As the editors of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion, we convened this conversation to clarify what is at stake in the project and where it all leads. The volume proposes vocabularies for analyzing science and religion as entangled with race, gender, and colonialism and models scholarship historically grounded and politically alert. What follows responds to the American Academy of Religion’s “Author Meets Critics” session “Critical Approaches to Science and Religion” presided by Donovan Schaefer. Authors Myrna Perez Sheldon, Terence Keel, and Ahmed Ragab respond to the comments by Megan Loumagne (Boston College), Elizabeth Perez (University of California, Santa Barbara), Peter Harrison (University of Queensland), and James Miller (Duke Kunshan University). Our reflections here take up questions prompted by their responses to the volume, especially about whether changing a field—its language, archives, and institutions—remains an urgent site of political work or whether the present demands other commitments alongside and beyond the university.

Myrna Perez: Hello friends, let’s get right into it!

I felt like we brought together the critical approaches project because we had a shared intellectual interest—giving vocabulary to an intuition we each had, sometimes independently and sometimes collectively—that there had to be a different way of talking about science and religion. A way of naming and voicing how science and religion are entangled with race, entangled with gender, come out of colonialism. It is almost hard now to remember how hard it felt to find that vocabulary, because through the project, the vocabulary has become clear and intuitive.

But the other reason we started the project was to make scholarship useful in pressing political situations. The book was published in 2023, and now when I reflect, that second part seems so much more pressing. That first part, that intellectual interest, I’m not even sure I care about anymore. I can’t find it in my heart to be committed to changing the field of science and religion.

When I look at this book, I feel like it could reshape the field of science and religion, but I’m not sure that I care. And the second part—making scholarship useful—feels even more necessary, but maybe we’re beyond that point.

I think the belief that changing a field of scholarship is the necessary work in the world is not something I can feel committed to. It probably has always been self-indulgent, but it feels incredibly self-indulgent to me now. I can’t get up every day and think, “The thing I want to do in the world is change the way people study science and religion.” Maybe it’s a refusal of academic work in general. Also, the field’s institutional legacy would require so much political work to reshape, and I don’t feel that’s where my political energy should go.

Terence Keel: I completely understand these sentiments, Myrna. Do you think the current political crisis facing American democracy might make this a different proposition? That we are in a moment of praxis, not pure theory? Since the 1960s, the left has had to convince established intellectual traditions of the value of feminist studies, ethnic studies, postcolonialism, the Global South, all in the face of conservative forces that saw these claims as threatening the university and democracy itself. Now, the cat’s out of the bag—democracy has been eroding since the ‘60s. People are disappeared through ICE raids, die in police custody, women’s rights are under assault, Republicans are blocking affordable health care.

This political moment makes intellectual work different—not easier, but different—because it’s not just abstract. There are real, material things eroding. I’ve always thought the subtext of the science and religion debate is: we can’t have people denying the validity of science, believing in superstition and myth, endorsing creationism at the expense of evolutionary science. Irrational people are difficult to control, and that makes governance hard. The job of the intellectual is to do a kind of intellectual policing of minds.

Yes, the left has made some inroads—Black studies, feminist studies, Chicano studies, Asian studies—but the larger university apparatus has remained embedded in the Enlightenment tradition. Even still, democracy has eroded. So I can no longer endorse the project of turning young minds into one-dimensional, predictable people. That got us where we’ve been for sixty years. We need something different.

Myrna: Thinking about the New Left is helpful and gives texture to my refusal. New Left politics and fields—Black studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies—had confidence that knowledge is a site of political transformation. If you could speak about the world differently, remember history differently, give voice to more experiences, this would make a more democratic world.

Now, my university has eliminated the LGBTQ Pride Center, Women’s Center, and Multicultural Center. It’s against the law in Ohio to have places that work on behalf of diversity. It’s made me reflect: Is knowledge the place for transformation? Is the university the place? Do we need another kind of left?

Five years ago, I’d have given a different answer about the value of teaching postcolonial feminist theory. I feel less confident and more humble about what changing an academic field can do in the world.

Terence: I agree. The New Left’s integration into the academy came with concessions that defanged it, distancing it from communities and local organizations. Once it was integrated into the university, reward structures shifted to publications and prestige.

We’ve moved further from the people and the problems that should be the focus of our intellectual work. This distance is more like a cosmic-sized gap when you think about conventional approaches to science and religion.

Ahmed Ragab: Since the 1960s, the university’s role has been to create governable subjects. The expansion of higher education shifted who it serves. “Local truth” taught to the governing builds political structure. Taught to the governed, it depoliticizes. The New Left exaggerated the university’s role, investing too much in changing it.

The university is a centrist institution. We all teach to the right of our research and research to the right of our public views. I’ve never met people going into classrooms to indoctrinate students—except on the right. So when we talk about science and religion, are we talking about research or teaching? Each plays a role. Changing teaching and research can still have political impact because that’s the infrastructure for political positions.

Myrna: Yes, I think the New Left overinvested in the university. It turned political work into structures for building prestigious academic careers. I don’t care about being a leading voice in the field because that’s not where I want my political work to be. It’s hard for me to separate what I care about intellectually and politically and what I need to establish myself as a thinker and wage worker.

Ahmed: I think that’s where I’d disagree. If I use your sentence and talk about mathematics or physics or computer science, it’s just not possible. If I write a paper in abstract mathematics or programming language theory and it doesn’t directly impact AI or make AI better—even ethically—you wouldn’t accept that. Because if you don’t do that work, there’s no chance of ever doing serious programming language research or climate science or developing medicines.

The argument that you require basic scientific research is not really up for debate. One of the main things structuring the current global economy of knowledge and technology is that places with the capacity and luxury to do basic scientific research—mostly in the Global North—dominate. The Global South may produce chips, but without basic scientific infrastructure, it’s still buying computers designed in California and made in China. This absence of infrastructure keeps the Global South secondary.

I think the same logic applies to the humanities and social sciences. We shouldn’t buy into the devaluation of basic research in these fields. Basic research in humanities and social sciences is necessary to do applied research. If we don’t talk about theoretical constructions of fields like science and religion, or about archival methods, we won’t end up with meaningful applied research.

Precisely because this link has been severed, the former left has bought into the idea that basic humanities and social science research is not important—and so it hasn’t produced a single new idea in decades. How can you develop new ideas with zero interest in basic research? If computer scientists stopped learning math and physics and only learned programming languages, they’d hit a wall in five years.

This is connected to the changing university structure. If plans like the Heritage Foundation’s continue, we won’t have universities without humanities and social sciences—we’ll have elite ones that still teach them, often in a very white, Western-canon way. But most schools will become glorified technical schools. The backlash to mass university education has been: “Let’s just make it all vocational.”

State schools won’t have money to teach history, gender studies, or basic sciences like math theory. They’ll just teach programming and engineering at a technical level. Everyone else gets vocational schools; Harvard, Yale, and Princeton students still get humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences. It’s a return to the 1940s–50s order.

That’s why I think there’s significant value in keeping basic research in humanities and social sciences. I understand why it feels far removed from immediate outcomes—but mathematicians feel the same way. They could “just invent a new car,” but that’s not how it works.

Terence: I agree. We’re returning to a vocational model of education that existed in the 1930s and earlier with land grant models, including for historically Black colleges after 1865. Then, the ethic of education was tied to local industry but with a very limited and problematic vision of social science and humanities. The goal was to train Black physicians, lawyers, social workers, and construction workers to build local economies and communities.

Now, it’s: get a degree in medicine, computer science, or engineering, maybe get picked up by a tech or biotech company, become an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is libertarian politically, uninterested in broader democracy. They might want campuses in Silicon Valley to sustain themselves, but they’re not creating citizens invested in democratic governance.

It’s like we’ve returned not just to the 1930s but to colonial models of learning—training bodies and minds to be productive for an economic project that’s not invested in democratizing power, knowledge, or truth. It feels like a movement to return this country to a colony. Democracy isn’t part of the equation.

Ahmed: And the aspiration is to become an entrepreneur—but not even 1% will. Most people will be glorified line workers. With class mobility foreclosed and education stripped of anything beyond the practical, the ideology sold is libertarianism: dress for the job you want, think for the job you want. You think like an entrepreneur while you’re actually a line worker who should be thinking about unions and weekends.

Myrna: So, I want to go back to the core question: Does it matter to put political energy into changing the field of science and religion—whether conceived epistemologically or institutionally?

I’ve voiced disillusionment, and Ahmed, you’ve given a resounding commitment to the value of basic research in the humanities. I agree. Every colonial or oppressive structure has used knowledge as integral to its project. There are no politics without ideas. If you’re not going to have ideas, others will.

But I keep returning to how to separate that work from the temptations of power and prestige in the academy. There’s this sense: “We’ll make the world more democratic—and to do that, I need power.” It feels like a political conundrum.

I genuinely think it’s transformational to understand science and religion as about reproductive technologies, surveillance shaping immigration, or knowledge used to architect cities along racial lines. But what do we do with that realization? Who do we offer it to?

When I teach or speak in media spaces and say “science and religion is about reproductive politics,” people light up. That feels transformational. I’m not sure I need to argue with the old guard to have that moment. I’m not sure I need to call what I do “science and religion scholarship” or be the authority in the field to make that impact. The fight over disciplinary labels feels like a distraction.

Terence: I feel similarly. What we mean by “science and religion” doesn’t look like what previous generations meant. More and more, young people aren’t shaped by formal religious institutions, even though they continue to live in a Christian culture inundated by symbols they don’t recognize as religious.

We’re dealing with religion’s remainder in conservative legislative arguments against women’s rights, for example. Religious scholars should be able to unpack the patriarchal Christian symbols in those arguments, even when they’re not explicitly invoked. That’s where the work is.

Unfortunately, religious studies has also been a victim of neoliberal logic: humanities only matter if they’re linked to capital accumulation or the creation of one-dimensional subjects that are easily governable. The field has taken the deal by doubling down on “literal” religion, where what scholars are supposed to do is study obvious religious institutions and religious practices. This sort of work is valuable in many respects. But it doesn’t help young minds or the public more generally recognize, for example, Christian values hidden within state policy, criminal justice, or the ideology of the free market. In other words, this approach to religious studies keeps alive the distance between scholarship and changing our society. Without a critical approach to the study of religion or science, our students can’t recognize the strange, twisted world we live in, where white supremacists invoke Christian supersessionism to legitimate their takeover of federal policy decisions on vaccines, access to abortion technologies, climate change, etc. That’s the problem.

Ahmed: I agree. I feel strongly that we need to maintain consistent investment in basic research in the humanities and social sciences. But I don’t feel strongly about maintaining disciplinary structures as they are.

Terence: I agree with what you’re saying, and I think the disillusionment we’re describing is about the assault on democratic institutions and democratic belief—ways of thinking and being that are oriented toward freedom, equity, and self-governance. We’ve seen an accelerating collapse of those institutions.

And with Trump’s attempt to strong arm and infiltrate UCLA, USC, Columbia, and other R1s, we are seeing how easily the liberal democratic values of the university can be abandoned or repurposed to extend authoritarian politics—suppressing student protests, denying genocides, targeting academic freedom. That creates a deep sense of institutional betrayal that heightens the feeling of disillusionment.

But as Ahmed says, we can’t just concede academic institutions to the right. Defending them still matters, even with all their contradictions. And part of this is about who we’ve been formed to be as intellectual subjects: people who value slow learning, slow thinking, time in the stacks. That’s a gift, but we have to ask what it means to offer that gift now.

On the one hand, this humanistic practice is exactly what the world needs. On the other, neoliberal conditions and the distraction economy make it harder to sustain them. If getting a degree is the only path to social and economic mobility, why spend hours with Kafka, Audre Lorde, or Sheldon Wolin?

So, how do we teach slow thinking in a world structured to obviate it? But also, how do we teach slow learning in a world where the crises facing our democracy require dynamic and experimental thinking that cuts across established disciplines? Perhaps what we mean by “basic research” is what we have been grappling with. But what is “basic research” in the humanities, or in science and religion, during an economic, climate, political, or moral crisis?

I think the entries we published in our volume made it clear that being critical is part of the answer. But this conversation has also made it clear that working outside the university needs to be a part of this critical orientation.

Ahmed: I don’t fully disagree, but I want to separate two kinds of work: research and teaching. They’re connected, but they’re not the same. Think of the natural sciences: a researcher might be teaching undergrads basic cell structure but running a cutting-edge lab on curing cancer. Their teaching lags behind their research, and that’s expected. I don’t need to translate everything I do into something my students immediately grasp. My teaching should lag behind my research. The research itself is what enables us to build political, social, and technological solutions in the long term. When I teach medieval medicine, I don’t care if students memorize every detail of Galenic or Chinese medical systems. If they leave with an understanding of pluralism and epistemic diversity, that’s enough. My cutting-edge research doesn’t have to fit neatly into a 200-level course.

Myrna: I don’t think we actually disagree there. My question isn’t about research needing to be immediately teachable. It’s about what you mean by “value.” If by value you mean moral or spiritual worth—the intrinsic human good of engaging with ideas—then yes, I’m deeply committed to that. I teach at a state school, in a Classics and Religious Studies department, where students read Homer in Greek. I want that kind of intellectual richness to be available to everyone, not just the wealthy.

But if we’re talking about why universities pay for research—that’s a different story. They invested during the Cold War because they saw basic research as essential to global power. Before that, only the wealthy could afford to do it. So yes, I believe in its transcendent worth. But expressing that worth in a democratic society is another question entirely.

Maybe we’ve simply played out the hand of investing our political energy in the university. The right has invested more effectively in other institutions—churches, think tanks—and treated universities as a problem to be subdued. If they can’t reshape them, they’ll crush them. Even Harvard’s been pushed around. So it’s not the worth of the research I’m questioning. It’s where we place our political energy.

Ahmed: That helps clarify it. I also want to complicate the distinction I made between research and teaching. What counts as valuable research is determined by our colleagues, by gatekeeping. When I started publishing on deaths in custody, reviewers dismissed it as unworthy because the sample size was “too small.” That’s exactly the problem: universities exclude certain forms of knowledge production.

We’ve seen similar resistance in public health research around environmental violence and health outcomes. Brilliant work gets marginalized as “not bench science.” And as we rise within the institution, we become those gatekeepers. Whether consciously or not, we’ll inherit that power to define value.

And this ties back to value. Terence’s early historical work or yours, Myrna—it might look politically inert at first glance. But its value is foundational. One reason the left struggles to articulate a coherent science policy—something that isn’t colonial or technocratic—is that we haven’t done or taken seriously the basic research that would allow it.

We talk about intersections all the time, but we haven’t built politics capable of acting on them—around race, empire, or global decline. The value of our research isn’t always immediate, but it’s indispensable. Like pure mathematics leading to new technology decades later. Not everyone has to take the work from A to Z, but we do need a different politics of knowledge—one that recognizes and sustains that value.

Myrna: Two quick things before we end. First, my hot take on why the left can’t articulate that kind of politics: because we keep compromising with liberals, and the right doesn’t.

Terence: Nancy Fraser would definitely agree with you.

Myrna: Second, what you just said reminds me of the image in Ephesians—the body of Christ. All the parts are different, but they work together. We don’t all have to do the same kind of work; we just need a shared sense of purpose.