Spiritual Machines

Today at The Immanent Frame, I’ve got an interview with John Lardas Modern, one of the most exciting young scholars of religion out there today:

I’ve always been taken with gadgetry in a lot of ways, but at the same time I’m also afraid of my television set. My academic interest in technology stems from a personal love/hate relationship with technology in general. This has drawn me to writers and artists who are also interested in the relationship between technology and the way we practice our humanity: people like Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Laurie Anderson, Thomas Pynchon, and Ralph Ellison. They each inquire into what constitutes agency. What is it? Is it possible? If one takes into account technology, it’s no longer quite as clear that there is a single human actor that is determining what is in front of him or her. This doesn’t negate agency, but it definitely makes things more complicated. In the process, we find that the distinctions between the religious and the secular, or science and theology, aren’t quite as definitive as we would like them to be.