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Science-Engaged Theology Comes to San Antonio: A Report from the American Academy of Religion / Society of Biblical Literature Meeting 2021

For those of us who attend the American Academy of Religion / Society of Biblical Literature Meeting each year, if we work in areas represented by Theology and Science, the annual Science and Religion Hospitality Event is an important fixture. It is convened and sponsored by a shifting coalition of institutions, including the International Society for Science and Religion, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion at Boston University, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. Last year, on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, the AAR/SBL meeting took place online, so there was no reception, nor was there one this year, when we met in-person again in San Antonio. That does not spell retreat by any of the bodies traditionally involved, any more than the absence of Cambridge or Oxford University Press from the book hall means that they are pulling out of theological publishing (the absence of the latter was all the starker because the stall was set up, with the Oxford logo, but not books or people). We can hope that all of that picks up next year. The absence of the usual Hospitality Event, though, did serve to highlight the arrival of a new player in town, and of a prominent new presence in the theology and science line-up at the AAR/SBL Meeting this year, in the form of a “Science-Engaged Theology Reception”, jointly sponsored by five programmes that have received funding from the John Templeton Foundation under the “Science-Engaged Theology” (SET) banner. I first heard the phrase exactly five years earlier: the last time, indeed, that the AAR/SBL Meeting had come to San Antonio. We could not wish for a better illustration of the rise of SET to prominence today than this journey, in only five years, from a topic of conversation among a few people over an evening drink to being the occasion for the main theology and science drinks and food reception at the Meeting. The first programme to receive funding along these lines was based at St Andrews, the fruit of a proposal devised by John Perry, and implemented in collaboration with Sarah Lane Ritchie and Joanna Leidenhag. Asking him at the AAR/SBL Meeting this year what he had set out to accomplish, Perry began by hoping that the time would come when a theologian would feel no more comfortable with saying “I am a theologian, so I don’t bother myself with empirical scientific matters” than with saying “I am a theologian, so I have no interest in the Bible” or “I care nothing for history”. (His “theologian” here is likely working somewhere in a cluster around systematic, philosophical, and moral theology, and Christian in the first instance, although the paradigm is broadening out to involve the other Abrahamic faiths.) “The question for us today”, as he put it, “is not whether the theologian should use