About five years ago, I met Andrew Pinsent, Director of Research at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, over a coffee in Oxford. Within a few weeks we decided to create a programme to understand and document research into issues regarding science and religion throughout Latin America. This part of the world is a vast region where many philosophical and theological traditions meet. Our hope was to find academics working on science and religion research from this diversity of perspectives. And we were not disappointed. Over the course of three years, which included three international conferences and several journeys across the region, we were lucky to meet hundreds of scholars working on topics related to science and religion. This volume is but a reflection of what some of these scholars are currently thinking and discussing on these topics.

Latin America is a somewhat overlooked region, in particular where issues regarding science and religion are concerned, hence the need for a volume detailing various features of the past and current state of academic research into these issues. It is well known that John Brooke has persuasively argued for the complexity of the relations between scientific enterprises and religious traditions in history. Similarly, David Livingstone has recently shown the importance of complicating even further our understanding of these relationships. It is in this spirit that I conceived this volume.