New Books by Dr. Ashley Moyse

We are delighted to announce the release of two new books by Dr. Ashley Moyse, McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life, Christ Church, University of Oxford.

Treating the Body in Medicine and Religion

Treating the Body in Medicine and Religion had its roots in the Third Annual Conference on Medicine and Religion where scholars laboured to respond to questions that emerge from the practice of medicine, which exists because of the need to attend to physical and psychical limits and frailties. Yet with the arrival of genomic medicine, novel biotechnologies, and fringe sciences, contemporary medicine also pursues ever-new possibilities for our bodies. In such a climate, biomedical professionals find themselves confronting pressing questions: What is the relationship between body and soul, and between individual persons and the community? To whom does the body belong? What is the norm and ideal for human bodies? How should medicine response to suffering and death?

The Art of Living for a Technological Age

The Art of Living for A Technological Age sketches the crisis of our late modern age, where persons are enamored by the promises of progress and disciplined to form by the power of technology--the ontology of our age. Yet, it also offers a response, attending to those performative activities, educative and transformative social practices that might allow us to live humanly and bear witness to human being (becoming) for a technological age. As such, it is an exemplary example of the goals and outcomes of the Dispatches series, the individual volumes of which draw on diverse theological resources in order to offer urgent responses to contemporary crises. Authors in the series introduce succinct and provocative arguments intended to provoke dialogue and exchange of ideas, while setting in relief the implications of theology for political and moral life.

Human Flourishing in a Technological World with Jaron Lanier

Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier is one of the most celebrated technology writers in the world. He is known for charting a humanistic approach to technology appreciation and criticism. The Human Flourishing project hosted him at a free online event in Vancouver, B.C. on April 14, 2021.

Due to contract requirements, the video recording of this lecture is no longer available for viewing. However, all other Winter 2021 lectures can be viewed here, free of charge.

Remaining Focused: Human Flourishing in the Emergent Techno-Culture with Dr. Brent Waters

Brent Waters of the Stead Center, Garrett Evangelical Seminary, argues that human flourishing entails participation in communicative associations (e.g., church, family, and friendships). “Communication” is derived from the Greek koinonia that can be variously translated as communion, community, or communicate. Communicative associations promote the sharing, rather than exchange, of material and immaterial goods that promote the wellbeing of its members. Over time, such sharing requires practicing a series of acts and relationships that are repetitive and mundane. Since human flourishing thereby comprises more ordinary than extraordinary behavior, the challenge is to prevent or resist the various social forces driving the emerging technoculture from becoming distractions that effectively diminish human wellbeing. This in turn requires a critical engagement with technology rather than its rejection.

The Winter 2021 event series was sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Work and Leisure in a Technological World with Dr. Clark Elliston

The 21st century has seen a revaluation of work, now understood as a mode of self-realization and fulfillment, and Americans work longer and harder than ever before, despite having more material goods than ever before. Concomitantly, the modern world suffers from a devaluation of authentic leisure, which finds clear expression in two related areas of concern: sports and friendship, both of which have been co-opted by social media technologies promising ever-expanding immediacy of relation. In this lecture, Elliston of Schreiner University builds on these realities to argue that philosophical technophilia seriously overlooks aspects of Western modernity which threaten the foundations of human flourishing. He concludes that the very aspects of technological advance that have contributed much to the betterment of humankind also contain within them seeds of destruction if left unrealized and unchallenged.

The Winter 2021 event series was sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Living in the Midst of Death: Theological Reflections on Ageing and Technology with Michael Mawson

Michael Mawson, Charles Sturt University, Australia, draws upon the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Austrian born philosopher Jean Améry to reflect upon the phenomenon of human ageing. In particular, he explores how Bonhoeffer and Améry might help us to better understand and attend to the ambiguities and complexities of our experiences of ageing. In the first part, Mawson engages Bonhoeffer’s theological account of the human being as situated between life and death. In his 1933 Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer presents human beings as existing between the two conflicting promises of the opening chapters of Genesis: God’s promise to Adam in the garden (‘if you eat from this tree you will surely die’) and the Serpent’s promise to Eve (‘you will not die at all’). These two promises together encapsulate and disclose the situation of the humanity: ‘After the fall, all human beings are suspended between these two conflicting statements—living towards death, living as those already dead.’

The Winter 2021 event series was sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Oh, That We Might See Everything Differently: Interrogating a Baconian Spirit, Confessing (In)humanity: Dr. Ashley Moyse

Ashley Moyse, University of Oxford, interrogates some of the foundational ideas of transhumanism, which despite their appeal to novelty, futurism, and human liberation, reveal themselves to be anti-human, offering both dissent and a call to pedagogy. Heeding William Stringfellow’s claim that dissent is a humanising action, Moyse will expose the failure of transhumanists to see human being rightly. Employing critical philosophy of technology, he will show how the modern imagination in general has been turned away from the real [world of life] and toward the fictional world of a future perfect of re-engineered and re-animated zeros and one, or sequences of qubits, which in turn leads to the construction of antihuman desires.

The Winter 2021 event series was sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Education, Enhancement, and the Pursuit of the Good: Dr. David Lewin

David Lewin examines the intersection between education, technology and religion by considering what kinds of human improvement are ethically justified, and how they are justified. Lewin observes that within discussions of technological human enhancement, ethical questions can’t be restricted to the ends of human improvement, as though the means to those ends are neutral. Rather, there is an ethical demand for both a vision of what it means to be human, and how that vision should be realised. General notions of improvement or enhancement suggest an ethical discontinuity between acceptable and unacceptable means of improvement: conventional forms of human enhancement, specifically through education are considered ethically acceptable, even demanded, while unconventional means of human enhancement, for instance, drugs, gene therapies or neural implants, are often considered ethically problematic or unacceptable.

The Winter 2021 event series was sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

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.

The Winter 2021 event series is sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Disability, Technology, and Human Flourishing with Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin

Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin assesses the role of technology for human flourishing of people with disabilities in two steps. First, she defines human flourishing as depending in large part on our relationships with others, suggesting that, despite Christian theology's historical failure to understand this relational core of human flourishing, evidenced by the church's supporting the us/them divide between people with and without disabilities, there are nevertheless resources within theology that can help overcome this divide, and thus strengthen relationships between all people.

The Winter 2021 event series is sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Who Am I? Personhood, Technology, and Human Flourishing: A Lecture by Dr. Jens Zimmermann

In this lecture, Jens Zimmermann, Regent College’s J.I. Packer Chair of Theology, will address modern understandings of human consciousness, including Trans- and Post- humanist visions for the future of human society, and argues that contemporary notions of the human person presume a reductive model of human identity rooted in an already defunct scientific epistemology. As a counterpoint to this construction, Zimmermann offers a robust model of human consciousness that is grounded in the philosophically and theologically informed theory of personalism—a personalism that, in the Christian tradition, is validated in and through the Incarnation.

This lecture was presented as part of the series Human Flourishing in a Technological Age and sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College.

Being Human in a Technological World: Pointers from Patristic Anthropology: A Lecture by Rev. Dr. John Behr

In this lecture, which was presented as part of the Human Flourishing in a Technological World Winter 2021 series, John Behr, Regius Chair in Humanity, University of Aberdeen, 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? As Hervé Juvin notes in the last lines of his study, The Coming of the Body (2010), which examines the various ways in which our experience of embodiment has changed over the last century: ‘Alone, the body remembers that it is finite; alone it roots us in the limits, our last frontier (for how long?); and even if—especially if—it forgets, the body alone still prevents us from being God to ourselves and others.’

The West's Journey from Living Souls to Software Selves: A Lecture by Dr. Robert Doede

In this lecture, which was presented as part of the Human Flourishing in a Technological World Winter 2021 series, Robert Doede, Professor of Philosophy, Trinity Western University, 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. Doede explains how it is that contemporary scientists, philosophers, and intelligent laypersons find it easy, indeed almost natural, to take seriously that they are beings whose living identities are capable of being captured as digital software patterns, thereby de-coupled from their vital bodies, and then uploaded onto a non-biodegradable substrate where they can carry on their lives in perpetuity.