Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Galileo And The Church: An Ecological Perspective, Holly J. Lawson

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

The post-medieval church was surrounded by intense sociocultural factors, including the recent Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Although “the Galileo affair,” as it has been dubbed in the years since, is generally presented as a case example of the conflict between science and faith or religion, it is far more complex than these two issues alone. Galileo’s discoveries supporting the Copernican theory entered a complex interplay of factors, eventually leading to a highly pressurized encounter between Galileo and the Inquisition. Galileo’s indictment is a nuanced, poignant example of the rich cultural and contextual factors that drive clashes of religion …