The Zygon Center for Religion and Science is a non-profit organization housed at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago that is committed to the study of the interaction of religion and science. The center was founded in 1988 in continuing with the vision of Ralph Wendell Burhoe and it is supported by the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS).
The first director of the center was Philip Hefner (1988-2003) who was succeeded by Antje Jackelén (2003-2007). Currently the center is headed by Director Lea Schweiz with Associate Director Gayle Woloschak.
The center hosts a yearly course entitled the "Epic of Creation", which brings scientists and religious scholars together to offer lectures on the origins of the universe. It also hosts a yearly seminar with changing topics entitled the "Advanced Seminar in Religion and Science."
The center has hosted many notable conferences, with speakers such as Wolfhart Pannenberg (2001), Arthur Peacocke, and Ursula Goodenough. Ian Barbour, one of the godfathers of religion and science study is a frequent guest also.
Although sharing a name and various scholars, the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science is a separate entity from the center.
Famous quotes containing the words center, religion and/or science:
“Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion of the ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.”
—Richard Chase (b. 1914)
“If science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than the gestures of ceremony.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)