Imagining Progress

Summary

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.