Podcast interview: G. Clinton Godart, “Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine”
In Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine. Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), G. Clinton Godart (Associate Professor at Tohoku University’s Department of Global Japanese Studies) brings to life more than a century of ideas by examining how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or – as was more often the case – how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious beliefs? These are some of the questions the book tries to answer, in a tour de force that takes the reader from the Meiji Restoration to the contemporary period.…