February 3, 2006

Rationality and Religion

To the Editor:

Rodney Stark's "How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science" (The Chronicle Review, December 2) was both profoundly enlightening and profoundly uninformed. His emphasis on the importance of reason in the Christian tradition, while obvious to anyone who knows the history of scholasticism, is worth re-emphasizing in a political climate in which popular Christianity and science are often at odds. I also delighted in Stark's remarks on the development of capitalism in