James Eric Lane

Dr. James Lane has been a professor of cultural history for over forty years. His interests all have to do with the function of religions in cultural history. He understands a religion to be an institution that passes down myth and symbols, and Lane's expertise is in the interpretation of these. Myths and symbols are human creations that present images of what it is to be human and thus form the very nucleus of a civilization. Lane insists that it is only by understanding these religious images that one can gain entrance into a cultural world different from one's own.

Lane has had an abiding interest in how myths and symbols function in political history, and his first book, Moment of Encounter, shows how the confrontation of the Bemba, a people of central Africa, with the imperial British was, above all, the clash of two fundamentally different images of what it is to be human. Today we know how our present world is being torn apart by such clashes. Although published over thirty years ago, Moment of Encounter is still very relevant (perhaps even prophetic) for the insight it offers into the nature of these clashes and how one might come to terms with them.

A second interest of Dr. Lane is the relation of religious myths and symbols to the modern scientific analysis of nature. His second book, Myth and the Mechanistic Universe, explores this relation. It is a study of the relation between the kinds of experiences expressed by religious forms to the kind of knowledge made available through mathematical forms. In our modern world it is rare that anyone understands both religious symbols and mathematical analysis. But an understanding of both is necessary for a proper understanding of religion and science. The book is important for anyone with a serious desire to understand the relation of religion to modern science.

A third interest of Dr. Lane has to do with the relation of religion to our human biological dimension. Thus he has studied and taught courses on the relation of religion to health and well-being, the relation of religion to the life cycle, and the relation of religion to issues of gender and human sexuality.