Magisteria

Reviews

'This page-turner of a book compellingly tracks the relation between science and religion, eternally bickering siblings, across two millennia. The ironies of the collaborations and oppositions between the two are brilliantly set out. You don’t have to have religious belief to recognise that science doesn’t always have the right answers. The real question: who has the authority to make statements about the natural world? Nicholas Spencer well shows that this authority – formerly in the hands of religious authorities, now usually scientific ones – has been effortfully constructed and disagreed over across time.' -- Chris Wickham, author of The Inheritance of Rome

'This sweeping and comprehensive look at the "war" between religion and science lays it bare as a nineteenth-century myth. Studying God’s Works – what we call "science" – was historically as important to Christianity as studying his Word. The battles we’ve mythologised – from the ancient mathematician Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob, to Galileo kneeling before the Inquisition, to the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial – were not about ideology, but authority. A compelling act of myth-busting.' -- Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Abacus and the Cross

'Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria is an indeed magisterial and brilliant attempt to bring a more up-to-date and sophisticated understanding of the intricate historical relationship between science and religion to a popular audience. Readers will be both entertained and surprised. He has done the cause of improved inter-human understanding a real service.' -- Professor John Milbank