The next meeting of the Jesuit Scholarship in a Post-modern Age group will be at 3:30 PM on Sunday, December 12 at Barat House on the Newton Campus to discuss with Professor Steven Harris his paper, "Science and the Jesuit Constitution: How Jesuits of Old Held God, Nature, and Society Together." This paper was originally delivered at Boston College during the fall semester of 1999.

The meeting will be the first related to a new direction we are exploring experimentally this year by hearing from scholars outside the Society who have been working on the Jesuit intellectual tradition. Our intent is first of all to clarify the tradition and practice of Jesuit learning in the past and then to consider how the particular strategies of investigation undertaken in these studies can help us probe deeper the nature of our contemporary Jesuit scholarly practices and presuppositions and the sorts of identities we forge in the academy. This inquiry also contributes to an overall, larger project of ours, i.e., uncovering "Sources of the Jesuit Self," with the possibility of having a group of us collaborate on a book on the topic. (See the introductory essay at http://fmwww.bc.edu/JSPMA/jesuitself.html)

At our December meeting we will begin this series of new investigations by meeting with Steven Harris, a philosopher and historian of science who is a visiting scholar at Boston College this year. To facilitate a discussion of his work on the early Jesuit scientists, Steve suggests we read a paper he gave earlier in the semester at BC, "Science and the Jesuit Constitution." Steve's paper nicely draws on the riches of contemporary historiography of science to explore the emergence and growth of a Jesuit scientific tradition. In particular, he uses Bruno Latour's notion of a "constitution" (not related to that of our Jesuit Constitutions!) to ask how the early Jesuits involved in science conceived of the division of powers among the social, natural, and supernatural worlds, and saw their own Jesuit participation on an universal stage consisting of the natural and divine worlds. Since Steve will be present at our meeting our discussion will of course be more wide-ranging, but the paper is a good place to start.

November 26, 1999