#scott midson

[technoccult]

Cyborg Theology and An Anthropology of Robots and AI

Scott Midson's Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson's An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson's book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect "Edenic" state and the various disciplines' dichotomous oppositions of "human" and "other." This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way. That is, all of the categories of "human," "animal," "technological," "natural," and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships. Midson's training is in theology and religious studies, and so it's no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway's 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.

Read the rest of Cyborg Theology and An Anthropology of Robots and AI at Technoccult

[weirdletter]

Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality, edited by Eleanor Beal and Jon Greenaway, University of Wales Press, 2019. Cover art by Fay Pomerance, info: uwp.co.uk.

Horror and Religion is an edited collection of essays offering structured discussions of spiritual and theological conflicts in Horror fiction from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Contributors explore the various ways that horror and religion have interacted over themes of race and sexuality; the texts under discussion chart the way in which the religious imagination has been deployed over the course of Horror fiction’s development, from a Gothic mode based in theological polemics to a more distinct genre in the twenty-first century that explores the afterlife of religion. Horror and Religion focuses on the Horror genre and its characteristics of the body, sexuality, trauma and race, and the essays explore how Horror fiction has shifted emphasis from anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism to incorporate less understood historical and theological issues, such as the ‘Death of God’ and the spiritual destabilisation of the secular. By confronting spiritual conflicts in Horror fiction, this volume offers new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as horrifying.

Contents: Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction – Eleanor Beal and Jon Greenaway 1. ‘Headlong into an Immense Abyss’: Horror and Calvinism in Scotland and the United States – Neil Syme 2. The Blood is the Life: An Exploration of the Vampire’s Jewish Shadow – Mary Going 3. Decadent Horror Fiction and Fin-de-Siècle Neo-Thomism – Zoë Lehmann Imfeld 4. ‘Let the Queer One in’: The Performance of the Holy, Innocent and Monstrous Body in Vampire Fiction – Rachel Mann 5. More or Less Human, or Less is More Humane?: Monsters, Cyborgs and Technological (Ex)tensions of Edenic Bodies – Scott Midson 6. Horror and the Death of God – Simon Marsden 7. Aboriginal Ghosts, Sacred Cannibals and the Pagan Christ: Consuming the Past as Salvation in Wilson Harris’s Jonestown – Eleanor Beal 8. Reconfiguring Gothic Anti-Catholicism: Faith and Folk-Horror in the Work of Andrew Michael Hurley – Jonathan Greenaway 9. ‘Deliver Us from Evil’: David Mitchell, Repetition and Redemption – Andrew Tate Bibliography Index