Technology and Human Flourishing
2012 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture
Thursday, October 25-Saturday, October 27
Call for Papers
Technology changes us—and the world around us—in countless ways. It eases our labor, cures diseases, provides abundant food and clean water, enables communication and travel across the globe, and expands our knowledge of the natural world and the cosmos. The stuff of science fiction is now, in many cases, reality, and it can make our lives longer, healthier, and more productive than ever.
But technological advance is not without complication, and even ardent proponents of technology recognize that our present age of innovation is fraught with concern for unintended consequences.
Technology that eases our labor, for example, can detach us from a meaningful sense of work. What can cure disease also can encourage us to view the human body as something to be engineered, modified, and immortalized. Techniques that produce more food from less land can have ruinous, long-term effects on the environment. Likewise, even as technology makes possible instant communication with others around the world, it often creates distance between ourselves and people near to us; while it enables unprecedented mobility, it can undermine the stability necessary for families and communities to thrive. And as technology provides ever increasing knowledge, we quite reasonably wonder whether such knowledge is being used to bring about a wiser, more just world.
The 2012 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture invites reflection about technology and how it contributes to and, at times, compromises human flourishing. How should we understand and evaluate both the promise and peril of the things we create? What implications arise for our understanding of what it means to be human and live well? How might theological considerations—in particular Christian convictions about the things we make and how we use them—illuminate our understanding of technology?
Confirmed speakers include:
- Patrick Deneen, the Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies, Georgetown University
- Ian H. Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Peter Kilpatrick, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering, University of Notre Dame
- Nancey Murphy, Professor of Christian Philosophy, Fuller Theological Seminary
- Rosalind Picard, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Director, Affective Computing Research Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- R. R. Reno, editor-in-chief of First Things; Professor of Theological Ethics, Creighton University
Possible topics include:
- Technology as co-creation with God
- Visions of the future: technology, utopia, and dystopia
- Technology and the aims of education
- Technology and consumerism
- Appropriate technology
- Transhumanism
- Technology in literature, film, and popular culture
- The church and faith in the information age
- Biotechnology and the body
- Electronic gaming and virtue
- Technology, e-waste, and environmental responsibility
- Critics of technological culture: Wendell Berry, Jacques Ellul, Romano Guardini
- Friendship and social media
- Technology as hope for the third world
Proposals for individual papers, panel discussions, and responses to current books are welcome. Abstracts of no more than 750 words should be submitted by July 16, 2012 using the online form at www.baylor.edu/ifl/cfp.
Call 254-710-4805 or send an e-mail to ifl@baylor.edu for more information.