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This interdisciplinary volume explores how two domains of human experience and action–religion and technology–are implicated in one another. Combining rich historical and ethnographic detail with extended theoretical reflection, Deus in Machina challenges longstanding assumptions about religion and/as technology and outlines new directions of inquiry at the crossroads of religious studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, history, anthropology, and philosophy.
Jeremy Stolow is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He is the author of Orthodox By Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution and the essay "Salvation by Electricity," in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (Fordham).
. . . Stolow takes an interdisciplinary voyage through the many different contexts in which religion and technology meet. By putting god back into the machine, he and the featured authors revise the idea that the two exist as separate areas of action and experience.
—Susan Harding:The modern categories 'religion' and 'technology' would have us sever all connections between them and the entities that pertain to them and set them on mutually exclusive planes: one, a plane of faith, the sacred, and meaning; the other, a plane of the reason, the profane, and material reality. Enter Deus in Machina, not as a plot device, but as a subtle and complex restaging of this modern drama through a series of brilliant essays. Some of the essays reveal how the categories religion and technology were, and continue to be, segregated, or purified, in conflicts over the authenticity and efficacy of hybrid practices, such as American séances, Japanese Buddhist healing prayers, and Ghanaian Charismatic Christian machines that emit divine sparks. All of the essays restore the connections between the technical and the religious by foregrounding hybrid rites, techniques, and mechanisms. Clocks and calendars join heavenly and earthly realms. The Hebrew God works through documentary films. Vodou gods and goddesses colonize cyberspace. Dark spirits haunt techno-modern men and women. Together, the essays, including Jeremy Stolow’s masterly introduction, evocatively theorize the ways in which the religious and the technical are always linked, overlapping, and entangled. In the process, Deus in Machina reconfigures both categories and enables us to re-script the drama of modernity.
—David Chidester:Taking in an impressive historical and geographical sweep, the book contains fascinating chapters on thinking about machines, thinking through machines, and thinking machines, enabling readers to see religion and technology anew.
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