COSMOLOGICS

a magazine of science, religion, and culture

About Cosmologics

Cosmologics is a space for new and insightful conversations aimed at understanding the interactions of science. We view science and religion not only as ways of thinking, but as practices, languages, and sources of authority. The writing in Cosmologics moves beyond polemics in favor of one or the other and instead encounters each concept anew through the lenses of race, gender, and inequality. By shifting the discussion on science, we intend to rethink the past, critique the present, and imagine new and promising futures.

Cosmologics is a project of the Science, Religion, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School. While we primarily cater to the academic community, we recognize that students, in their pursuit of knowledge, might occasionally feel overwhelmed. In line with this, we often encounter queries from students asking us to “Write My Essay” or provide guidance on complex topics. Our content is designed to offer rich insights and assist in their academic journeys.

Submissions

Cosmologics welcomes both submissions and pitches for potential articles. Features submissions should range between 2000-4000 words, while review submissions should fall between 1500-2500 words. All pieces should engage thoughtfully with their subject and refrain from overly technical language. All articles should adhere to writing standards and follow consistent formatting. We suggest having recourse to Writology writing service for editing and formatting assistance.

Unsolicited submissions should not be previously published and should take into account the topic of the magazine as well as its thematic areas of focus. Pitches should be as detailed as possible. In all cases, include a brief bio and links to previously published work.

Please send submissions and pitches via email.

We look forward to reading your work and appreciate your patience as we cannot respond to all correspondence immediately.

Call for Papers:
Indigeneity: Beyond Science and Religion
A special issue of Cosmologics
This special issue, guest edited by Eli Nelson, explores the myriad ways in which the categories of science have mapped onto, drawn upon, partnered with, and done violence to Indigenous epistemologies, knowledges, institutions, and ceremonies. In diverse Native epistemic contexts, science and religion are imperfect translations and foreign classifications, both now with their own long and interconnected history, and must be understood as contextual, incomplete, and in the absence of theoretical and institutional intervention, in service to settler colonial political structures. Science are colonial and settler taxonomies built on the backs of Indigenous and other colonized peoples globally, and yet, Indigenous discourses and practitioners have historically and in the contemporary moved between these categories and the spaces they delineate, and with them Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies have at times grown and changed to facilitate survivance and at others inhabited a space of refusal to be classified and researched.

We seek contributions rooted in critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies perspectives that engage science and religion as categories relative to each other and to Indigenous epistemologies and practices, and as sites of colonial oppression and Indigenous assertions of self determination. Contributions in the history and philosophy of Indigenous knowledges and specific tribal/national traditions, science and technology studies, religious studies, anthropology, and literary studies are all welcome.

Naomi Oreskes: Environmentalism at the Vatican
For most of us, the Vatican isn’t the first place that comes to mind when thinking of major players in the environmental activism world.
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Jasbir Puar: Regimes of Surveillance
Surveillance is not just about who the state is watching, but about multiple circuits of collective surveillance: it’s not just about the act of seeing or noticing or screening (bodies/identities), but also about acts of collecting, curating, and tabulating data and affect.
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Devin Singh: Debt Cancellation as Sovereign Crisis Management
Debt cancellation in its ancient near east context is unquestionably an act and prerogative of sovereign power.
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Jeff Guhin: Evolution in the Classroom
A student asked, “Should we believe in science?” The teacher joked, “Absolutely not,” with a completely straight face. Some students laughed nervously and then the teacher started laughing. “Of course!” he shouted.
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Alyshia Gálvez: Sanctuary, An Old Religious Idea Becomes a New Immigrant Movement (Again)
When the Sanctuary and New Sanctuary Movements sought to protect immigrants fleeing human rights abuses or to prevent separation of families, they did not do so within the narrow confines of legality.
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Adam Shapiro: Darwin’s Foil
The transition from reading Paley’s book as a work of theology to reading it as a failed attempt at scientific explanation is a crucial part of a broader genealogy of misreading of the Natural Theology, but Paley as a scientific foil to Darwin is an image that evolved gradually over the course of two centuries.
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Jason Josephson-Storm: Magic Never Vanished
When and how did the myth of disenchantment emerge?
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John Durham Peters: Obsolescence in the Digital Era
Massiveness of documentation, fragility of preservation: this is our condition. How will digital records be kept alive across decades, centuries, and millennia?
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Lisa Messeri: Finding Our Place in the Cosmos
Place breathes meaning into alien worlds because it makes these worlds familiar and, moreover, familiar as something that is physically explorable.
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Candi K. Cann: Responding Theologically to Contemporary Mourning
Stories keep the dead in our lives, help make sense of their deaths, and communicate our losses to others. Narratives order lives in a timeline that we can recount and to which we can give meaning.
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Laura L. Lovett: The Unquestionable Sacredness of Home
When we have an ideal that is unquestioned—the home, the family, country life, at the turn of the last century—it creates a weapon for use against anyone who seems to challenge those structures.
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J. Corey Williams: Race in the Hospital
Medicine as a modern social and cultural institution has all the plagues of racism, gender bias, Islamophobia, and all these things we deal with in broader society. It might be more nuanced, but it’s still there from the patient’s perspective, as soon as they walk in the door. I want to encourage people to think critically about that, especially people in the system like myself.
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Rebecca Brendel: Autonomy and Mental Health
Very early in my training, a middle-aged mother of two school-age children was referred to me for psychiatric care. In the past, she had struggled with periods of depressed mood, but she had never sought treatment. She came to me after, as she described it, her husband had “dropped her off” at the hospital and she was sent to me.
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Carlos Martinez: Forging a New Body Politics
The greatest challenge we face is not the emergence of identity politics, but rather how to build a broad-based movement that resonates across marginalized groups.
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Lauren Taylor: Waiting on God in Ghana
Mt. Horeb is an evangelical Christian organization whose mission is to “set free those held captive by Satan through a ministry of fasting and prayer.”
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