Wild Experiment

Donovan O. Schaefer is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, also published by Duke University Press, and The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power.

"Inaugurate[s] a project of secular theorization that adds a distinctive and needed methodological angle to studies of the secular in North America. . . . A must-read for scholars of American religions. . . ." - Valeria Vergani (American Religion) "Wild Experiment is an indispensable addition to any course syllabus on race, religion, affect theory, and any interdisciplinary topic on the intersections between feeling and thinking." - Abdulrahman Bindamnan (Material Religion) "Through Schaefer’s endeavor to expand the conversation between secularism studies and STS, the field of STS has an illuminating new vantage from which to look at knowledge, feeling, and belief. And it feels right." (Society for the Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Prize Committee) "This fascinating book is a valuable contribution to the field of affect studies and secularism studies, as it starts a first conversation between these previously somewhat unconnected fields." - Nur Yasemin Ural (Politics, Religion & Ideology) "Perhaps humanities scholars such as Schaefer can be useful in the climate crisis. They can help scientists pay attention to how knowledge feels-and thus how to be more effective in communicating it." - Amy Frykholm (Christian Century) "Wild Experiment is a very well-written book that sheds a new light on how to perceive science. It provides good grounds for rejecting naÏve arguments about objective and value-free knowledge in science." - Kostas Kampourakis (Quarterly Review of Biology) "Reading Donovan Schaefer’s book has been an experience. At times I felt almost dizzy as his intellectual range is breathtaking. Schaefer effortlessly engages with a vast range of topics normally not discussed in one breath, in one book. He gives us an outline of cogency theory on how thinking feels and then debates it in relation to racialized reason, secularism, Darwin and Huxley and their science,  new findings in neuroscience, creationism and more. Each chapter is like a stand-alone episode of the most gripping drama, reading which I had a Hitchcockian feeling-never a dull moment. The book is a page-turner. The nuance, the richness, the poetics of Schaefer’s prose-the book is indeed a testimonial of a passionate love affair with an idea." - Esha Shah (Zygon) "As someone who has not previously engaged with religious studies in any substantive way, I did not expect to be captivated by this book. And yet it drew me in, held my attention, and has continued to resonate with me since. . . . Part of what made the book accessible to me-in addition to the lucid writing-was its robust engagement with canonical STS literature as well as with the feminist and antiracist scholarship I do know well. He brings together bold-faced names for STS such as Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, as well as incisive antiracist thinkers ranging from Audre Lorde to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. And yet a key thing that made it interesting to me was that it brought those too-often-siloed literatures together with each other and with new-to-me literatures in a way that is original." - Anne Pollock (Zygon)

• Introduction. Cogency Theory: An Essay on Our Intellectual Affects  1Part I. Cogency Theory1. The Longing to Believe: Philosophers on Conspiracy Theory and the Sense of Science  332. Sensualized Epistemology: Affect Theory on How Reason Gets Racialized  573. Science as an Intoxication: Secularism Studies on Enchantment and Critique  804. Feeling is Believing: The Triune Brain, Mere Exposure, and Cogency  107Part II. Feeling Science and Secularism5. Only Better Beasts: Darwin, Huxley, and the Sense of Science  1376. The Secular Circus: Science and Racialized Reason in the Scopes Trial  1697. The Four Horsemen: New Atheism as Secular Conspiracy Theory  200Epilogue. From Creationism to Climate Denialism  230Acknowledgments  239Notes  243Bibliography  281Index