A three-year research project working toward a comprehensive Christian vision for human flourishing in a world of technology

Involving scholars from Canada, the USA, Australia, Germany, and the UK, this collaborative project aims to provide a comprehensive theological assessment of recent technologies' impact on human nature and human life. The research program has three main objectives. First, to establish, in critical dialogue with philosophy, biology, and sociology, a modern theological anthropology in continuity with classic orthodox Christian theology in all three major confessions (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant). Second, to evaluate visions of human flourishing represented by technological culture, from social media to bio-genetic, enhancement technologies, including transhumanist dreams of transcending the body. Third, to provide a theologically grounded perspective on human flourishing in an age of technology. All research results will be published in print and internet media.

Dr John Behr queries the erasure of death from the horizon of sight in the modern Western world: what challenges does this erasure raise for our understanding of ourselves as embodied human beings? Click to watch ⭢

Dr. Robert Doede delineates some of the key conceptual shifts in the history of the West that have crucially contributed to the conceivability and perhaps even the plausibility of the contemporary transhumanist project of engineering mind uploading. Click to watch ⭢

Embodied Cognition and Psychiatry in a Technological World with Dr. Thomas Fuchs

Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs argues from a psychiatrist's perspective against the new gnosticism of the transhumanist movement, which assumes a fundamental mind-body dualism, insisting rather that processes of life and consciousness are insep­arably linked through the living body as a whole. In the unity of the per­son, both aspects are intertwined: the body is alive and therefore also mindful; the mind is alive and therefore also truly embodied. Watch all videos from the winter 2021 lecture series here.

Director

Dr. Jens Zimmermann

Jens Zimmermann is J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College/UBC and Research Associate at the Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought (CTMET) in Oxford.

This project, generously supported by a grant arranged through the Issachar Fund, extends Zimmermann's previous research on Christian humanism, theology, and hermeneutic philosophy by examining how technology shapes our conceptions of human identity and perception, of who we are and how we know, and how human relations, policies, and institutions are impacted, in turn, by these changes in human identity and perception.

Co-Director

Dr. Michael Burdett

Michael Burdett is Assistant Professor in Christian Theology at the University of Nottingham, a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford and an associate of the Ian Ramsey Centre, Oxford. Before becoming an academic, he worked in the aerospace and robotics industries with a firm that had contracts with NASA and JPL.

As part of this project he is advancing his work begun in Eschatology and the Technological Future by focusing on how death and glory are experienced and related to in highly technological societies and how our perception of both are conditioned by the forces of science and technology today. Throughout he analyses how death and glory are inseparably related to one another in humanist, transhumanist and Christian thought.