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The Study of Man: Toward Intellectual Teamwork
- Abstract
More than five years have elapsed since the organization of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life. The idea of the Conference was conceived by nine scholars who met not long after the Second World War broke out to consider the crisis of their time. They were President Henry Sloane Coffin, Union Theological Seminary; Professor Arthur H. Compton, Chicago University; President Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Theological Seminary; Dean Hughell Fosbroke, General Theological Seminary; Professor Frederick C. Grant, Union Theological Seminary; Professor Harold D. Lasswell, Washington School of Psychiatry; President John A. Mackay, Princeton Theological Seminary; Professor Alexander Marx, Jewish Theological Seminary; Doctor Anton C. Pegis, Fordham University; and Professor Harlow Shapley, Harvard Observatory. By the fall of 1940, seventy other scholars from the various arts and sciences rallied to the project and the first official call for a national meeting was issued in their name.
Since its inception the Conference has received wide support in both academic and lay communities. Its meetings have been well attended and extensively publicized, and its proceedings reviewed with care. And with good reason. For the problems involved in the organization of the Conference are of general interest, both in themselves and in their bearing upon the strategy of cooperation in behalf of common objectives among groups of varying religious and philosophical belief, a type of cooperation that will be of increasing importance in the years before us. The papers and speeches delivered under the auspices of the Conference fill five volumes, with a sixth in preparation, and each one more massive than its predecessors. To date, approximately 3500 pages of its deliberations have appeared, running close to two million words.
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