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.