that's the question for the ASA is really how do we do that? And and you know, we're working on strategies to do that. And these are people who may not come up through Christian higher education and not have that background in their families to even consider that. They come up so so how do we then give them a sense of what it means to integrate faith and science? So one of the things we're doing at this next meeting is initiating an ASA 101 workshop, which introduces newer members and younger members to sort of an overview of what the discussion around faith science looks like historically. And then also, and what can you expect from the ASA? Because the ASA is not an advocacy organization. We don't take positions, we create a space for our members to be able to talk about these issues. And often we have people who want us to then take a position on something, but that's not our role. And so we're we're sensing we need to orient people, we need to give them a larger context for faith in science. So I'd say that's the direction we're going in terms of orienting our members and helping create a create, it's a kind of professional development for them.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah. Yeah, and I'll just say from my experience here at Upper House, one of the interesting things with faculty is um you know many of them are coming from some of the best programs in the country, and then they're coming to UW. And so they're their entire uh graduate education is not in a Christian context. And so they're often coming with uh, you know, the desire to integrate their faith in in different ways, either in the in the way they act in the classroom or in their research, uh, but they don't have the tool set that someone that might have come up through a Christian college uh context would have. And so there's this interesting sort of imbalance in their expertise in their field and their, for lack of a better term, their expertise in their faith or or even in the concepts that could sort of interact with that very deep knowledge of a particular field. Uh and so you you you run into people who um just don't know what to do with that dissonance in their own identity.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Well, and I think it's especially challenging for the sciences if somebody hasn't come up to the Christian Christian higher ed too. I think sometimes in the humanities they can read and get there's there's just a tradition there that may be richer than or more known within the humanities. And so that's one of the reasons we're talking to the Christian studies centers, too, is what can we do to help them in nurturing the faculty and the sciences? And um I think this is one of the great challenges of the future because I I don't know what Christian higher education is going to look like, and how are we going to build up the next generation in their understanding of the relationship between faith and their discipline or a topic so that we don't live dualistic lives.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Right. Right. Yeah, and uh just to reiterate one point you made, a place like UW has about 2,000 faculty on the roles. And I would guess, I I I hesitate to guess this in public, but I'm gonna guess that at least two-thirds of them would be you know considered STEM or related fields. And so, you know, the majority of faculty at UW, which is you know a typical large R1 Big Ten school, uh, there's just so many uh science faculty. And that's where you know most of the action is happening. Uh I think of our our biggest major is computer science here, um, and it's the fastest growing one as well. So anyway, that is where the in a way it's interesting you mentioned the humanities have this tradition of uh even the phrase like Christian scholarship, like the people who invoke that phrase tend to be historians or philosophers. Those are the ones who talk about that. Um and and I'm one of those, so I I like talking about that, but it is sort of a conversation among a few fields that doesn't often include the sciences or even the social sciences. So it's an interesting sort of uh misalignment uh in some ways of of where the conversation has been and where it needs to be for the future.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Well, and uh what I think there is a need for is even giving those STEM faculty some frameworks, historical frameworks for how people have thought about it.

unknown 30:37

Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:38

Because I think that's what gives them um a better grounding for integration, a kind of historical context for the debate between science and faith.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I have I have uh just two more questions. One of them is you mentioned um, we mentioned at the top that you have some experience with international Christian higher education. And I wondered if you just wanted to reflect on what are you seeing that's different in the in other places than the U.S. when it comes to these conversations around uh scientists and faith and science. Uh are you seeing the same sort of issues and stresses on education, or are you seeing something different in in Pakistan and Hong Kong and elsewhere?

SPEAKER_01 31:26

Yeah. For for me, probably when I've been overseas, it had when it was in Hong Kong, it was all the secular universities. There really is no Christian sector to higher ed, or it's very, very limited. So the discussions there are very, very different. Um so there it's about helping scientists think more broadly rather than rote learning. How how do you connect the sciences to the social sciences, or how do you collect connect it to life on the ground rather than just the sciences as a kind of narrow field? In Pakistan at Foreman, Foreman has is a Presbyterian school, or it has its roots with the Presbyterians, but now it is um 10% Christian and 90% Muslim. So having spent time there, it was it was just fabulous because in some ways it had a more openness to talking about faith than you might get out of secular school yeah, right? Because you accept the fact that faith is important to people. And so I just had such great experiences, and and Foreman is everybody knows what they are, and they have to Christians are at the very top of the university, but you have faculty and students who are from any variety of places, and very different than the United States, I would say, is Foreman is unique in that all ethnic groups, all religious groups feel safe there as opposed to at a secular school. Well, it's not really a secular school, but at a public university. So the Christian ethic of loving your neighbor permeates, and so it creates a kind of environment where people can learn about each other's faith, which is the draw and the wonder of the place. It's just a fabulous place.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Yeah, that's very interesting. I wonder, is there maybe that maybe what you just said will answer this, but are there lessons you're learning as you look outside of the US that you're trying to bring back to and sort and through the ASA inform, teach uh American scientists uh to sort of think more like uh non-Americans on some of these issues? I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yeah, I don't know. I would say the the lessons I'm trying to teach are more about um skills for dialogue, and maybe there are lessons that are needed across sectors, right? So at the ASA last summer I taught a workshop on difficult conversations and what are the skills that you need for that. And that's what I did when I was in Madison for the consultation around climate change, too, with the pastors. I feel like those are the skills that are needed, and those are the same skills that allow you to talk to somebody who's very different than you are and be curious about their life and h why they believe what they do and how they understand science and how they understand faith. So I really feel like those are the skills our society needs in general right now. How to listen, how to how to truly be curious about somebody else without an agenda and how to stand in that space with the whole with the help of the Holy Spirit without judgment as you are curious about somebody. I mean, my daughters, you know, have lived overseas with me, and my younger daughter, when she came back and was in high school in Grand Rapids, she got to know all the international kids. And one of her friends said, How did you do that? And she thought about it and she said, I asked them questions about themselves, right? It's like she was curious, she wanted to know. That's what it takes, and that's what science is like. It's about being curious about something. I want to try to understand. And I think that's what science can add to the church, too, that that culture of courageous curiosity. And and intellectual humility.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

Yes, those are those are virtues, those are great virtues. I uh courageous curiosity, that's a good one. Um so uh as you were talking, Janelle, I was thinking of a uh I have a couple good friends who are on faculty here at UW uh in the sciences, and I've heard them say this uh this observation a few times where they say they have met as prof as scientists who are Christian and church-going Christians, and I should say these are more uh coming out of more evangelical traditions, they say they have met more resistance uh in the church to being a scientist than they have in the university to being a Christian. And I wonder if that observation rings true to you from the ASA perspective. Um yeah, does that ring true to you? Have you heard that from others as well?

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Absolutely. And in fact, for our winter symposium, we had a virtual symposium, and the main speaker was Walter Kim with the National Association of Evangelicals, the president. And he started with the story about he and his wife inviting a neighbor to church who was a scientist, and she said, I don't think you want me to go. Not because she had a problem with faith, but she would assume that the church had a problem with her being a scientist. Yeah, and through the pandemic, too, I would say a lot of ASA members really had a difficult time in their churches. Very difficult time. So yeah, that's the question of why is that so hard? And that's actually what Walter Kim addressed in his um his comments, and I would encourage people to look at it. So you can just find it at asa3.org and then just go to the winter symposium because he he talked extensively about that.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

We'll we'll link to that in our show notes for this episode. Um I uh yeah, I think I want to uh land the conversation here and talk a little about the church. So I think for a lot of listeners, even I'll put myself in this category too, when I think of faith and science or uh sorry, sci scientists who are Christians in the university context, I often do think about the sort of secular nature of a lot of universities and how it can be difficult to be a Christian in there. And I don't want to minimize that, that those are things that people struggle with. But I do think the the potential for what scientists can bring to the church is really high and and powerful. And so, Janelle, just as you think about uh what the ASA could do if if uh if the world were uh if you could control everything and and the ASA could sort of fulfill its mission to a hundred percent. And uh what is your vision for how uh ASA members shape the church? And and and sort of you've talked a bit about these sort of civic virtues or these ways of dialoguing. I think that's probably a big part of it, but but what other things are you hopeful for uh with improved relations uh between the church and and science?

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Well, I I think Walter Kim gave some models of how scientists could engage in the church and gave some examples that weren't were more about this dialogue that scientists also have to realize that it's often about building relationships. So it's not always about no, you have the facts wrong, right? It's about long-term building relationships of trust. And it's only out of trust that then you can move on to have those conversations. On the other hand, you would love to have pastors who would consult with scientists before their sermon or something like that. Or one of the ideas that we floated is having adopt a scientist for pastors, you know, maybe a scientist who's not even in your congregation, maybe that would be better, right? And adopt one, yeah. You know, to have somebody who's a dialogue pipe partner where you could say, help me understand this issue better so that there's more nuance that comes from um in the sermons. And I'll just give you an example of that is I did a study on sermons post-Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami. And I looked at Methodist, Reformed, Catholic, and fundamentalist Baptist sermons. And just very different responses to a natural disaster in terms of their understanding of these events as being natural, it's human decisions that create the disaster where you put h housing units not having safety um in place. You know, it's these but but there's a lot of discussion in the sermons about you know that these come from the fall. These uh you know, earthquakes are part of just the natural working of the earth and the distribution of heat. And so so being able to have those dialogues, I think, then help pastors think more carefully about what they say about it. Um and you know, I I was very moved by the the Catholic response in terms of the suffering of people. They just said, you know, they their tendency was to say, we don't know, but we know that Christ suffered too. You know, just to sit with it without an answer. Just sit with it.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

So that's a that that's a really powerful. We we here at Upper House have partnered pretty consistently with a group called Science for the Church, which is a newer organization, but it's in this same space. And they they came out of a previous project. Uh I believe it was Templeton Foundation funded, but it was about pairing scientists and pastors. That was their whole model. And it was it was fun just to hear some of those stories about even just for a pastor to just have someone to get reliable basic information about how. either something from the Bible, you know, the Bible has plenty of, you know, disease and earthquakes and everything else, and just getting a sense of like what was actually going on there from a scientific perspective to the the hot topics of the day and wanting to just uh you know you can tell a lot of pastors just want to uh or at least some pastors uh are really eager to be accurate um but they don't have the resources and the time to become an expert on everything uh so uh but there's there is that trust level that that seems to be so important is is uh building a trust where you can just basically depend on someone to be to giving you good faith accurate um information yeah you almost have to become friends or become close to have that kind of trust to be able to even say to somebody I don't understand this. Right. You know right yeah exactly and I think you know pastors um I remember reading about this as a as a a grad student in sort of American religious history the role of the authoritative role of pl pastors in so many communities as particularly before our society professionalized so much they were the font of all knowledge uh for many communities uh maybe not all knowledge but a lot of knowledge and and as that has uh gone away in some ways you know there's experts in all different things that pastors would defer to uh there is still an instinctual sense by many people in the church if the pastor says something that must be true right he you know he or she must have researched this before getting up here and telling us this and so there is this burden that pastors have to week oftentimes weekly weigh in on something um that that none of most of us don't have to weigh in every once a week uh on this stuff um but they have this burden of needing to be accurate uh all the time so um yeah I just yeah it it seems like a particularly interesting difficult problem that scientists can are actually really uh well positioned to help out um at least on some of these more these issues where they would be experts on it for the pastors well thank you Janelle this was a great conversation uh enjoyed learning about the ASA and and your work um yeah thank you for joining us and uh look forward to seeing more uh coming out of the ASA in years to come thank you it's a great conversation thanks for joining us if you've enjoyed today's podcast be sure to subscribe and give us a rating on your favorite podcast app. Also be sure to check out our upcoming events on upperhouse.org and our other podcast, Upwards, where we dig deeper into the topics our in-house guests are passionate about. With Faith in Mind is supported by the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. It is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin, hosted by Dan Hummel and John Terrell. Our executive producer and editor is Jesse Koopman. Please follow us on social media with the handle at UpperHouse UW