Invoking the Enlightenment

A couple centuries after the Enlightenment ended, there are still disputes over what it was and whether it's still alive in contemporary debates about the relationship between science and religion. Why does the Enlightenment remain a touchstone? Literary scholar Maureen McLane and historian James Schmidt join Chicago Public Radio's Gretchen Helfrich for the discussion. McLane, Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University, is a visiting media scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She's also author of "Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species." Schmidt, Professor of History and Political Science at Boston University, is editor of "What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions."