In December I had the privilege of taking part in a Faith and Science event hosted by St. Stephen Baptist Church and The Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute of the University of Louisville (Kentucky, USA). The purpose of the event was to “celebrate community heroes & learn from an expert panel discussing the key intersections of faith & science.” I was there with Dr. Kate Bulinski of Bellarmine University. We operated a table, representing the Archdiocese of Louisville. We had a lot of cool stuff there — the Bouchet telescope, fossils from Bellarmine’s collection, various books, etc.
Cool as our stuff was, however, the central feature of the event was the recognition of Elmer Lucille Allen, a Louisville chemist now in her nineties, as an “& Science” Trailblazer Awardee. Allen has become a little bit of a local science hero recently. Earlier this year she was honored with a street naming (the images below are from a story on WDRB, a Louisville TV station).
Allen worked as a chemist in Louisville’s bourbon industry. She added a Catholic connection to this Faith and Science event at a Baptist church. Consider the following, from an article about her in American Whiskey Magazine:
[After high school Allen] pursued higher education first at Louisville Municipal College (1949-1951), and then at the all-female Catholic Nazareth College (now Spalding University) (1951-1953). While Louisville Municipal College was co-ed and all Black (as the Black counterpart to University of Louisville it was the first liberal arts school for African Americans in Kentucky and only the third to open in the entire US), when she joined the cohort of all-women scholars at Nazareth College in 1951, she was one of very few Black students. Although the Day Law, which had prohibited integrated classrooms in Kentucky, was not fully repealed until Brown V. Board of Education overturned it in 1956, Nazareth College graduated its first Black students in 1951, Patricia Lauderdale and Barbara Miller. Allen enrolled at Nazareth in 1951, and described the transition as follows: “… I went from an all-Black school to an all-white school, so it was totally different because you had to fit in, and like I tell everybody now, is that you just have to learn how to adjust and go on, which is what I do now. Now you have to accept who I am. When I come into the room, here I am. Take me as I am, and that’s how I’ve survived all these years.”
I found it interesting that, in a prerecorded video interview that was part of the ceremony (click here for the interview), Allen mentioned how at Nazareth she had to take “12 hours of religion, 12 hours of philosophy”. So her education featured both faith and science.
The photos below are of Allen at work in the 1960s (from the American Whiskey article), and at St. Stephen Baptist during the December event.
Another part of the event was a panel discussion. It featured Dr. Kevin W. Cosby (Senior Pastor of St. Stephen Baptist Church and President of Simmons College of Kentucky, Louisville’s HBCU), Dr. Angelique Johnson (CEO/Founder, MEMStim LLC), Dr. Justin Mog (Assistant to the Provost for Sustainability Initiatives, University of Louisville), and Waylon Riley (Youth Program Manager & Assistant Camp Director, Trager Family JCC). It was moderated by Rev. Dr. Leah Schade (Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship, Lexington Theological Seminary).
In that discussion, I found Dr. Johnson’s comments the most interesting, especially her remarks on going to church as a research scientist. She talked (click here for the video) about how she got her PhD from the University of Michigan, and then continued —
I was doing science and research and engineering in implantable medical devices for hearing loss. And I started a company doing that. But I remember sitting in the lab and pulling allnighters to develop this technology and to get through my coursework. And we’d pull allnighters and then I would close down, saying [to my colleagues], “I’m going guys. You know, it’s about 7 o’clock in the morning. I have to get ready for church.” And they’re like, “Church? What are you talking about?” And I was one of the few people in my classes that actually held to a faith system that motivated them to actually practice it.
She also noted that,
The United States Federal Reserve Bank actually released a study … on black females [and entrepreneurship] and they never asked them anything about faith. They just gave them [the women] a wildcard question to respond to. And at the very end of this report, this multi-page report on the state of black female entrepreneurship, they had these few paragraphs [answers to the wildcard question]. They [those paragraphs] said overwhelmingly the women chose to emphasize that they not only were believers, went to church and practiced their faith, but they were using their faith to make business decisions.
It was an interesting statement both on the role of faith in the lives of these women, and also on how that role is, not just overlooked, but never thought of as being something to look for in the first place. The women in the study just spontaneously inserted it into a blank when they had a chance. That is something to think about.
So as you can see, it was an interesting and informative Faith and Science event.
Click here for other “Kentucky Science Conversations” posts.
