Barnes, Michael

Michael Barnes

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Michael Horace Barnes holds the Alumni Chair in Humanities and is professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton. He is author of Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science (Oxford University Press, 2000), In the Presence of Mystery: An Introduction to the Story of Human Religiousness (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990 and forthcoming), Theology and the Social Sciences (Orbis Books, 2001), and various articles on method in religious studies, on the evolution of religions, and on the thought of the Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner. He has received a Templeton award for an article on religion and science, as well as both the initial and advanced Templeton awards for courses in religion and science. He is past director of the CORE program at U.D., an integrated sequence of ten courses in the humanities, and in 1992 received the university-wide award as best teacher. His current work is to compare genetic influences on behavior to the impact of long-term cultural developments, arguing that opponents of evolutionary psychology would do better to acknowledge the real impact of the genes on behavior but also to delineate the many ways in which culture has reached far beyond what the genes provide.