Project Science, Religion, Nationalism and Atheism. A network of Spring
schools.

(SCiReNA) is the continuation of a collaboration that started in 2017,
in order to pursue scholarship from a non-Anglo-American, yet European
perspective. The main goal of this project is to organize three short Spring
schools on Science and Religion in Spain, Greece and Poland with the
following aims in mind: Firstly, to test a short version of a syllabus on
science and religion, formerly supported by the INSBS, in different
geographical and cultural (and non-English speaking) settings; secondly to
test the theses of a recent project and volume on ‘Science, Religion and
Nationalism’, which appeared in Routledge in 2023 ; and finally to explore
local information for a new projecta on Science, Religion and Atheism.

The first Spring School will take place in Athens, Greece with the institutional
support of the National Hellenic Foundation and the University of Athens, on
the 20th and 21 st of April, 2024. The second will take place in Poland, under
the aegis of Fundacja Pro Futuro Theologiae, on the 4 th and 5 th of June 2024,
and the third in Donostia/San Sebastian, in the Basque Country, Spain, as
part of courses offered by the Summer Courses Foundation of the UPV/EHU,
the 20 th and 21 st of June 2024.

SciReNa is to bring together a number of elements. It furthers research on
how to pedagogically advance the diffusion of the latest research on
science and religion to audiences often unaware of state-of-the-art
scholarship. The so-called ‘conflict thesis’, however debunked from academic
work, is still largely present in the public sphere, and we hope to use this
experiment as a way, not only to challenge the views of the students, but also
to learn from their a priori approaches (often related to local histories and
narratives). SciReNA will also be combined with research on pedagogy by
the Principal Investigator and the Co-Investigator, as well as some of the
major approaches developed by the INSBS to audiences underrepresented in
the network; namely non-English speaking, European audiences. Finally, it
will use the pedagogical framework already developed as a way to trigger
new research, particularly on the new science-religion-atheism project.

Principal Investigator: Kostas Tampakis, Senior Researcher, National Hellenic
Research Foundation
Co-Investigator: Jaume Navarro, Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University
of the Basque Country