Negotiating Darwin

Negotiating Darwin provides an assessment of the Vatican's policy toward evolutionism during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Within the context of six case studies, the book displays painstaking knowledge of documents from the Vatican's archives and a thorough awareness of the interpretive issues involved. This is a major, scholarly contribution to the field. -- Giuliano Pancaldi, University of Bologna

In the process, they provide insight into current debates on evolution and religious belief.Drawing on primary sources made available to scholars only after the archives of the Holy Office were unsealed in 1998, Negotiating Darwin chronicles how the Vatican reacted when six Catholics-five clerics and one layman-tried to integrate evolution and Christianity in the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. As Mariano Artigas, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martinez reconstruct these cases, we see who acted and why, how the events unfolded, and how decisions were put into practice. With the long shadow of Galileo's condemnation hanging over the Church as the Scientific Revolution ushered in new paradigms, the Church found it prudent to avoid publicly and directly condemning Darwinism and thus treated these cases carefully. The authors reveal the ideological and operational stance of the Vatican and describe its secret deliberations. In the process, they provide insight into current debates on evolution and religious belief.