Biocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religions

William Grassie, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science

A leader in the interdisciplinary and international dialogue between science and religion, Grassie is at work on a book-length study of the evolutionary phase in which human cultural processes begin to dominate the biological development of the planet. Grassie will try to expound upon the Lamarkian model of cultural evolution with a view to understanding "the evolutionary role of religions" in what might be called our contemporary "neo-biological civilization."

Grassie will begin by investigating how anthros has begun to shape bios through the alteration of planetary bioregions and genetic engineering and how information and systems theories can provide a model to describe the dynamics of cultural evolution. Noting the ambivalent moral character of our contemporary civic, scientific, and ethical choices, Grassie will then explore the inability of our moral system to deal with cultural processes of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics. Finally, Grassie will contemplate the evolutionary role of religion, which has become a mode of cultural expression and replication in shaping the interaction between moral systems and systems of economics, technology, and evolution. On the collective strength of these considerations, Grassie will conclude by predicting an ascendancy and power of faith in the 21st century as a means of coping with moral and existential uncertainty about our futures.


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Hanson's research interrogates the intersections of religious pluralism and ethnic immigration in American history. Currently, Hanson is working on a manuscript version of his dissertation, "City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens-New York City, 1945-2000."

This book-length study traces Flushing's evolution from its colonial history of religious freedom and tolerance to the contemporary emergence of intolerant nativism in the face of immigration. From his deep understanding of the neighborhood, Hanson derives a model of religious pluralism that does not hover in abstraction, but is based in the real world of everyday lives over time. In other words, Hanson creates a sociocultural history and ethnography in which people and groups are not depicted as fixed or isolated, but as dynamic and interacting agents in a complex and constantly changing world of local, national, and transnational dimensions. Hanson believes that his study of Flushing as an ethnically diverse and religiously pluralistic area is particularly significant as it is a neighborhood that could be considered a microcosm of the nation.

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Apocalypse in 20th- and 21st-Century America

Tim Horner
Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities and Augustinian Traditions, Villanova University

How has apocalypse—and Revelation in particular—been used in America during the 20th and 21st centuries? Contrary to conventional wisdom, apocalypse was not used by small persecuted groups to assure themselves that God would prevail in the end. Instead, it appears that apocalypse was used to create the appearance of a small, tightly knit group defined by a common belief. The danger these groups faced was not cognitive dissonance or the apparent absence of God, but social assimilation and the threatened loss of identity.

Horner's doctoral work in early Christian-Jewish relations has reshaped his understanding of modern forms of Christianity, leading him to investigate how apocalypse has been used since 9-11 to enhance Christian beliefs and literally "rally the troops." Horner seeks to understand how belief is used to build and maintain Christian communities and how the dynamics of belief play themselves out in the marketplace of society.

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The Physics of Eschatology in Early Modern England

Kristen Poole
Associate Professor of English, University of Delaware

The late 16th century witnessed the end of popular belief in purgatory; in the wake of this collapse, English culture became obsessed with melancholy and alienation. Poole proposes that this momentous and widespread shift in eschatological belief was brought on by a rapid change in the understanding of physics through the extensive dissemination of geographic, cartographic, and even perspectival knowledge. Space, in particular, underwent a dramatic transformation from a metamorphic and fluid construction to a calibrated, static entity that was given its final modern articulation by Descartes. With the emergence of modern, quadrated space, the dead no longer inhabited a world that was parallel to and interpenetrating with earthly space, but were spatially severed and temporally repositioned in the "afterlife."

While at the Forum, Poole will focus on a section of her manuscript tentatively entitled Deadlines: Eschatological Dramas in Early Modern England that focuses on relationships with the dead and what is now known as the "afterlife" during the years preceding this Cartesian formulation of a stable, modern conception of space. To explore the dramatic and lyrical expression of these issues, Poole will examine Shakespeare's Othello and Macbeth, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Donne's poetry and sermons.

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