Politics by Other Means:
Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century
by William Grassie

Politics by Other Means is a collection of essays by William Grassie, the Founder and Executive Director of the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science. Founded in 1998, Metanexus has worked with over four hundred universities in forty-five countries and hosted over a dozen international conferences. Metanexus publishes an online journal with 9000 subscribers.

Many of these essays were first presented abroad – China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere – and later published on Metanexus. Throughout William Grassie argues that we live in a remarkable moment in the natural history of our planet and in the cultural evolution of our species. We are in the midst of an epochal transition in the material, causal, and symbolic relationship between human cultures and other-than-human natures. The exponential growth in human population and consumption patterns has significantly altered every bioregional ecosystem of the world and the atmospheric chemistry of planet. We have become god-like in our powers to alter the evolutionary trajectory of nature for better or worse. Techno-science and global capitalism have brought us to a threshold, profoundly transforming our ecological and cultural legacies. Scientists are now calling this the Anthropocene, a new epoch in evolution when humans begin to dominate the atmosphere, the geosphere, the biosphere, and now also the “genome-sphere.”

Taken as a whole, this collection speaks of an urgent need to ground global ethics (natural law philosophy) in contemporary science (natural philosophy) in dialogue with comparative religion (revelation) and then translate these insights broadly into intellectual and popular culture.

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Pages : 304

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Table of Contents

1. Epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike

Religion by Other Means

2. Ten Reasons for the Constructive Engagement of Religion and Science
3. Metanexus: The Very Idea
4. Beyond Intelligent Design
5. Which Universe Do You Live In?
6. Toward a Constructive Theology of Evolution
7. Universalism and Particularism: Judaism in an Age of Science
8. Resources and Problems in Whitehead’s Process Philosophy

Peace by Other Means

9. Sleepless in Tehran
10. Universal Reason: Science, Religion, and the Foundations of Civil Societies
11. Science, Religion, and the Bomb
12. Engaged Contemplation for a Troubled World
13. Leeches on the Road to Enlightenment
14. Nationalism, Terrorism, and Religion: A Bio-Historical Approach
15. Entangled Narratives: Competing Visions of the Good Life

Evolution by Other Means

16. Bio-Cultural Evolution in the Twenty-First Century
17. Useless Arithmetic and Inconvenient Truths
18. Re-Reading Economics: New Economics for a New Biology
19. Post-Darwinism: The New Synthesis
20. Eating Well Together
21. In Heaven as it is on Earth: Astrobiology and the Human Prospect
22. A Thought Experiment: A Civilization Recovery Plan
23. Millennialism at the Singularity

Post-Script

24. All My Relations

Index