Religion Meets Technology

I must admit that I am feeling a bit of a fraud this week since I am leading a group of authors who are writing about the interface between religion and technology. As a self-confessed technophobe, this is rather a shock to the system. Life is full of surprises!

The University of Malawi, the University of Edinburgh and the British Academy have teamed up to offer a mentoring process to early-career academics who are aiming to publish their first article. Their areas of interest fall into three areas: religion and health, religion and ecology, and religion and technology. They must have been really stuck with the third one if they ended up asking me to do it.

But I am glad that they did. Not that I am planning to retrain as an engineer. What I do see is that technology is becoming more and more definitive for our understanding and living of our lives. Therefore, its interface with religious questions is gaining greater importance.

The so-called fourth industrial revolution raises many questions about human identity and vocation. As artificial intelligence advances, more and more determination of things is taken out of human hands. I expect that this movement will bring religious questions to the centre of attention, especially the crucial question of that it means to be human. I am pretty sure this will not be the last time I will find myself at the interface of faith and technology.