This talk explores the reception of the work of the Jesuit priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin at the United Nations since the 1950s. It shows how Teilhard’s Catholic cosmology was taken up by high-level UN bureaucrats and contributed to the development of a distinctive UN spirituality. The story of Teilhard’s influence at the UN, I argue, reveals the way that science and religion came together to animate postwar projects of global governance. It thus serves as a counterpoint to histories of postwar internationalism that privilege the role of secular political forces, and to histories of Catholicism that privilege the centrality of the Vatican.

Pre-Circulated Papers and Registration

The pre-circulated papers will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Shachar Gannot at [email protected].