Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering. By Wesley J. Wildman and Kate StocklyReligion and the Technological Future: An Introduction to Biohacking, Artificial Intelligence, and Transhumanism. By Calvin Mercer and Tracey J. Trothern

Abstract

Religion and technology are constant companions who are often treated as strange bedfellows. Our perception of technology’s newness—the shiny chrome and bright twinkling lights of the “latest thing” that has caught our eye—often seems to stand in contrast to the deeply embedded “old” traditions we commonly understand as religion or spirituality, even though there is a long history of religious uses of technology, from the obvious, such as the printing press, to the less obvious, like the now-ubiquitous church website. Some might even consider religion itself a technology, a human-created device for navigating our world, or a technology of the self in the Foucauldian sense. However, in Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering, we are again being told that we are in shocking new territory as spirituality uses new technologies (xiii). And in Religion and the Technological Future: An Introduction to Biohacking, Artificial Intelligence, and Transhumanism, we are told, nigh on apocalyptically, that “the religions of the world will come to an end, or thrive, depending on how they respond to the topic of this book” (3). Both books are catalyzed and enthused by technologies from the past few years. Still, they tackle their emergence and impact in radically different ways, and in doing so provide very different resources to the reader.