Berkley Center

How does religious belief feel? How does science feel? And how is the pattern of interactions between religious bodies and science structured, not by a grid of beliefs, but by a living tangle of emotions?

At this Religion, Culture, and Politics Workshop, Donovan Schaefer, assistant professor of material religion and visual culture at the University of Pennsylvania, will adopt an affect theory approach in order to examine the reception of Darwinism in America, with a particular focus on the Scopes trial. His presentation will consider how an “affective economy,” in Sara Ahmed’s term, shapes the circumstances of the trial and considers the implications of this for thinking about the contemporary U.S. culture wars.