Imagining Progress: Science, Faith, and Child Mortality in America
Kristin Johnson
Jul 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Susan Hanfield
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14 hr 4 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Explores the intellectual history of Americans' divergent assumptions about God, nature, and science. Humankind has always wrestled with the existence of suffering. For two centuries, many American ministers, physicians, and scientists believed that an omnipotent and omniscient God created the world such that people might relieve suffering through ingenuity and learning. Others responded to the new worldview introduced by the scientific revolution as a threat to the divine order. In Imagining Progress, Kristin Johnson traces the history of Americans' evolving relationship with science and religion at "one of its most dramatic places"-the bedsides of dying children. It's here that she illuminates diverging assumptions about God, nature, and history. From Cotton Mather's campaign for smallpox inoculation to battles over teaching evolution in the 1920s, Johnson adroitly weaves an interdisciplinary history of medicine, science, theology, and activism. She follows a wide cast of characters from across theological, scientific, and political spectrums. What emerges is a portrait of diverse, often contradictory hopes and anxieties inspired by new theories of nature and human existence. Johnson also discerns a problematic pattern of invoking science to ameliorate the suffering of some children while ignoring the suffering of others.
About the author
Kristin Johnson is professor in the Science, Technology, Health and Society Program at the University of Puget Sound. She is author of The Species Maker: A Novel and Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition.
Along with a diverse career on stage and screen, Susan Hanfield is a prolific audiobook narrator with hundreds of titles to her credit. Known for her ability to bring the written story to life, Susan is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, three-time Audie Award finalist, and a Voice Arts Awards nominee.
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