Religion and Contemporary Crises: Editorial for the September 2025 issue
Posted by Arthur C. Petersen on 2025-11-20
In this Editorial for the September 2025 issue [click here browse the issue online; click here to view and download a PDF of the entire issue; and to order a printed copy for $9.82 (no-profit-to-journal price) through Amazon, choose for instance one of the following market places: US, UK, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, SE, BE, IE, JP, CA or AU], you will find a brief overview of the articles included in this issue, both in the general section and in two thematic sections, as well as an overview of books reviewed in the latest edition of Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology.
Articles
This issue contains eight general articles. Joaquin Menacho and Llorenç Puig-Puig address salvation through technology; they contrast Christian hope in God’s redemption with the hope offered by transhumanism, leading to a guide for reflection on the challenges that technoscience poses. Halvor Kvandal and Gabriel Levy focus on end of the world narratives in environmental movements; they explore the biological underpinnings of Extinction Rebellion’s Green Apocalypse narrative, and they argue that such a narrative can be seen as a simulation-device that lets social activists experience the end of the world virtually. David Robinson discusses niche construction theory as a corrective to accounts that neglect or diminish the agency of organisms in evolutionary process; he argues for a shift away from seeing humans as co-creators with God in order to better understand ourselves as niche co-constructors. David Nikkel reviews self-organizing systems and divine action; he qualifies attempts by scholars of science-and-religion to reconcile divine particular causation with scientific knowledge as a failure, and he explores a model for reinterpreting the divine. Ebrahim Maghsoudi and Seyed Hassan Hosseini critically assess whether a divinely guided world can include blind chance; they show major issues with three candidate models for such compatibility (the Bartholomew-Bradley model, the van Inwagen model, and the Polkinghorne model). Lawrence Cahoone draws the consequences for cosmology and the problem of evil from a “process” notion of God that rejects omnipotence and omniscience and makes God partly corporeal; he offers one possible explanation, that is, that God is subject to internal limitations that apply to the universe as well, and that such a Ground of Nature is likely not only to be partly physical but also subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Esgrid Sikahall proposes a hermeneutical approach to bridge the gap between historiography and philosophy in science-and-religion; he shows how science-and-religion discourses can be opened up by focusing on how the temporality of things (history) and the being of things (philosophy) are hermeneutically integrated to create these discourses. Finally, Andreas Tzortzis responds to Stefano Bigliardi’s critique of his book The Divine Reality in an earlier issue of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.
Religion and Contemporary Crises
(by Emily Qureshi-Hurst)
This thematic section, entitled “Religion and Contemporary Crises,” showcases the proceedings of a two-day workshop held at the University of Oxford in Spring 2024. It was hosted by me (Emily Qureshi-Hurst), Tim Middleton, Raffaella Taylor-Seymour, and Austin Stevenson. The workshop sought to bring together a diverse group of early career researchers with a broad range of research interests to reflect upon some of the most significant problems facing our modern world. We were generously funded by both the Religion and the Frontier Challenges research program at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford. We thank them for their support.
As the title indicates, this thematic section focuses on contemporary crises. The term “crisis” often implies a sudden, dramatic moment in which an immediate problem must be faced and swiftly dealt with. It may seem surprising, then, that none of these articles frame their “crisis” in terms of a sudden or dramatic event. Rather, these articles are interested in endemic and persistent crises: forms of violence and suffering that are unfolding over longer periods of time. Each of the contributors to this thematic section reaches for the word crisis as a way of emphasizing both the severity and the urgency of a situation that might not otherwise be recognized as such. In other words, whilst these crises are deep, persistent, and pressing, many of them have gained momentum relatively slowly. When inhabiting these crises, we risk becoming frogs in boiling water—only realizing the true severity of the situation after it is too late. For this reason, giving our attention to these crises now is extremely important.
In recognition of the multiplicity of crises faced the world over, these articles include research on Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and North America. Despite the varied themes and truly global perspective of the workshop, we found profound agreement in the central role that religion plays in the most pressing crises our world is facing. With the majority of the world’s population (around 75% according to a 2025 study by the Pew Research Center) being religiously affiliated, it is unsurprising that the multifarious crises we face are deeply influenced by religion. Religious ideas, religious communities, and religious authority figures all have a role to play in choosing whether these crises are exacerbated or ameliorated in the years ahead. We call upon them to take this responsibility with the utmost seriousness that it deserves.
An overarching theme that emerges from the section as a whole relates to Adam Tooze’s notion of polycrisis, namely the idea that multiple crises intersect with and amplify each other, resulting in a highly complex situation that is very difficult to resolve. Just two examples that we were not able to explore are the Black Lives Matter protests that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ecocide that is resulting from the war in Ukraine. In both of these cases, multiple crisis points are reached simultaneously, magnifying the catastrophic nature of the situation and making simple solutions almost impossible. On the other hand, scholars like Janet Roitman have observed that the language of crisis saturates our epoch, “the noun-formation of contemporary historical narrative.” If our understanding of history and the present is constructed through the language of crisis, these articles interrogate the role of religion therein—both in striving towards solutions, but also constructing crises in the first place.
In recognition of the complex and interrelated nature of polycrisis, we explicitly designed the workshop to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. We recognized, then and now, that each crisis under consideration is too complex to be adequately tackled by a single discipline alone. A great strength of this workshop was that each contributor came from a different scholarly perspective, and many from different disciplinary backgrounds. The result is a thematic section that showcases both breadth and depth. Articles cover the climate catastrophe (Raffaella Taylor-Seymour and Anupama Ranawana), vaccine hesitancy (Austin Stevenson), anti-gender discourse (Jack Slater), conflict and peacebuilding (Eduardo Gutiérrez González), antisemitism and antizionism (Imen Neffati), ethno-religious violence (Gehan Gunatilleke), and the crisis of meaning (Mark Schunemann). What unites these articles is that each examines a pressing problem facing modern society that is shaped, intensified, and potentially also tackled by religion.
The theme of crisis feels ever more fitting in a world plagued by perennial conflict, genocide, political polarization, the so-called culture wars, and the impending climate catastrophe (to name just a few). Simply turning on the news demonstrates that we are living in turbulent and troubling times. We felt encouraged during our time together, despite the heaviness of the themes we were addressing. In a very small way, our collaborative and mutually enriching exploration of these issues represented the strengths of cross-disciplinary cooperation. One participant reflected that “our collaborative efforts lead to an atmosphere of generosity and mutual respect, in which the differences between participants—in terms of academic background, experiences, methodology—were figured as strengths to draw on, not obstacles to overcome.” Despite this, a recurring motif was the danger of dehumanizing and over-intellectualizing these discourses, something we are easily at risk of in academia. Thus we came away confident that action must partner with reflection if these crises are to be resolved. We hope that this ethos of coming together from a range of backgrounds to examine these issues with an open mind will also be the focus of those who have the power to make changes, be they leaders in religious, political, or cultural spheres. And we hope that readers of this thematic section issue are encouraged by the academic voices represented here, who refuse to shy away from even the most severe crisis-points and courageously tackle them head-on.
Boyle Lecture 2025
This second thematic section contains the 2025 Boyle Lecture, delivered by Antje Jackelén under the title “Science, Technology, Theology, and Spirituality: A Necessary Partnership?,” as well as the response by Arthur Petersen.
Books reviewed in Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology
Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology is a quarterly joint publication of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT) and the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) and is distributed free to all members of ESSSAT and ISSR. In order to give readers of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science an overview of recent publications, we include the list of books reviewed in the latest Reviews issue (in this case, June 2025):
- Alister McGrath, Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times, London: Oneworld Publications, 2025.