RT Book
T1 Divine variations: how Christian thought became racial science
A1 Keel, Terence
LA English
PP Stanford, California
PB Stanford University Press
YR 2018
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1690197722
AB Introduction --Impure thoughts : Johann Blumenbach and the birth of racial science --Superseding Christian truth : the quiet revolution of nineteenth-century American science of race --The ghost of Christian creationism : racial dispositions and Progressive Era public health research --Noah's mongrel children : ancient DNA and the persistence of Christian forms in modern biology --Beyond the religious pursuit of race.
AB Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history.Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization. -- Provided by publisher
NO First published in 2018
NO Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-182) and index
CN BT734
SN 1503610098
SN 9781503610095
SN 9780804795401
K1 Race : Religious aspects : Christianity
K1 Race : Historiography
K1 Religion and science : History
K1 Eurocentrism : History
K1 Eurocentrism
K1 Race ; Historiography
K1 Race ; Religious aspects ; Christianity
K1 Religion and science
K1 History