Vid förnuftets utkanter. Förhållandet religion-vetenskap i svensk idé- och lärdomshistoria, 1936–1987

Sammanfattning: The interest of religion in the academia of history and the history of ideas has held an unobtrusive and modest position during modernity. Often, religion and its influences, was regarded as something waning, something that was about to disappear. Instead science would become the foremost guiding light upon which most historians would focus their gaze. This essay aims to examine how article-authors, in the Swedish academic yearbook of Lychnos, wrote about the topics of religion and science between the years 1936 and 1987. With a focus on the article authors’ language-use, and with the implementation of discourse analysis, I aim to distinguish how these article-authors narrated, and portrayed, the history of religion and science and the interconnections between them. The study shows that in the early days of Lychnos the yearbooks focal point is aimed upon the sciences of history. The scientists of the age, as portrayed by the article authors, are described as the protagonists of the story and they are often described as in conflict with religious peoples and ideas. Further on, the discourses take on other shapes. Religion, no longer, gets depicted as something inherently negative and regressive, and some of the authors leans towards a discussion where science no longer is represented as the progressive idea of history. By studying these depictions and descriptions in Lychnos it is possible to get a view of the Swedish field of the history of ideas and of how some article-authors discursively have looked upon the subjects of religion and science and the circumstances between them. Furthermore, with these discourses and historical happenings, described in the yearbook of Lychnos, this essay aims to put these discussions into a broader contemporary historiographical perspective: how the study of religion and the ideas of religion certainly has an important position in the study of the history of ideas. This in the age of the so-called return of religion.