I recommend everyone interested in science‐and‐religion to read this handbook. I had planned to share my enthusiasm about it with the readers of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science earlier; it was the appearance of a paperback version of this gem a few months ago that triggered me to finally get it out. John Slattery, in his position as Senior Program Associate with the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER) Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 2018 to 2022, was ideally placed to collate this handbook. He is now Director of the Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law at Duquesne University.

What is refreshing about the handbook is its combination of rigor, new voices, and new topics, while still being sufficiently “comprehensive” (let us face it: no handbook on science and religion can be fully comprehensive). Representatives from the three major branches of Christianity—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—are featured, as well as an unusually wide range of sciences (including social and environmental sciences). Also, the scientists and theologians discussed are not all the usual suspects. In fact, two of the most commonly discussed figures in science‐and‐religion, Galileo and Darwin, are not on the list by choice, since (i) they “have been the anchors for the vast majority of all work on the intersection of science and theology for the last few hundred years” (4), (ii) many good books have already been written about these scientists, and (iii) “they are still niche figures in the history of Christian theology” (5).

The book contains 24 short chapters, which are clustered around three themes. The first eleven chapters belong to a part on “Historical Explorations,” with chapters on: the Hebrew Bible; Aristotle; Augustine; Basil and the Greek Fathers; Maximus and John of Damascus; Hildegard of Bingen; Thomas Aquinas; John Calvin; George Washington Williams, Frederick Douglas, and Maria Stewart; and Neo‐scholasticism. The second theme is “Transitioning from the Twentieth to the Twenty‐First Century” and contains three chapters, one each for each major branch of Christianity. As a third theme, ten chapters offer “Explorations in Christian Theology today,” with two chapters on the physical sciences, three chapters on respectively the biological, medical, and psychological sciences, two chapters on the social sciences, and three chapters on the environmental sciences.

This book provides really interesting reading throughout. I learned a lot from it. One catches the allure of science as well as of theology: as Slattery writes: “Science, that basic human instinct to understand the world and its creatures, originates from the same instinct that seeks to explore the mystery of our existence itself. Science and theology can be described in a multitude of relationships—dialogue, coherence, harmony, integration, conflict—but in the end, they are human endeavors, as complex individually as they are entangled. And so, while this volume encourages further exploration of the widest reaches of scientific fields, it perhaps also encourages humility and simplicity in the face of technological and scientific heterogeneity” (11).