Today’s featured entry from the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages:
“Jesuits: Savants” (CLICK HERE for it)
Mordecai Feingold seeks here to “get past the stereotypes that surrounded the Society of Jesus during the first 200 years of its existence and evaluate the scientific dimension of its intellectual contribution, independent of its religious mission.” He writes that, “[B]y and large, the scholarly activities and aspirations of Jesuits were indistinguishable from those of other contemporary savants, secular or ordained, irrespective of denomination. True, constraints on the pursuit of secular learning were more stringent among Jesuits, as were the mechanisms regulating their teachings, publications, and contacts with outsiders. But this cannot be automatically construed to mean that the Jesuits harbored a greater number of reactionary, prejudiced, or bigoted scholars than did other Catholic orders (or, for that matter, the various Protestant churches). Indeed, my research indicates that while scholarship often served partisan goals in the charged religious atmosphere of the early modern period, Jesuit scientific practitioners as a group seem to have resisted the temptation to yoke science to other ends as well as did practitioners of any other religious denomination….”
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