Mark A Kalthoff

"The sky is not a God but, rather, a book in which we see His greatest wonders painted on its pages and sides, and on the front of which we can almost find the name of the creator who made this." [...]wrote Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the Archbishop of Milan, in the early seventeenth century, giving voice to his natural theological convictions. First published in 2012 in Turin, Italy, Galileo's Telescope has now become available in English thanks to Catherine Bolton's translation. [...]as the authors explicitly avow, the principal task of the book is to present an "experiment in cartography and the cross-referencing of texts in an attempt to offer an overall vision of the circulation of the telescope in Europe" (169).

According to Shores of Knowledge, Columbus issued in "the most significant unintended consequences of all: the breaking open of the closed world of Christianity" (14). Hers is the old story of Enlightenment empiricism's victory over the text-bound and closed-minded religiosity of "Christians whose Bible was presumed to describe all that humans needed to know" (18). [...]it belongs on that list of dispensable titles that every library should ignore.

Ultimately, fewer and fewer interested parties found reason to affirm either a new natural theology that affirmed a divine hand in the evolutionary course of nature or an idea of Progress that seemed so much at odds with the world situation. Because the proposed reconciliation had been founded upon these notions, the enterprise miscarried. A highly regarded historian of science at the Queen's University of Belfast, Bowler has produced many books on the history of evolution that have rightly become staples of the Darwin industry and contributed mightily to our understanding of the idea of evolution. Were the same terrain to be plowed by a historian with a Christian commitment, there is reason to suspect that a different tale would emerge. [...]some such historian rises to the challenge, however, Bowler's copious, and in places cumbersomely written, rendition will suffice very well as the best starting place for a look at science and religion in early-twentieth-century Britain.