We’ve been visiting Bowdoin professors in their offices, asking them to tell us about a special or important book. To make it impromptu, we pick a shelf from which the professor then must select a book. In this video, history professor Dallas Denery speaks about two books that influenced his career.

 

Denery also tells a story about how he, as a young man in his early 20s, stumbled upon one of these books, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, in a San Francisco bookstore run by St. Mary’s Parish. At the time, he confessed he couldn’t understand any of it. Later as a graduate student, Denery ended up taking a class with the book’s author, Amos Funkenstein, who became a generous and influential mentor to him. “It was one of those fortuitous circumstances where I had the book and the author showed up and was everything you would hope he would be,” he said.