Roundtable on <em>Critical Approaches to Science and Religion</em>: Response to Commentators

This roundtable conversation reflects on the aims and implications of Critical Approaches to Science and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2023), edited by Myrna Perez, Ahmed Ragab, and Terence Keel. The discussion responds to four critics—Megan Loumagne, Elizabeth Perez, Peter Harrison, and James Miller—who engaged the volume at the American Academy of Religion’s “Author Meets Critics” panel in 2024. In this dialogue, the volume’s editors consider how the study of science and religion might move beyond disciplinary reform toward more urgent forms of political and intellectual work. They question whether transforming academic fields remains a meaningful site of democratic practice amid the erosion of university infrastructures, the rise of authoritarian politics, and the vocational turn in higher education. The exchange revisits the legacy of the New Left, the status of basic research in the humanities and social sciences, and the relationship between research, teaching, and social transformation. Together, the participants articulate both the necessity and the limits of academic critique, proposing a renewed ethics of scholarship attentive to institutional fragility, epistemic inequality, and the moral imagination required to sustain democratic knowledge.