PROJECT DESCRIPTION
I. INTRODUCTION: THE BIG QUESTIONS
The purpose of The Enhancing Life Project is to explore essential aspirations of human beings
that move persons and communities into the future. Yet the human drive to enhance life is
often an implicit aim in many cultural, technological, and spiritual processes and it is
intertwined with what Charles Taylor, a Templeton Award winner, has helpfully called the
social imaginary, which includes the religious imaginary as well.1 Because human aspirations
are often implicit in a society’s culture and are intertwined with religious narratives, symbols,
and rituals, it is not surprising that the desire to enhance life is as pervasive as it is overlooked
in the academy and even in public life. The Project explores this rich but widely unexamined
dimension of human aspiration and social life.
The goal of The Enhancing Life Project is to address the following Big Questions: 1)“What
does it mean to enhance life, including spiritual life?” 2) “Correlatively, what are the
spiritual laws for the strategies, social mechanisms, and technologies that enable us to
enhance life in its many dimensions and in measurable ways?” By asking and answering
these Big Questions, The Enhancing Life Project brings to articulation and also assesses
assumptions hitherto submerged within the academy and public perception about the fullness
of life and how it is to be measurably enhanced.
The Project Description sets forth the aim, structure, and goals of The Enhancing Life Project
as configuring a new discipline of study.
1
On the intersection between the socio-cultural and religious imaginary and the enhancement of life see
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Boston: Harvard University, 2007), William Schweiker, Dust That Breathes:
Christian Faith and the New Humanisms (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Jürgen Habermas, The Future of
Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity, 2003) and Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the
Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2002).
1
II. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES
In order to seek, effectively and efficiently, to answer our two interrelated Big Questions, The
Enhancing Life Project is designed with respect to the following research questions,
hypotheses, and project procedure. The hypotheses aim to answer the research questions and
the project procedure structures the experimental activities undertaken to test those
hypotheses. All of these matters are then elaborated in more detail throughout this Project
Description.
1. Research Questions:
1. What are the forms of life in which the enhancement of life takes place?
2. What are the key aspirations, forces, and values that propel the enhancing of life?
3. What is the conceptual and empirical place of “the future” in enhancing life?
4. What types of “counter-worlds” challenge life in order to be enhanced?
5. What are the implied models of change in human attempts to enhance life?
6. What are the “spiritual laws” that religious, cultural, and social resources use in order to
imagine, plan, measure, and assess the enhancement of life?
7. What are the various agents (persons, institutions, etc.) who facilitate the enhancing of life?
8. How do the various forms of life in which the enhancement of life takes place interact with
each other?
9. To what extent is enhancing life connected to seemingly counterintuitive or even
paradoxical laws, such as enhancing this life by enhancing a “counter-worldly” life, or by
giving away life to enhance life?
10. What are our cultural, social, and religious resources to measure and assess the
enhancement of life?
2. Hypotheses For Answering Research Questions:
Hypothesis 1: In order to enhance life, the forms of life can be understood in terms of the
basic needs and correlate goods required for a species and/or community to attain an
enhancement of flourishing.
Explanation: In order to imagine, plan, measure, and assess the enhancement of life
we need a richly textured, “thick” understanding of life that transcends classical academic
boundaries and reductionist approaches. Per definition, a reality without needs is neither
living nor is it able to be enhanced in any way. The first hypothesis thereby proposes that
attention to species’ and communities’ needs (natural, social, cultural, and religious) and the
goods that fulfill these needs is a multi-dimensional and disciplined means to understand life
in its many forms.
Hypothesis 2: In order to examine the human drive to enhance life, one must explore the key
values, that is, what are held as important and worth pursuing as reasons for action, by
investigating scientific, social, and cultural legacies of thought.
Explanation: The human desire for enhancing life takes many forms and encompasses
many dimensions of personal and social life (i.e. law, politics, technology, communication,
and religious practice) and yet these aspirations are deeply shaped by larger visions of life
reaching out to spiritual realities. These spiritual realities, in turn, move human beings and
leave an imprint on human imagination, thereby planning, orienting, and assessing the
enhancement of life. The second hypothesis thus proposes that attention to the interrelation of
visions of life, such as religious and cultural beliefs, is crucial in order to understand the
values that provide the reasons for enhancing life, human and non-human.
2
Hypothesis 3: Just as the enhancement of life entails the claim that a reality without needs is
not living, so too a reality without a drive to a future that does not in some way value
enhancement is not living and cannot be enhanced. In order to enhance life, one must explore
the interconnections between conceptions of an open and not utterly determined future and
forms of hope. We call these futures “counter-worlds” and we seek their spiritual laws.
Explanation: In the face of spiritual realities for enhancing life we need to reckon with
seemingly counterintuitive or even paradoxical beliefs that reveal the undergirding spiritual
laws that enhance life: i.e. laws such as 1) that enhanced life requires conceptions of a
counter-world, 2) that life can be enhanced by giving life away in hope for the future, or 3)
that one dimension of life can be enhanced by focusing on another dimension.
Hypothesis 4: In order to articulate and to explore the spiritual laws that govern the
enhancement of life, laws that are related to but more elusive than natural laws, one must
examine religious and cultural resources from multiple perspectives and in light of the three
prior hypotheses.
Explanation: This Project explores religious, cultural, and social resources used in
order to imagine, plan, measure, and assess the enhancement of life. Yet it does so not only
for the sake of discerning their historical or social meaning, but also with an eye to the
spiritual laws they encode or presuppose and which govern the actual enhancement of life in
all of its dimensions.
3. Project Procedure:
In order to answer our Big Questions by means of the Research Questions and their correlate
experimental Hypotheses, the Project Procedure seeks to establish a new form of research
community that draws together two paradigms of scholarly work and also the new
disciplinary outlook of Enhancing Life Studies. Given this ambitious task, we need to create a
framework of research characterized by disciplinary depth and the interconnection of
knowledge.
We will realize the objective of producing high-profile research projects by scholars of
different disciplines by linking two paradigms of scholarly work: 1) The residency seminars
will allow for in-depth exchange and collaboration by means of multiyear projects (similar to
Institutes for Advanced Studies) and 2) at the same time, the residency seminars will foster
the intellectual focus of a shared concern (similar to single theme conferences). In addition,
3) the innovative structure of residency seminars will bring into conversation outstanding
advanced career scholars and excellent early career scholars who, as the future leaders in
their field, will shape academic inquiry into enhancing life.
We will now elaborate our proposal in greater detail and with reference to relevant resources.
A fuller set of resources can be found in the Bibliography.
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III. THE BIG QUESTIONS
One of the most profound spiritual capacities human beings possess is the ability to imagine
how life can be enhanced and to strive for new and enriched futures for persons and
communities. The longing to overcome physical and social limitations, the ability to imagine
heavenly realms, and the capacity of hope even in the face of death are definitive qualities of
the human species.2
We also know the devastation caused to people who are deprived of hope or disempowered as
agents in attaining their aspirations. Furthermore, virtually every known culture, and likewise
every human life, is oriented with respect to imagined futures about the enhancing of life.
These imagined futures range from, for instance, beliefs about heaven, ideas about the end of
times, utopian dreams of a just community, and claims about a possible trans-human future as
well as new biological technologies to enhance life. Dreaming, imagining, and hoping for a
future that enhances human individual and social life seem to be defining features of human
existence. It is also the case that religious frameworks of meaning, symbols, and ideas about
the future eventually fade and lose cultural relevance when they do not and cannot orient
human individual or communal life towards enhancing life.3 In a word, there is something
distinctive in the human drive to enhance life, and religious ideas and ideals can and must be
interpreted and assessed mindful of that human distinctiveness. Yet the Big Questions that
this distinctive human spiritual capacity pose are admittedly deceptive in their seeming
simplicity: 1)“What does it mean to enhance life, including spiritual life?” (2)
“Correlatively, what are the spiritual laws for the strategies, social mechanisms, and
technologies that enable us to enhance life in its many dimensions and in measurable
ways?”
The Enhancing Life Project intends to help answer those Big Questions by exploring the
human spiritual aspiration and capacity from different perspectives and in relation to cultural,
social, and religious traditions (see below). The Enhancing Life Project will promote research,
facilitate public discussion, and develop a core group of scholars dedicated to work on
enhancing life as a human aspiration and the spiritual laws that can condition and orient that
aspiration in concrete and measureable ways. That is, we seek both to understand and yet also
to assess, measure, and explain “enhancing life.”
What do we mean by “spiritual laws?” Laws in the social world, most simply put, are rules
and measures of human action, individual or social, established by some authority,
promulgated, and thus knowable, and which concern the order and flourishing of the
individual or community. Thus, spiritual laws are those laws which rule and measure
enhancing life in relation to the authority of some counter-world, and are promulgated in and
operative through the socio-cultural imaginary. These spiritual laws, some of which we
mention in this Project Description, are often implicit in the socio-cultural imaginary and
some of them must necessarily operate in that implicit, inarticulate, way in order to be
effective. Other spiritual laws can and must be articulated in order for them to guide and
2
See e.g., Ronald Cole-Turner, Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of
Technological Enhancement (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2011); David E. Klemm, and William
Schweiker, Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2008); Ulf Görman, Willem Drees, and Hubert Meisinger, eds., Creative Creatures: Values and Ethical Issues in
Theology, Science and Technology (London: T&T Clark, 2005).
3
See, Lucian Hölscher, ed. Das Jenseits: Facetten Eines Religiösen Begriffs in Der Neuzeit (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2007).
4
measure the enhancing of life.4 The Enhancing Life Project seeks to identify these two types
of spiritual laws present in the religions, especially Christianity, but also in the emerging
global socio-cultural imaginary.
Our focus on enhancing life and on the interaction among scholars from different disciplines
within this Project are meant to facilitate a more concrete, measurable, and proactive approach
to understanding and orienting this human spiritual aspiration and capacity than previous
accounts of hope or imagined futures. Well-known are the utopian hopes, say, the visions of
some religious sects or political groups, and technological ventures, like the millions of
dollars spent on Cold Fusion research in the late 1980s promising inexpensive energy, that
were meant to enhance life and yet failed to do so. How can we understand, assess, and
explain strategies for enhancing life and also uncover cultural resources? Further, this Project
accounts for a salient feature of our age, namely, the radical extension of human power to
realize imagined futures.5 Indeed, it is often noted that through technological means human
power has now outpaced religious and moral insight and direction. In this social and historical
context, it is vitally important that scholars of various disciplines join with others in
developing ways to understand and assess enhancing life. The Enhancing Life Project
undertakes that task and it thereby can be seen as developing a new discipline of thought,
Enhancing Life Studies.
We are mindful of some radically different uses of the terms “spiritual laws.” There is, for instance,
an evangelistic Christian tract, The Four Spiritual Laws, that explains Christian faith concerning salvation. In a
very different way, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Essays: First Series (1841), includes an essay on “Spiritual
Laws.” There are also the specific teachings of various religions that are themselves spiritual laws: the Four
Noble Truths in Buddhism, Torah for Jews, the so-called Golden and Silver Rules, the Five Pillars of Islam, and,
for Christians, the Ten Commandments or the “Sermon on the Mount,” to name just a few.
5
See Mark Chan and Roland Chia, eds., Beyond Determinism and Reductionism: Genetic Science and
the Person (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2003); Celia Deane-Drumond and Peter Manley Scott, eds., Future Perfect?:
God, Medicine, and Human Identity (New York: T&T Clark International, 2006); Michael Murphy, The Future
of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature (New York: J.P. Tarcher and Putnam,
1992); and Marcus Düwell, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, and Dietmar Mieth, The Contingent Nature of Life:
Bioethics and Limits of Human Existence, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine (Berlin:
Springer, 2008).
4
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IV. THE PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT
Without doubt, we are living in an age in which forms of life—biological, social, reflective,
and religious—can be enhanced or demeaned through the exercise of individual and
communal capacities on a scale never seen before. Today, throughout the globe, human
capacities are being exerted and extended in ways that have far-reaching, even radical,
consequences for the future of life on this planet in all its forms. This transformative
expansion of human capacities is obvious in the numerous creative developments in
technology and the natural and social sciences. In the academy, there are developed ways to
enhance life (say, artificial limbs, more efficient methods of food production, pharmaceutical
research and anti-aging procedures). With equally far reaching consequences, policies are
being implemented in commerce, government, religion, and civil society. In a word, attempts
to enhance life bring together innovative initiatives, new technologies, social needs, and
cultural/religious ideals.6 Ideas about and measures to enhance life are influencing the way
people think, live, and communicate, and yet such ideas and measures have not been closely
examined or well understood to date. In each of these sectors of academic and public life,
highly consequential decisions, technological inventions, and social changes are being
pursued on the assumption, often tacit, unexplored and unacknowledged, that such decisions,
inventions, and changes do in fact enhance life and hold the promise of a better future.
In the desire to bring knowledge to bear on the Big Questions of the enhancement of life, The
Enhancing Life Project proposes to organize a new venture of interdisciplinary research that
will analyze the working assumptions that guide thinking about the enhancement of life.
Through this research and analysis, the Project aims not only to make these assumptions about
the enhancement of life more clear and explicit, but also to test their adequacy and develop
their potential contributions to the flourishing of human and non-human life. The principal
investigators for The Enhancing Life Project think that this investigation will shape a
sophisticated, interdisciplinary debate that will directly contribute to the shaping of policy
initiatives, technological and scientific agendas, and cultural and religious thought and
practice, a goal that is reflected throughout each feature of this Project’s design.
Human cultures, of course, have richly diverse legacies of ideas about the form and future of
human and non-human life (animals, flora, and fauna) and thus differing views on the
constraints and possibilities that will shape life’s enhancement. Equally important for this
Project is the fact that various academic disciplines also have quite diverse perspectives on the
decisive features of life and the critical questions that will guide its enhancement. Both the
diversity of cultures and the diversity of academic disciplines are crucially important to The
Enhancing Life Project. With respect to cultural and religious diversity, the Project assumes
that religious and cultural traditions provide rich repositories of ideas about the enhancement
of life, theories of transformation over time and visions of the future. The Project will give
careful consideration to the framing assumptions, narratives and symbolic forms through
which religions interpret the possibilities for the enhancement of life. Further, the Project will
explore the process of diffusion through which these religious and cultural frameworks and
narratives have influenced other domains of society and politics.
The principal investigators think that because social assumptions about the enhancement of
life are largely implicit, it will require the collaboration of several disciplinary perspectives to
6
On the role of imagination in this process see among others A. Coskun Samli, From Imagination to
Innovation: New Product Development for Quality of Life (New York: Springer, 2011); Rosalind H. Williams,
Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination(new ed., Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 2008).
6
render these assumptions visible and available to investigation and evaluation. In doing so, the
Project aims to make life, especially human life, more open to enhancement. The Project is
thereby structured through broad research trajectories within a primary focus on the religions
that have import for making life richer and deeper (see below.) Further, a new, integrated
inquiry about enhancement of life will best result from research strategies that accentuate the
diversities of cultures, religions, and academic disciplines.
The following two sections of this proposal expand on the subject of this new integrated
inquiry and the research trajectories that will give it structure.
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V. RESEARCH FRAMEWORK
In order to advance knowledge about the Project’s Big Questions, the following are key
assumptions within disciplinary areas arranged in logical order: 1) some implied theory of
change that requires analysis; 2) an idea of the plasticity or malleability of life; 3) imagined
futures; 4) some conception of the continuity and discontinuity of the form of life being
enhanced; and 5) examination of various dimensions of life, especially the spiritual dimension
of life expressed in the world’s religions and cultures.
A further implication of enhancing life is that life appears to be organized in forms that at the
same time interact with each other – for both fascinating mutual reinforcement and surprising
difficulties – and challenge each other. These challenges call for intellectual humility because
in the attempt to answer one aspect one might, unwittingly, impede other attempts to enhance
life.7 Sometimes called “wicked problems” in social policy discourse, the idea is that some
problems must be seen from multiple perspectives and also that answering such problems
from one perspective might create problems at some other level. More precisely, a wicked
problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as
four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions
involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with
other problems.8 For example, the advancement of economic well-being might create specific
challenges to the family as the bedrock of society. A religious revival might challenge the
functioning of the political order and endanger civil society.
In addition, the very idea of enhancing life implies recognition of the value or worth of forms
of life, as well as their possible futures. The Enhancing Life Project seeks to examine the
elements of enhancement just enumerated and also the forms, values, and futures of life with
respect to guiding frameworks, narratives, and images as specific and interrelated aspects of
socio-cultural and religious worldviews. The contention here is that the meaning of enhancing
life must be interpreted in a way that is mindful of the fact that human action and social
cohesion are linked to meaning-giving and orienting beliefs and values at interrelated levels of
analysis. One cannot properly understand the flourishing of life, its full enhancement, without
analyzing the dimensions of life. Accordingly, the examination of the religious and cultural
dimension of life is interrelated with the exploration of other dimensions. For instance,
scholars as well as religious and social leaders, increasingly recognize the extent to which the
pursuit of science itself can be encouraged or encumbered by religious or cultural beliefs,
values, and ideas. For this reason, the Project will explore the creative potentials of religious
and cultural traditions to promote the enhancement of life on a broad scale, including social
imaginaries, legal developments, media narratives, religious ideas, and technological change.9
The framework of this Project intersects in various ways with divergent accounts of
7
For a succinct call for this kind of humility see David G. Myers, “The Psychology of Humility,” in
God, Science, and Humility: Ten Scientists Consider Humility Theology, ed. Robert L. Herrmann (Philadelphia:
Templeton Foundation Press, 2000).
8
https://www.wickedproblems.com/1_wicked_problems.php accessed 2/27/2014. Also see Don S.
Browning, Equality and the Family: A Fundamental, Practical Theology of Children, Mothers, and Fathers in
Modern Societies (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishers, 2007); John Witte, Christian Green,
and Amy Wheeler, eds., The Equal-Regard Family and its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical
Theological Ethics of the Family (Grand Rapids, Mich: William B Eerdmans Publishers, 2007); Lisa Sowle
Cahill, Family: A Christian social perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).
9
See, e.g., Ted Peters, Robert J. Russell, and Michael Welker, eds., Resurrection: Theological and
Scientific Assessments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) and Stephen G. Post et. al., Altruism and Altruistic
Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
8
enhancement and signals the need for a new direction of thought and even an integrated field
of study. Sad to say, many specific agendas of enhancement are only implicit or assumed in
scientific research and social life, and therefore have not received critical analysis that would
expose contradictions or unanticipated consequences, or uncover their creative potentials.10
Again, the central purpose of the Project is to take the bold step of fashioning new ways of
understanding and advancing the enhancement of life. In this respect, the Project is
thoroughly future-oriented in exploring the deeply rooted and frequently overlooked factors
propelling the dynamics of enhancing life.
As an example of deeply rooted factors that shape different ways of enhancing life, one may
consider two strands in Western thought. One strand that shapes the lives of peoples and
nations around the world has emphasized the goodness of finite human life. With a sense of
humility, those who hold this conviction seek to maximize life within finite conditions.
Enhancement on this account is worked out in various ways within the limiting conditions
that also characterize finite existence. These limits might be set by God within a theistic
framework or by finite natural reality itself. So, beliefs about the sanctity or dignity of life
have frequently been used as ideas to articulate the goodness of those limits of finitude. Not
surprisingly, debates that deeply impact social existence swirl around worries about “designer
genes” as “playing God,” the manipulation of species, and the enhancement of human life at
the expense of nonhuman species.11
Another framework of enhancement in teaching and social practice has emphasized that
enhancing life requires a creative sense of life’s possibilities and the pursuit of the perfection
of life.12 Perfection might be understood within a religious tradition in terms of the deification
of finite life through God’s grace or through ideas and images about the genetic enhancement
of human capacities, the development of new social, legal, and political formations, and
technological inventions and advances in communications and media. Spiritual practices,
breakthroughs in genetics, utopian social experiments, and the pursuit of excellence in various
cultural activities have characterized this strand of thought about enhancing life. The Project’s
overall objective is to explore the driving ideas and practices that support the search for
enhancing life in diverse fields of inquiry. For this reason, The Enhancing Life Project seeks
applications from scholars in various fields, e.g., anthropology, sociology, law, psychology,
political sciences, communication, media studies, philosophy, religious studies, and tradition
specific theology (e.g., Christian or Hindu or …).
The assumptions behind enhancing life as well as the interrelation of concepts provide a
general structure to this Project.
A broad field of inquiry where the values of enhancing life are only implicit is “quality of life
research.” See e.g., Richard J. Estes, ed., Advancing Quality of Life in a Turbulent World (Dordrecht: Springer,,
2006), and for a limitation of the spiritual dimension to individual religiosity, cp. Kenneth C. Land, M. Joseph
Sirgy, and Alex C. Michalos, eds., Handbook of Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research (Dordrecht:
Springer Science+Business Media B.V, 2012).
11
David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Ruth Page, “The Human Genome and the Image of God,” in Brave New World:
Theology, Ethics, and the Human Genome, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond (London: T&T Clark, 2003); and Ted
Peters, Playing God?: Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2003).
12
See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.II.1-5 (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne,
1920-25); Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960);
Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (London: Mowbrays, 1975); and Emilie Townes, ed.,
Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1997).
10
9
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VI. RESEARCH TRAJECTORIES
Our overall objective is to address the Big Questions of enhancing life by means of multiyear, interdisciplinary research. It is absolutely necessary for research on religion and spiritual
laws to intersect with sociology, law, psychology, communications, etc., in order to advance
knowledge about how life can be enhanced and thereby to contribute as well to spiritual
advancement. On the level of manageable research agendas, our Project works within the
interrelation of two trajectories of inquiry (see below). More specifically, these projects are
designed to do two things: (1) create interdisciplinary conversations between the academic
study of religion and other academic disciplines; and (2) identify the major points at which
this interdisciplinary research will interact with the wider, international public discussion of
proposals for the enhancement of life.
The expectation is that the Project leaders and Scholars will undertake research in one or more
of these lines of inquiry thereby expanding the scope and depth of the Project. Finally, the
exemplary research questions noted here illustrate the operative assumption in the Project as a
whole, namely, to explore the driving ideas and practices in religion and in spirituality that
support the search for enhancing life in fields of inquiry outside of religion, e.g., sociology,
technology, law, psychology, communications, and theology.
How are the research trajectories related? The first research trajectory focuses on spiritual
laws and then provides orientation for the technological enhancement of life. The second
research trajectory changes the perspective and moves from the technological enhancement of
life to articulate the implied spiritual laws and aspirations of enhancing life. These trajectories
of research are needed in order to answer the Big Questions about enhancing life (see above).
1. The Visionary Power of Spiritual Ideas
The overall Enhancing Life Project seeks to isolate spiritual laws (Big Question #2) in ways
that impact the meaning of enhancing life (Big Question #1). Religions enhance life through a
transformative tension between the constructive and creative reshaping of this world and its
affairs, on the one hand, and the inhabiting of a more or less distant counter-world, on the
other.13 This religious trajectory will bring into a fruitful conversation two fields of inquiry:
1) The first field assumes that most religions strive for the enhancement of this life from birth
to death -- even though such enhancement assumes a variety of symbolic and interpretive
forms--based on different beliefs and promoting peculiar visions of life. As such, the Project
will develop suitable analytical tools to evaluate the “enhancing-life” dimension of the
religions. What are the key socio-religious forms involved in enhancing life (organizations,
clusters of interactions, individual lives, rituals)? What central themes, narratives, and
symbols undergird and accompany this process?
In order to overcome a simplistic distinction between the empirical world and religious
visions of transcendence, the Project will develop and employ a multidimensional concept of
“counter-world.” In order to understand the multiple dimensions of “imagined futures” we
13
In terms of Christian eschatology see Günter Thomas, Neue Schöpfung. Systematisch-Theologische
Untersuchungen Zur Hoffnung Auf Das ‘Leben in Der Zukünftigen Welt’ (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener
Verlag, 2009); Ted Peters, Robert J. Russell, and Michael Welker, eds., Resurrection: Theological and Scientific
Assessments (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 2002); Jürgen Moltmann, Carmen Rivuzumwami, and
Thomas Schlag, Hoffnung Auf Gott - Zukunft Des Lebens: 40 Jahre “Theologie Der Hoffnung” (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005); and Jerry L. Walls, The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, Oxford Handbooks
(Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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need to analyze the religious dimensions of counter-worlds.14 That is to say, any imagined
future that can inspire action to enhance life required for the future entails a conception of a
coherent domain of meaning, a “world,” that is counter to present conditions, the present
social, historical, political, economic, and religious domain of meaning, the current world. A
counter-world exists then in various relations of continuity and discontinuity to a people’s
present world. This gives a counter-world its distinctive status as being present, and yet not
present, but hoped for, and so an already existing condition, but one that is also not yet
existing and must be realized. The investigators of this Project are convinced, then, that
“imagined futures” and “counter-worlds” encompass many dimensions; religion and
spirituality, however, are always essential dimensions.
This approach opens a conceptual space suitable for the analysis of different types of
symbolized counter-worlds and the varying degrees to which they are deployed and supported
within a religion. It becomes possible, in other words, to examine the social, spatial, as well as
temporal dimensions of these counter-worlds and the extent to which they strive for a
transformative and enhancing impact on the individual’s social and personal life. Within this
trajectory of the Project we need to explore the voice of different faith traditions, but we must
take into account the Christian faith that is still a spiritually formative force of global
societies.15
The counter-worlds which move people are not exclusively but are nevertheless powerfully
influenced by spiritual realities. This perspective enables a new way of looking at religions
and spiritual traditions: many faith traditions combine explicitly spiritual movements with
movements in space and time. Religious exercises (worship, devotional, and spiritual
practices) move people in time while pilgrimages add the physical movement in space.16
Additionally, the religious imagination can grasp forms of pilgrimage only available on the
spiritual plane (e.g., see John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” or the stations of the cross in
medieval churches).
Using this combination of spiritual (counter-worldly) movements with physical movements as
a model and heuristic tool we want to ask: to what extent are other movements in space driven
by imagined futures that entail a deeply spiritual dimension? If people are not just moved by
materialistic interests but by a subtle combination of forces and desires, what is the role of
religion in far-reaching spatial movements? In other words: what dimensions of religions are
encouraging or preventing movements in space that are intended to enhance life? It appears to
us that it is the specific religious background of the socio-cultural imaginary of peoples that
encourages us to ask how larger spiritual visions of life are woven into spatial mobility and
the larger texture of enhancing this earthly life.
14
See e.g. Fritz Stolz, “Paradiese und Gegenwelten,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 1.1 (1993):
5-24.
15
Erazim Kohak, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Sallie McFague, Life Abundant (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2001); James Gustafson, A Sense of the Divine: The Natural Environment from a Theocentric Perspective
(Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1994); and Charles Birch and John Cobb, The Liberation of Life: From the Cell
to the Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
16
Linda Kay Davidson and David M. Gitlitz, Pilgrimage: From the Ganges to Graceland: An
Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2002); Simon Coleman and John Elsner, Pilgrimage: Past
and Present: Sacred Travel and Sacred Space in the World Religions (London: British Museum Press, 1995); for
modern pilgrimages cp. Simon Coleman and John Eade, eds., Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion
(London; New York: Routledge, 2004).
12
2) The second field of inquiry will build on the first but shift the focus to the rich texture of
traditions and understandings we find in Christian faith.17 Again, it is our understanding that
in order to comprehend the forces for enhancing life in technological, social, political,
cultural, and religious processes, we need to explore the potentials of the most powerful
tradition in Western societies, namely, Christian faith.
The central hypothesis that interconnects both trajectories of inquiry is that one can observe in
the Christian symbolics a particular triangle consisting of: 1) a faithfulness to a good creation
(the realistic moment); 2) a vision of an unattainable fullness of life (a utopian and
eschatological moment); and 3) a deep sense of life’s plasticity and capacity to be transformed
and enhanced (the transformative-technological moment). In other words, we will unfold how
religious resources, like Christian ones, help us to articulate and assess the hypotheses that
drive this Project (see above). This approach shows promise because these several dimensions
of life can be set in correspondence to the persons of the Trinity. The dynamic between the
different aspects of life present in the attempt to enhance life correspond, theologically
speaking, to the threefold divine life. The care for a good creation needs the transformative
Spirit and the sacrificial giving of life in Christ not just to preserve but to enhance life through
a hope which is willing to take risks. In this “thick” religious symbolism we can see how
seemingly paradoxical forms of some spiritual laws (e.g., winning life by losing it) contribute
to the spiritual enhancement of life.18
The Christian religion enhances life here and now by a “logic of giving” as a spiritual law
anchored in a counter-world. This logic is capable of transforming while not denying
contractual understandings of life in which forms of reciprocity among human beings are
dominant.19 At the same time, this logic helps to transcend strict utilitarian calculations. The
Project assumes that religion plays a major role when the logic of giving reaches its limits in
self-sacrificial love, thereby radically opening new possibilities for the enhancement of this
earthly life. It also assumes that this transformative tension in religion can productively “spill
over” into other spheres of life such as science, technology, economics, and the arts.
2. The Techno-Cultural Process of Enhancing Life
Throughout the legacy of cultures and human history, technologies as simple as a flint knife,
as basic as animal breeding, or, nowadays, as sophisticated as mapping the human genome,
have been used to enhance life, human and non-human.20 Technology in this broad sense is
17
One way of construing this rich texture is in relation to the Trinity and Christian life. See Joy Ann
McDougall, Pilgrimage of Love: Moltmann on the Trinity and Christian Life, Reflection and Theory in the Study
of Religion (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Michael Welker and Miroslav Volf, eds.,
Der Lebendige Gott Als Trinität: Jürgen Moltmann Zum 80. Geburtstag(1. Aufl. ed., Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 2006).
18
The dynamics of enhancing life are touching issues discussed in Stephen Garrard Post, Altruism &
Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, & Religion in Dialogue (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press,
2002); and Unlimited Love: Altruism, Compassion, and Service (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press,
2003).
19
For forgiveness and mercy as such a spiritual act of opening up reciprocity see Miroslav Volf,
“Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice. A Christian Contribution to a More Peaceful Social Environment,” in
Forgiveness and Reconciliation. Religion, Public Policy & Conflict Transformation, Raymond G. Helmick and
Rodney Lawrence Petersen, eds. (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001); Sharon Lamb and Jeffrie G.
Murphy, eds., Before Forgiving: Cautionary Views of Forgiveness in Psychotherapy (Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002); and Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
20
See Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human
Nature (New York: J.P. Tarcher and Putnam, 1992); Koichi Hishida, ed., Fulfilling the Promise of Technology
13
one of the most powerful tools to enhance lived life regardless of all questions concerning its
uses, specific forms, and applications. A peaceful life on this planet in the third millennium is
inconceivable without efficient and powerful technologies touching almost every aspect of
everyday life. It is our hypothesis in this trajectory of research that visions of enhancing life
are among the driving factors in propelling technological advances. These technologies
enable, sustain, enhance, and sometimes endanger life. We assume that the exclusive focus on
the economic dimensions in terms of the driving force of technological development is
insufficiently taking into account the social, cultural, and eventually spiritual and religious
factors. Under this broad research trajectory it is important 1) to explore forms of the
technological enhancement of life and 2) to test whether or not life has been enhanced in the
laboratory of cultural history.
1) In this Project, we would like to focus on biotechnology and communication technology as
the most vibrant fields of technological development influencing our life in the third
millennium. What vision of enhancing life is written into current communication technology
and media development? In biotechnology, what dimensions of life are moved into the
background, what aspects moved to the foreground? How are we to understand and assess
ideas about the “posthuman” and the “transhuman” as well as artificial intelligence?21 What
religious visions of life and social understanding – striving for understanding, community,
and compassion in a world “after Babel” – are embedded in technologies of communication
and biotechnology? What visions of enhancing life are built into these technologies?
The new technologies enable social participation and in many cases give people a voice in
newly emerging publics and forms of life. The ability to transcend the confines of space and
time through communication technology seems to make real visions of life long known
among the religions.22 So too, ideas about a “new heaven and new earth” or beliefs about rebirth and heavenly realms (counter-worlds) might well provide insight into the meanings of
biotechnology as well as artificial intelligence. In addition, the communication technologies
from television to new social media allow new communities to emerge, ranging from
interaction enabled by media to imagined communities formed by media and their implicit
assumptions of participation.23 Communication technologies and biotechnology become the
“technological glue” of advanced societies by linking people and also interconnecting social
spheres (e.g., economy, medicine, education, etc.) and creating a shared space for the cultural
and spiritual imagination.24
Transfer Fostering Innovation for the Benefit of Society (Tokyo; New York: Springer, 2013); and touching the
role of imagination and creativity John Reader, Globalization, Engineering, and Creativity (1st ed, San Rafael,
Calif.: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2006).
21
See Celia Deane-Drummond, “The Future of the Human: Transhuman Evolution or Human Identity
as Imago Christi?” in Christ and Evolution: Wonder and Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009); TiroshSamuelson and Kenneth Mossman, eds., Building Better Humans?: Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012); Ronald Cole-Turner, Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an
Age of Technological Enhancement (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011); Stephen Lilley, ed.,
Transhumanism and Society: The Social Debate over Human Enhancement (Dordrecht: Springer 2013).
22
Marita Sturken, Dou glas Thomas, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Technological Visions: The Hopes and
Fears That Shape New Technologies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
23
Joe Karaganis, ed., Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (New York: Social Science
Research Council, 2007); Tarleton Boczkowski, Pablo J. Foot, and Kirsten A. Gillespie, Media Technologies:
Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014); José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A
Critical History of Social Media (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and, critically, Sherry
Turkle, Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic
Books, 2011).
24
Nick Couldry, Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Cambridge;
Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a
Media Age, Comedia (London; New York: Routledge, 2004); Nick Couldry, The Place of Media Power:
14
In this Project, we would like to connect to other projects and ask how the visions and
practices of technologies influence the understandings of spiritual life, and, conversely, how
the religious imagination shapes communication and biotechnologies. Yet it is also important
to test and assess attempts at enhancing life. The paradox, of course, is that since “enhancing
life” is necessarily directed towards the future, the testing and assessment of projects of
enhancing life draw on analogies to past cultural forms as the laboratory in which to evaluate
imagined futures.
2) Culture Studies is an indispensable part of appraising visions of the future and the
technologies, physical and social, to reach that future. First, the ways societies and cultures
imagine the future neither arise spontaneously nor exhibit utter originality. Instead, they
reshape ideas and institutions already present in the socio-cultural imaginary and draw on,
explicitly or not, technological achievements. Second, when cultures or individuals begin to
implement plans based on a vision of the future, unanticipated consequences and new
possibilities result. Cultural history thus provides a kind of laboratory in which visions of the
future may be studied and evaluated in relation to their social pre-conditions, unanticipated
consequences, and newly emergent possibilities. This Project will investigate these three
dimensions of “futuring” by creating case studies from the history of the United States and
elsewhere. For example, the United States has a legacy of voluntary movements for reform
that were intended to enhance life. Some of these have made pivotal contributions to the
improvement of life: the abolition of slavery or the right of women to vote, to name obvious
examples. Meanwhile, American society is also filled with utopian experiments, past and
present, which sought to establish ideal communities, frequently as models for the future
enhancement of human society at large. It is also the case that one witnesses how the
promotion of religious and spiritual ideals spurs the growth of mass communication.25 These
utopian communities often had specifically religious commitments at their base, but they also
experimented with new social and economic arrangements.
Because most of these reforms and social experiments had quite specific purposes, it is
important to explore the larger assumptions about human nature, fulfillment, and the spiritual
life that were entailed in any specific reform – even those who led to the reformation of law.26
Our research would need to appraise both the intended and the unintended consequences of
these reforms and experiments, the ways in which they directly and indirectly shaped public
policy initiatives, technological and scientific agendas, legal changes or religious thought, and
practice. Scholarly analysis to engage public policy aims at enhancing life, by creating a set of
informed criteria for assessing alternative visions of the future.
These two research trajectories are needed to answer this Project’s Big Questions because
they show the interrelation between the question about the meaning of “enhancing life” and
the correlative “spiritual laws,” while enabling interaction among a range of disciplines. It is
Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age, Comedia (2000); Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise
of the Mediapolis (Cambridge; Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007).
25
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
26
On the dynamic relationship between religion and law see John Witte, The Reformation of Rights.
Law, Religion and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge, U.K.; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Witte and Frank S. Alexander, Christianity and Human Rights: An
Introduction (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); John Witte, Frank S. Alexander,
and George Hunsinger, eds., The Teachings of Modern Protestantism: On Law, Politics, and Human Nature
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
15
our intention, then, that the scholars invited to be Fellows in this Project would work within
and between these research trajectories to develop their distinctive projects. We have selected
these lines of inquiry because they give a broad context within which to examine the
enhancement of biological and artificial life, social networks, cultures, and religious
frameworks – see attached bibliography.
16