7 Florence Road
Harrington Park, NJ 07640.
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
10 August 2003.

Query for Love and Happiness: Spiritual Thought in the Light of Behavioral Genetics and Neurochemistry

Dear

For at least the last 2,000 years, many people have believed the maxim, ‘God is Love,’ and that love is eternal, extending beyond the borders of life and death. Neuroscience has reduced love to a well-timed trickle of neurotransmitters and hormones. Does this mean that the 2,000 year-old tradition of a loving God will now disappear into the depths of dopamine?

Love and Happiness explores the most recent work emerging from genetics and neurochemistry, research showing such human feelings to have a genetic and biochemical base. What does this mean in light of the cultural theological tradition that insists on God being love?

God doesn’t possess veins filled with love-inducing biochemicals. Neither do genes and neurotransmitters bring about happiness in the afterlife. What then are love and happiness, spiritually? To address this question means making sense of the opposing explanations that scientific and spiritual traditions offer to arrive at adequate explanations of love and happiness: ones that do justice to both the physical and the spiritual aspects of our nature.

Several religious thinkers have tried to confront advances in genetics, while most scientists choose to ignore traditional spiritual issues. Love and Happiness takes the next step by showing how science and theology can work in tandem for greater explanatory power. Taking over where recent books like Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal and Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland’s Living With Our Genes leave off, Love and Happiness provides answers to some of the most tantalizing challenges leveled by Richard Dawkins. This work reaches the burgeoning science and religion market, as well as students, scholars in theology, and educated trade audiences interested in spiritual responses to modernity.

For 35 years, I have been studying the nexus of science and spirituality. Currently, I also work in prehistoric archaeology, exploring human line markings and the evolution of language. I have published three books (Sleuthing the Divine: The Nexus of Science and Spirit; David Bohm’s World: New Science and New Religion; and From Science to an Adequate Mythology), have edited several more, and written many articles and academic papers. In the 1980s and 1990s, I founded, published, and edited the magazine, Science & Spirit. I began then, and continue to edit the book series, ‘Theology and the Sciences,’ for Fortress Press. Five other books await publishers: In the Spirit of Happiness, Dreaming Time, Natural Morality, Our Ancestors Touch Us, and Science of God.

I am a professor in the Graduate College of Union Institute and University, Cincinnati (a non-traditional learning-at-a-distance program, where I supervise and advise doctoral students), am a member of Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, and co-direct the Oxford Institute for Science and Spirit. My academic background includes doctorates in mathematics and in religious studies. I frequently speak at academic conferences in science and religion.

I have enclosed a SASE. However, as I travel frequently, it is best to contact me through email. A full proposal and sample chapter are available for you should you request them. Thank you for your time and interest, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Kevin Sharpe.