“Contingency and Grace
in an Age of Science and Technology”
By Albert Borgmann
We need to respond reflectively to the indifference that contemporary culture exhibits toward religion and theology. The realm of contingency offers common ground with atheists and agnostics and constitutes the habitual precinct of grace. Contingency, however, is questioned by scientists and reduced by technology. Thus, contingency must be clarified and defended vis-à-vis scientists (and philosophers), and its reduction by technology needs to be understood and reversed.
“Heidegger, Augustine,
and Poiesis: Renewing the Technological Mind”
By Glenn McCullough
This article looks at the problem of modern technology. In the first section, it considers Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” and his idea that technology is essentially related to the human faculty of understanding, arising from and determining human knowing. The second part searches for the historical roots of our modern technological knowing. Recent scholarship suggests that these lie in the nominalist view of God as an omnipotent will. A theological solution to this problem emerges, finally, in an examination of St. Augustine’s moral psychology in De Trinitate.
“Biotechnology: A
Pastoral Reflection”
By Ronald Cole-Turner
Although biotechnology offers many benefits, our desire for it may be fueled by discriminatory, competitive, anxious, or selfish motives. We yearn for a technology that promises us control over nature and freedom from the suffering and limits that define our biological existence. It is possible, however, to see biotechnology as serving a different purpose, as a support for life as it should be lived before God. Seeing it this way is particularly important when we come to the question of the genetic modification of future generations of human beings, a prospect that in some ways has already begun.
“Between Virtue and
Virtuality”
By Graham Ward
This essay performs a cultural negotiation between Christian theological discourse and the discourses of the Internet. It argues that Christian theology can neither ignore what is taking place globally and affecting all our lives in one way or another, nor pretend that this advanced technology is simply another tool that can be used or not used as occasion demands. Theology must engage Internet culture as this new culture transfigures social life. This means recognizing that theology, too, will be transfigured as the conditions of social living are transfigured. Being proactive, the work of theology will be affected by the engagement itself. But through this engagement, Christian theology will understand the distinctive contribution it can make to a critical and reflexive analysis of digital living. For there is a need for the engagement with Internet culture to be critical. There are moral and metaphysical questions posed by cyberpower. There are theological questions to be asked about its electronic dreams and sublime desires.
“Genetic Engineering and
Theology: Exploring the Interconnections”
By Audrey R. Chapman
This article provides an overview of the response of religious thinkers to the challenge of applying religious values and frameworks to the new and frequently unprecedented issues posed by genetic knowledge and technologies. It explores the kinds of issues that genetic developments raise for both theology and ethics. It then evaluates the efforts of religious thinkers and communities to interpret and illuminate genetic knowledge and significant ethical choices now before society.
“Technologies of
Desire: Theology, Ethics, and the Enhancement of Human Traits”
By Gerald P. McKenny
There are several different levels on which technology poses theological and ethical problems. At the first level, technology consists of devices and techniques. At the second level, technology involves the transformations that it effects in various areas of our lives. At the third level, technology expresses an entire kind of action or a basic attitude human beings take to the world and to themselves. Theologians typically address technology at the third level, while moral philosophers and policy experts remain at the first level. This division of labor often leaves theology on the margins of debates over particular technologies, while crucial issues at the second level remain unaddressed. This essay examines the growth of biomedical enhancement technologies in order to argue for a theological engagement of technology at the second level.