Two words with a lot packed in. A few distinct conversations usually travel under that heading, and they don’t overlap as much as people assume.
Technology as an object of theological critique
Jacques Ellul is the sharpest: technique as an autonomous system with its own logic of efficiency that absorbs politics, art, and religion into itself. Ivan Illich is the more humane version, especially Tools for Conviviality and his late claim that modern institutions are a corruption of the Gospel rather than its opposite. Romano Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como gets at the loss of proportion between human scale and machine scale. Albert Borgmann is the most usable for ordinary life: the “device paradigm” makes goods available while hiding the practices that used to carry meaning, and “focal practices” are what resist it.
Technology as itself a religion
David Noble’s The Religion of Technology traces the medieval theological roots of the idea that mechanical arts restore what was lost in the Fall. Erik Davis’s TechGnosis does the esoteric version. Transhumanism reads fairly cleanly as an eschatology without a God: resurrection as uploading, the singularity as parousia, Teilhard’s Omega Point sitting oddly in the middle of it all.
Theological anthropology under pressure
What imago Dei means when the traits we used to point to (reason, language, creativity) are being reproduced. Noreen Herzfeld’s In Our Image is the standard entry, Philip Hefner’s “created co-creator” the more constructive move. This is where AI questions actually bite.
Practice and ecclesiology
Embodiment against digital dualism, sacrament as a theory of mediation that predates and outclasses most media theory, Sabbath as a doctrine of limits, attention as a spiritual rather than merely cognitive problem.
Leave a Reply