Introduction: the entanglement of technology and religion

Abstract

Four vignettes, a preview of coming attractions. Note holy things, visions of God and community, and scaffolding, counterweights, and shoe leather: Wardiman Djojonegoro, trained engineer and Minister of Education and Culture under Indonesia's New Order, in Sumatra in 1994: articulating publicly a Muslim vision of the potentialities of technology for revealing the greatness of God, furthering God's divine order, and ameliorating human lives-and potentially world-significant. Rabbi Yitzchak Weisz, in Israel in the 1960s: analyzing elevator design and motions of car and counterweight to see how elevators fit into the vision of the Jewish Sabbath, as a holy respite and a shelter, a space in time free from work. Filippo Brunelleschi, Italian renaissance architect: building an ascension machine for Christian celebrations, using pulleys, cords, and scaffolding to bring God to earth and create a vision of God's immediate presence, in a spectacle of the resurrection of Christ. Jack Keiser, mechanical engineer and company education officer in Stocksbridge, England, early in 1950: wearing out his shoe leather hiking back and forth daily along Fox and Company's mile-long steel works, enacting his vision of how Christian industry should work, face-to-face with the apprentices under his care.

Religious Actors and Artificial Intelligence: Examples from the Field and Suggestions for Further Research

“…The first section introduces conceptual distinctions regarding ai and embeds research on religion and ai within the broader context of debates around religions and digital technologies. Contemporary interactions between religious actors and ai technologies are part of a long history of interactions between religious communities and technologies in general (White 1978;Geraci 2016;Cheek 2018;Alexander 2020). However, given our focus on how present-day religious actors perceive, use, interpret and sometimes shape ai technologies, we choose debates over the interactions between religions and digital technologies, in particular the internet, as our starting point.…”