Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
Category: Research
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A few weeks back I did a guest lecture on “Science, Technology and Human Being” in the Laidlaw postgraduate course R202 God’s World: Theology and Science and Theology. I framed my discussion using a trajectory through science fiction starting with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” through to contemporary narratives, focusing on the hopes and fears expressed about…
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The article is about questions from the audience at literary festivals but could also apply to academic conferences. Over the course of the weekend, I attended seven hour-long events, which means I sat through 105 minutes of audience questions. That’s 110 too many. There isn’t even a spontaneity about it because there are really only…
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One of the reasons I blog here is to record interesting web links and articles that I’ve come across with a particular emphasis on the intersection of faith, technology and popular culture. Here’s a bunch of things that have come across my desk, email and screen recently. religiousgames.org is basically an impressive index of religious…
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Every now and then, Google Scholar (and other research sites) send an email to say someone’s referenced my PhD thesis in a publication. It’s a good way to keep track of other researchers who are also interested in theology, technology and transhumanism, as well as who is using the thesis. The most recent of these…
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I was pleased to see a couple of references to the Networked Theology book in papers to be presented at the Association of Youth Ministry Educators 2017 conference in Dallas later this month. Angela Gorrell’s paper on integrating theological new media literacy into Christian education and formation – Faith for a Way of Life: Christian…
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An excellent op-ed piece on the way reporting of biotechnology is often reduced, unhelpfully and dangerously, to a “promise” vs. “peril” dichotomy. To do so ignores the many different positions that arise from competing (and misunderstood) values in the interactions with biotechnologies, as well as how the application of such developments shape not only those…
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For the past three days I’ve been attending the annual Theology and Communication conference THEOCOM17 at Santa Clara University in California. The conference describes itself as “A gathering of Theologians on Digital Communication” and this year’s theme is “Digital Shepherding: Pastoral Theology and Ministry in a Digital Age”. The schedule of presentations is below, which…
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An interesting post over at Michael Sacasas’ “The Frailest Thing” on what he names the myth around the relationship between technology and Protestant Christianity, which he describes like this: The myth, briefly stated in intentionally anachronistic terms, runs something like this. Marin Luther’s success was owed to his visionary embrace of a cutting edge media technology,…
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An article following on from the one the other day – though from a different source. This time, work on creating a hand with human-like dexterity as part of a larger project to create robots that interact with the everyday world. Combine this form of inductive learning with the ‘pain’ sensitivity of the other robotic…
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While we’re working to insulate ourselves from pain, we’re also working to make robots feel it. Makes for some interesting ethical scenarios about both human and machine pain. An artificial nervous system aimed at teaching robots how to feel pain is being developed by German researchers. Source: Robots to be taught how to feel pain