Religion, Technology, and Human Presence

Welcome you to our conversations on religion, technology, and human presence, hosted in conjunction with Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, which is a research and journalism initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist studies in Berkeley and funded by the Henry Luce foundation.

The program is led by director Steven Barrie-Anthony. Over recent decades, technologies have radically reshaped human relationships in ways that evoke deep questions such as what it means to be human and to be present with others. The Public Theologies of Technology and Presence initiative gathers and funds leading scholars of religion and theologians from universities across the US, and journalists, for projects and collaborations addressing the impacts of technologies on human relationships.

The project gathers these scholars of religion from universities across the USA and it includes a central focus on pedagogy.

One of the goals is to develop powerful and effective ways of teaching these themes within religion and theology curriculum. Many grantees are teaching courses in this vein. And so this podcast provides a window into the work they're doing in the classroom and beyond. We hope that it provides a significant resource for university and theology teachers who are approaching the themes of human presence, relationship and technology. What you will find here are conversations with about a dozen scholars, practitioners, and professors who share their insights from teaching wide, arrange of traditions and themes related to human presence and technology.

Stuart Ray Sarbacker is an Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. His research and teaching center on the relationships between the Indian religious and philosophical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

He discusses the implications of emerging technology on human relationships by examining how the philosophical and contemplative traditions of yoga and of Buddhism address the effect of human augmentation on interpersonal relationships. He explains how yoga and Buddhist traditions view the disciplining of mind and body as producing extraordinary modes of perception and action that have profound, but morally ambiguous, implications on human relationships.

Sheila Briggs is Associate Professor of Religion and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.

Briggs discusses her approach to research and pedagogy at the intersection of sexuality, technology, and modernity. According to Briggs, sexuality shapes the full range of our interpersonal relationships. We are present to one another not only as friends and lovers but also as citizens, workers and consumers. The impacts of technology in one area of our lives affect us in others: one cannot isolate our interpersonal relationships from how we are economic and political actors. To think about how technological innovation is affecting our sexuality, we need to go beyond a discussion of social media and dating apps.

Gregory Price Grieve is Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His current research uses video games to explore the category of evil in contemporary life.

Grieve discusses how video games differ from other media such as film and printed literature, because they do not merely represent evil as an audio/visual layer, or tell about evil as narrative, but simulate immersive worlds in which players dwell. Because of such immersion, video games reveal the ways in which digital technologies reshape human relationships.

Amy Sue Bix is Professor of History at Iowa State University and director of ISU’s Center for Historical Studies of Technology and Science. Her 2013 book ‘Girls Coming to Tech!’: A History of American Engineering Education for Women (MIT Press) won the 2015 Margaret Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society.

She discusses her research and teaching surrounding the phenomenon of "tech sabbaths," the religious, social, and popular meanings of the twenty-first-century movement encouraging people to adopt regular breaks from smartphone and Internet use.

Kevin Healey is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. His work focuses on the ethical and religious dimensions of digital culture. Kevin’s latest book, co-authored with Robert H. Woods, Jr., is "Ethics and Religion in the Age of Social Media: Digital Proverbs for Responsible Citizens".

He discusses his multi-faceted approach to teaching in contemplative media studies, relatively new field that integrates empirical social-science research (neuroscience, medicine, psychology, psychiatry) with insights derived from first-person contemplative practices (mindfulness training, meditation, yoga, arts and music therapy).

Dr. R. John Williams is Associate Professor at Yale University where he teaches in the departments of English and Film and Media Studies. He is the author of "The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of East and West" (Yale University Press, 2014), which examines the role of technological discourse in the development of Asian religious experience in the United States and Europe.

Here he discusses his courses on modernity, time, human presence, and "futurology" as ways to understand how human relationships with technology have changed in the modern era.

Beverley McGuire is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a historian of religion specializing in Chinese Religions, McGuire examines the impact of digital technology on moral attention—the capacity to discern and attend to the morally salient features of a given situation. Although most scholars associate moral attention with Western philosophers, Chinese religious traditions describe various means of facilitating moral attention, including Confucian techniques of moral cultivation, Daoist practices of “fasting the mind,” and Buddhist meditation.

This project considers ways in which digital technologies can distract us from other people and disrupt our moral attention, and ways in which digital technologies might enhance our interpersonal relationships and develop our moral attention.

Dr. Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy and Founding Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. Asma is the author of ten books, including Why We Need Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Evolution of Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2017), On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford, 2009), and The Gods Drink Whiskey (HarperOne, 2005). He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Aeon.

He discusses how his recent book, "The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition" (with Rami Gabriel) informs his approach to teaching at the intersection of philosophy, religion, technology, and monsters. Yes, monsters.

Noreen Herzfeld is the Nicholas and Bernice Reuter Professor of Science and Religion at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. She holds degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.

Herzfeld is the author of In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit (Fortress, 2002), Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World (Templeton, 2009), The Limits of Perfection in Technology, Religion, and Science (Pandora, 2010), and editor of Religion and the New Technologies (MDPI, 2017).

A leading voice on the relationship between religion and technology, Herzfeld discusses her approaches to teaching ethical issues in robotics, AI, and computing.