Incarnating the Unknown: Planetary Technologies for a Planetary Community

Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 4

Abstract

This article suggests that current technological development is based upon outdated ways of understanding human beings as “exceptional” to the rest of the natural world. As such, these technologies help serve to reify certain human lives at the expense of others. I argue that such exceptionalism depends upon an understanding of transcendence that is totally other. Using examples such as “Earthrise” and the UN’s International Treaty on Outer Space, I argue that an immanent understanding of “the other” renegotiates how we understand our embeddedness within the rest of the evolving planetary community. As part of renegotiating a planetary anthropology, we must also begin rethinking technologies as for the planet (not just for humans).

Authors and Affiliations

Whitney A. Bauman

Keywords

Related Articles

“A Religious Recognition of Equality”: Liberal Spirituality and the Marriage Question in America, 1835–1850

Studying texts by Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller, this article seeks to recover the early phases of a dialogue that moved marriage away from an institution grounded in ideas of unification and tow...

Belief into Action Scale: A Comprehensive and Sensitive Measure of Religious Involvement

We describe here a new measure of religious commitment, the Belief into Action (BIAC) scale. This measure was designed to be a comprehensive and sensitive measure of religious involvement that could discriminate indivi...

Faith in the Ghosts of Literature. Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrison’s Beloved

Literature, this paper argues, is a privileged language that can give form to those specters of existence that resist the traditional ontological boundaries of being and non-being, alive and dead. This I describe as th...

Like a Caterpillar Losing its Cocoon: Rediscovery of Self in Marisa Labozzetta’s Thieves Never Steal in the Rain

We ward off loss as best we can, but rarely are we so lucky. We attach significance to our rituals and collected items. This theme of warding off loss and searching for ways to cope with it is woven through the linked...

‘The Altars Are Holding the Nation in Captivity’: Zambian Pentecostalism, Nationality, and African Religio-Political Heritage

The study draws on ontocracy political theory to investigate Zambian Pentecostal interpretations of politics as a sacred realm of contestations between forces of good and evil. It argues that Zambian Pentecostal theolo...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP25703
  • DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8040065
  • Views 273
  • Downloads 10

How To Cite

Whitney A. Bauman (2017). Incarnating the Unknown: Planetary Technologies for a Planetary Community. Religions, 8(4), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-25703