Overview

Religion and Technology into the Future: From Adam to Tomorrow’s Eve examines the broad significance of the current trends and accomplishments in technology (AI/robots) against the long history of the human imagination of making sentient beings. It seeks to enrich our understanding of the present as it is trending into the future against the richly relevant and surprisingly long past. Creatively considered in some depth are a wide range of specific examples drawn especially from contemporary film and television, as well as from cosmology, ancient mythology, biblical literature, classical literature, folklore, evolution, popular culture, technology, and futurist studies. This book is distinctive, in part, in drawing on a wide range of resources demonstrating the indispensable interrelationship among these disparate materials. Science, technology, economics, and philosophy are seamlessly interwoven with history, gender, culture, religion, literature, pop culture, art, and film. Written for general as well as academic readers, it offers fascinating and provocative insights into who we are and where we are going.

Full Product Details

Author:   Sam Gill
Publisher:   Lexington Books
Imprint:   Lexington Books
Dimensions:   Width: 16.00cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 23.00cm
Weight:   0.658kg
ISBN:  

9781498580908

ISBN 10:   1498580904
Pages:   312
Publication Date:   15 August 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Into the Future: An Introduction 1. Thumbelina’s Severed Head 2. Little Green Sprout 3. Fury Road 4. Garden of Making and Unmaking 5. Ava and the Ultimate Turing Test 6. Cursed, Cursed Creator! Why Did I Live? 7. Falling in Love With “Her”: One Singular Sensation 8. Made of Clay: Prometheus and Golem 9. Gender Matters 10. Creepy Dollies or My Fair Ladies? 11. I-Robot 12. Orphans of the Sky: Outside, Movement, & Corporeal Concepts 13. Violent Delights 14. Robots & the End of Work 15. “Beam Me Up Scotty!” Corporeal Concepts & Posthuman 16. The Matrix 17. Meet Me on the Holodeck! 18. ToolsRUs 19. Cyborg/Metahuman: Future of Gender & Religion 20. Watson and the Jeopardy! Test: Machine Learning 21. It is Bigger on the Inside! TARDIS & Wormholes 22. Secret Hidden Horror 23. Step Again Into the Forge 24. Song of Tomorrow’s Eve

Reviews

Religion and Technology into the Future discovers untold possibilities in religious texts and science fiction. It traces a journey from the modern rejection of transcendence toward a future of emotionless robots. It proposes that the surrender of moving rites for the stasis of correct belief presaged the rise of an information-obsessed individualist world. A bleak, merely nostalgic religious future is, however, not the pessimistic prediction of this book. Rather, Religion and Technology into the Future sends us toward the 'moving flesh' of our bodies to rediscover and retheorize religion in more thoroughly embodied, everyday human relations. And in religion, we rediscover humanity. -- Graham Harvey, The Open University In a series of articulate, well-crafted meditations, Sam Gill offers in his new book provocative thought about technology in modern life. From school kids in social media and sci-fi film and literature to the intellectual gurus of modern thought such as Haraway and Kurzweil, Gill spans a broad range of current practice and critique, showing in very readable prose how religion permeates the culture of cyberpunk, dystopian visions, AI, and technological hopes and fears. With an eye to history, Gill asks for a longer view of the relation between religion and science as a more productive way to understand their complex relationship today. Ancient myth, ritual, and sacred literature resurface in sci-fi films in the form of struggles over embodiment, sexuality, love, self-awareness, and simulacra, speaking to the present with an urgency that belies their antiquity. Pulling it all together in brief and poignant chapters, Gill's book will be indispensable in the religious studies classroom. -- David Morgan, Duke University Anyone watching videos online of robotic prototypes being kicked by their developers (to demonstrate their resiliency and balance), and who instinctively feels bad for the robots, needs to spend some time with Sam Gill, to eavesdrop as he mulls over the mixings and possibilities of bodies, technologies, and identity-from the ancient past to the near future. What started out as lectures in an introductory course has turned into a wide-ranging book that makes plain that scholars of religion have tools to help us understand more about the present moment than we might at first think. -- Russell T. McCutcheon, University of Alabama

Into the Future discovers untold possibilities in religious texts and science fiction. It traces a journey from the modern rejection of transcendence towards a future of emotionless robots. It proposes that the surrender of moving rites for the stasis of correct belief presaged the rise of an information obsessed individualist world. A bleak, merely nostalgic religious future is, however, not the pessimistic prediction of this book. Rather, Into the Future sends us towards the 'moving flesh' of our bodies to re-discover and re-theorize religion in more thoroughly embodied, everyday, and human relations. And in religion, we rediscover humanity. -- Graham Harvey, The Open University In a series of articulate, well-crafted meditations, Sam Gill offers in his new book provocative thought about technology in modern life. From school kids in social media and sci-fi film and literature to the intellectual gurus of modern thought such as Haraway and Kurzweil, Gill spans a broad range of current practice and critique, showing in very readable prose how religion permeates the culture of cyberpunk, dystopian visions, AI, and technological hopes and fears. With an eye to history, Gill asks for a longer view of the relation between religion and science as a more productive way to understand their complex relationship today. Ancient myth, ritual, and sacred literature resurface in sci-fi films in the form of struggles over embodiment, sexuality, love, self-awareness, and simulacra, and speak to the present with an urgency that belies their antiquity. Pulling it all together in brief and poignant chapters, Gill's book will be indispensable in the religious studies classroom. -- David Morgan, Duke University

Into the Future discovers untold possibilities in religious texts and science fiction. It traces a journey from the modern rejection of transcendence towards a future of emotionless robots. It proposes that the surrender of moving rites for the stasis of correct belief presaged the rise of an information obsessed individualist world. A bleak, merely nostalgic religious future is, however, not the pessimistic prediction of this book. Rather, Into the Future sends us towards the 'moving flesh' of our bodies to re-discover and re-theorize religion in more thoroughly embodied, everyday, and human relations. And in religion, we rediscover humanity.--Graham Harvey, The Open University In a series of articulate, well-crafted meditations, Sam Gill offers in his new book provocative thought about technology in modern life. From school kids in social media and sci-fi film and literature to the intellectual gurus of modern thought such as Haraway and Kurzweil, Gill spans a broad range of current practice and critique, showing in very readable prose how religion permeates the culture of cyberpunk, dystopian visions, AI, and technological hopes and fears. With an eye to history, Gill asks for a longer view of the relation between religion and science as a more productive way to understand their complex relationship today. Ancient myth, ritual, and sacred literature resurface in sci-fi films in the form of struggles over embodiment, sexuality, love, self-awareness, and simulacra, and speak to the present with an urgency that belies their antiquity. Pulling it all together in brief and poignant chapters, Gill's book will be indispensable in the religious studies classroom.--David Morgan, Duke University

Author Information

Sam Gill is professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Dancing Culture Religion.

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