How Did We Get Here?

Until roughly the 16th century, nearly everyone in Western Europe — from common farmers and laborers, to highly educated scholars and clerics — took for granted that they lived in a cosmos teeming with a wide range of spiritual beings. Then, the story goes, everything changed, as the Scientific Revolution cast out all these intermediary spirits, leaving a cosmos that resembles a collection of inanimate machines, rather than an ecology teeming with living agents: a process which the pioneering sociologist Max Weber famously termed “the disenchantment of the world.” In this evening’s program, we’ll consider this process of disenchantment within its historical context and its consequences. Learn more & RSVP here!