Events

Being human in our technological age requires not merely technical skills but—more importantly—intellectual capacity to navigate a rapidly changing philosophical milieu. Join us this winter for our online lecture series, Human Flourishing in a Technological Age, to learn from leading scholars about key aspects of what it means to be human in a technological age: personhood, embodied cognition, leisure, transhumanism and more.

Please join us on Friday, March 19 as we welcome Dr. Ashley Moyse who will give the lecture "Education by Dissent: A Theological Interrogation of Transhumanist Anthropology."

Dr Moyse will interrogate some of the foundational ideas of transhumanism, which despite their appeal to novelty, futurism, and human liberation, reveal themselves to be anti-human, offering both dissent and a call to pedagogy. Heeding William Stringfellow’s claim that dissent is a humanising action, Dr. Moyse will expose the failure of transhumanists to see human being rightly. Employing critical philosophy of technology, he will show how the modern imagination in general has been turned away from the real [world of life] and toward the fictional world of a future perfect of re-engineered and re-animated zeros and one, or sequences of qubits, which in turn leads to the construction of antihuman desires.Concomitantly, while dissenting from the profane doctrine that perpetuates such desires, the chapter will point toward a schooling in and by Christ, a turn toward Christian traditions and their treatment of the body, in order to present a robust theological examination of the biological reality of being. Such reality will be illumined to demonstrate that the body—the physical word of the soul—is essential for unity. As modern theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer insist, the body is essential because it not only unites the human with its fellows, but also unites the human with God and the earth.

Dr. Ashley Moyse is the McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life, Christ Church, University of Oxford. He was previously the Post-Doctoral Fellow in Theology and Science at Regent College (Vancouver). He is also a Member of the Centre for Research in Religion and Social Policy and Honorary Research Associate at Trinity College, University of Divinity (Melbourne) and an Associate Fellow at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, Trinity International University. Ashley is the author of Reading Karl Barth, Interrupting Moral Technique, Transforming Biomedical Ethics (Palgrave, 2015). He is also a contributor to and co-editor (with Scott A. Kirkland and John C. McDowell) of both Correlating Sobornost: Conversations Between Karl Barth and the Russian Orthodox Tradition (Fortress, 2016) and Kenotic Ecclesiology: Select Writings of Donald M. MacKinnon (Fortress, 2016). He is also a contributor to and coeditor (with John Fitzgerald) of the forthcoming Treating the Person: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives on Medicine and the Body (under review). Ashley is preparing a forthcoming volume that takes up the question and crisis of technology, with the working title The Art of Living for the Technology Age. 

Watch this space for registration information closer to the event date.