Welcome to the JSRT Blog
Here is another attempt to create a blog for us to stay in touch and recruit more participants.
Religion and technology have evolved together. Now, if by religion we simply mean that which reconnects us with what we hold sacred, that is, with what is most meaningful, then religion is itself a technology. And if technology is ultimately oriented towards the enhancement of the meaningfulness of human life, it has always had and always will have both religious inspiration and religious consequences. Indeed for many social critics, both techno-skeptics and technophiles, technology has itself become a religion: In other words, for many contemporaries, technology itself is part of what they hold sacred.
This website offers a network of resources for the exploration of these two interwoven and interdependent forms of life. It is a contribution to a new academic field at the intersection of the Philosophy of Religion and the Philosophy of Technology as well as other related fields such as Media Ecology, Cognitive Archeology, Object Oriented Ontology and Lived Religion.
At first glance, the study of technology and religion might appear to involve a coincidence of opposites. For the past century or more, technology and religion have been set over against one another. It is often said that technology disenchants the world and eliminates the need for religion. It is also often said that religion offers a refuge from technology, a place where one can step back, unplug and get off the grid, if only for a time. Both are true, but consequently, both are partial truths, each of which, when taken in isolation only occludes the more important larger truth: that humans are by nature both: the only technological species and the only religious species on the planet. The motivating assumption of this website is that this is not a coincidence.