Edited volume
Religious Skepticism about Science: Understanding Mistrust and Building Bridges Open Access Forthcoming
Edited by Josh Reeves, Jeroen de Ridder, and Jonathan Jong, and under contract with Routledge with full open access. The volume runs to 15 chapters and 3 cross-track exchanges that bring theology, religious studies, philosophy, and psychology into direct conversation. Several of the findings on this site come from its chapters, including van den Brink on providence and eschatology, Kamwendo on clergy-mediated vaccine trust, and Sturm on apocalyptic counter-knowledge.
The manuscript is due to the publisher in February 2027. A table of contents is not yet public, since contributor consent is still being gathered.
Routledge. 15 chapters, 3 cross-track exchanges. Manuscript delivery February 2027.
Literature reviews
Three reviews, one per track
Three literature reviews framed the workshops, one for each disciplinary track. They are summarized here rather than published in full.
The theology and religious studies review, by Reeves, maps how specific Christian doctrines shape epistemic dispositions toward science, and argues that Christian skepticism is a disorder of trust rather than an entailment of faith. It reads the tradition's account of faith as trust in testimony, from Augustine through Aquinas and Scotus, against the populist epistemology that treats dependence on human authority as the thing faith must refuse. This review is complete.
The psychology review, by Jong, covers the trust-in-science literature, including interpersonal and institutional trust, cross-cultural evidence, motivated reasoning, psychological distance, and competing authority structures.
The philosophy review, by de Ridder, covers the philosophy workshop's central themes: epistemic frameworks for expert testimony, inductive risk, institutional accountability, and the conflict thesis. This review is forthcoming.
Summaries only. The full reviews are not posted here.
For churches
A pastoral book on the Bible and conspiracy theories Forthcoming
A book-length manuscript for Christian laypeople, on the Bible and conspiracy theories, was written under the grant. It carries the project's work on trust, expertise, and misinformation to a general church audience. Completion is expected in the fall of 2026.
Related
Current Opinion in Psychology, "Trust in Science and Beyond" (2026) Open Access
Co-edited by the project's psychology co-director Jonathan Jong and Natalia Zarzeczna, this collection gathers 29 open-access review articles surveying the psychology of trust in science, with contributions from Lewandowsky, Douglas, Hornsey, Rutjens, Skitka, and Rios. The intervention research the articles survey was tested almost entirely on general populations, with religious communities rarely present as samples and religious identity seldom measured. That gap is what this project addresses.
Read the special issue on ScienceDirect
29 open-access articles. Current Opinion in Psychology, 2026. Editors: Jong and Zarzeczna.