This summer, Professor of Psychology Dr. John Teske was invited to join the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR), an elite scholarly society with fewer than 200 members. Teske’s recent presentations and articles in the Zygon Journal of Religion and Science, connections to international professionals in the field and former position as president of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) all contributed to the offer of membership.
The ISSR, founded in 2002, has been “gradually accumulating members … just the best,” according to Teske. As a member of the ISSR, Teske is most looking forward to “being recognized as part of the elite group.” He plans to help with fundraising for the ISSR, use his membership to establish further connections in the field, and attend relevant meetings and events, including a conference on “New Challenges in Science and Religion” in Baltimore, Md. this November.
Teske was also reelected to another three-year term as vice president for conferences for the IRAS. He served as president of this organization from 2005 to 2008, held the position of immediate past president, and now serves as vice president for conferences. In this position, Teske manages long-range conference planning and serves as a member of the IRAS council. In 2009, Teske ran an IRAS conference entitled “The Mythic Reality of the Autonomous Individual” and edited the March 2011 issue of Zygon which included papers from this conference, including his own work. Teske cited his editing of this issue and his paper included in the issue as one of his favorite pieces of his own work. Most recently, Teske and colleague Whitney Bauman, of Florida International University, presented a workshop about “Navigating Worldviews” at the 59th annual conference of the IRAS in Silver Bay, N.Y.
Teske intends to bring his work with science and religion back to Elizabethtown College, both around campus and in his psychology courses. Teske plans to give a talk on “diversity, not dissention” with Professor of Religion and Asian Studies Dr. Jeffery Long and others on campus in the spring. The proposed talk will be about world religions, but will also include discussion about various nonreligious perspectives. “It’s important to acknowledge that that there are worldviews that aren’t necessarily religious ones,” Teske said. Teske has devoted much of his career to the study of mythology and is especially interested in mythological worldviews.
Teske said his accomplishments in the science and religion field are extremely interconnected with the material he teaches in his psychology courses. “There’s a total overlap with everything— there has to be,” he said. As a social psychologist, Teske sees study of worldviews and mythology as hugely important in understanding identity formation. “Myths are ways to code repeated things that happen over and over. We construct lives of meaning out of connecting our lives to myth,” Teske said. He said humans model themselves on the stories they are exposed to and noted that this connects to his study of film and its role in culture. Teske also tied his study of mythology to his course on personality, the last third of which focuses on narrative identity. He cited former course offerings, such as a psychology course on brain, mind and spirit and an honors course about emotional psychology, as direct connections to his current work with science and religion.
“You like to think your life hasn’t peaked yet,” Teske said of his accomplishments so far. He remains proud of several articles he wrote in the 90s, including “The Haunting of the Human Spirit,” which he considers his most accessible work. He has been interested in mythology throughout most of his professional career and sees his 2006 article “Neuromythology: Brains and Stories” as still central to his work. Teske plans to focus his current research on humans’ emotional lives and creation of stories.
In addition to his academic work this summer, Teske went skydiving to face a personal phobia of “not having anything under [his] feet.” Teske decided to pursue his fear in an extreme way as a personal experiment with flooding, a type of behavior therapy that involves exposing someone to the object of his or her phobia to help him or her realize the irrationality of his or her fear. According to Teske, the flooding worked, and he no longer has that fear. This semester he plans to relate this experience to his Emotion class.
