Robert Doede: Human Nature, Technology and Mind-Uploading

September 21, 2018 By Guest Contributor

This post traces the history of human nature and then relates this nature to the concept of “mind uploading.” Doede asks: “How did we get to the point where we can realistically entertain the notion of engineering the uploading of human identities onto inorganic digital platforms, especially given the prevailing evolutionary and physicalist ideological climate characteristic of contemporary western thought?” He argues that mind uploading is not our common destiny, and not even a coherent concept. Read more

Michael Mawson: Theological Anthropology and Extending Life

September 7, 2018 By Guest Contributor

Michael Mawson asks “How should Christians understand and respond to recent technologies aiming to radically extend the human lifespan?” Responding through the work of Barth and Bonhoeffer, Mawson explores the key category of finitude for theological anthropology. Read more

Celia Deane-Drummond: Features of Our Humanitas in a Cyborg Age

August 9, 2018 By Guest Contributor

Celia Deane-Drummond introduces theologians to “extended evolutionary synthesis,” a concept known to some evolutionary theorists. She examines how this theory differs from other evolutionary theories, and opens some questions for the conversation between theology and science. Read more

Thomas Fuchs: In Defense of the Human Person

August 9, 2018 By Guest Contributor

This post by Thomas Fuchs argues that the human mind must be understood through an irrevocable connection to the body. “Mind” could therefore never truly be replaced by “a computer algorithm, however sophisticated it might be.” Read more

David Lewin: I Post Therefore I Am: The Formation of Identity in an Age of Social Media

August 9, 2018 By Brian Dant

David Lewin argues that the identify-forming capacity of social media needs to be a key component of our understand of its role in our lives. Read more

John Behr: Dying to Live? Or How to Become a Human Being?

August 9, 2018 By Brian Dant

Fr. John Behr considers death and finitude, concluding that “If we don’t ‘see’ death today then, bluntly, we will not see God, and we will not see the transcendence of voluntary self-sacrificial love to which we are called.” Read more

Brent Waters: Aspiring to be Habitually Ordinary

August 9, 2018 By Guest Contributor

Dr. Brent Waters contrasts the “extraordinary world” we create through technology with the “everyday mundane” approach to being human, doing so in the context of what it means to love God and love neighbor. Read more

Celia Deane-Drummond: The Lost Soul of Early Hominins

June 7, 2018 By Guest Contributor

This lecture addresses several recent archaeological discoveries about early hominins, discoveries that help us think theologically about their probable inner mental world. Read more

Jens Zimmermann: A Theological Account of Personhood

May 3, 2018 By Guest Contributor

Jens Zimmermann has been awarded a British Academy Visiting Fellowship and will be conducting research in the faculty of theology and religion at Oxford University, Christ Church College, in collaboration with Graham Ward, from August 1, 2018 to February 1, 2019. Over the course of this project, Zimmermann intends to sketch the historical development and substantive contours of a theological conception of personhood and bring this description of ‘who we are’ to bear on pressing technological and social issues. Read more

Robert Doede: The Neo-Gnostic Flight from What Matters

May 3, 2018 By Eric Stein

In this lecture, Robert Doede undertakes a multi-dimensional examination of the Neo-Gnostic impulse, which he describes as the progressive immaterialization (and denigration) of matter and the material world, and which has naturally culminated in the thought of many transhumanists today. Read more