Something Old, Something New

‘Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.... We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be.’ (Pope John Paul II) This quotation from John Paul II distils the main theme which Glausser develops in this text. He tries to show that despite the best efforts of the separationists on both sides of the religion-secularism-science divides, these categories remain “entangled”, or in another term “in Dialogue”. Through a series of chapters that demonstrate the impossibility of a pure separation and seek to illustrate the enduring relevance of the religious in an ostensibly secular contemporary world, Wayne Glausser offers a “third way” that expresses the virtues of moderation and compromise.