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Class Prep
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Technologies, Religion & Meaning-Making
 So far in this class, we have touched on religious beliefs expressed through Jewish and Christian scripture and how those are interpreted by individuals:-
- Clare's embrace of Jesus' radical poverty,
- Ignatius' spiritual exercises imagining himself in biblical situations,
- the displacement of religious narratives like the Bible in the modern and post-modern periods, and
- the "babel" of voices in our own time as we recognize our responsibility to create meaning but find ourselves in a kind of authority vacuum, with competing voices telling us what to value and whom to believe.
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- In Wednesday's class, we saw how even people who read the Bible as literally true are not always seeing the persons on the page, and how even people who profess the same religion can have diametrically opposing interpretations of contemporary moral issues. All of these topics help set the context for our exploration of the Bible this quarter.
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- There's one more context we need to explore to set the stage for "texting God," and that is technology. At the surface, it might seem like technology has nothing to do with religion. Technology is the produce of science, and one myth in our culture is that science and religion are not merely mutually exclusive but even opposing entities. Many of the computer engineers and visionaries who surround us in Silicon Valley are secular humanists who disdain formal religion.
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- In today's reading, Stanford-trained communications and digital media scholar John Durham Peters will tell you a different story. He will argue that religions have always gravitated towards and even been behind the development and control of technology, because of technology's capacity to extend our understanding and control or time and space. His study is of "media" so basic that we don't tend to think of them AS media, AS logistical technologies—calendars, clocks, and towers (like the Minecraft ziggurat above). These basic media help us to see religion's role in technology, and to appreciate that religion is indeed about intangibles, as one student put it the other day, but also must be mediated through tangible objects if it is to be experienced at all. And religion, with its temples, altars, ritual meals, sacred texts, liturgical calendars, monetary donations, special vestments, regulated prayers, fragrances of incenses and sacrificed foods, memorial altars for the deceased, physical exercises, music, art and community bonds—to name but a few of its media—is one of the most complete, multimodal forms of human expression and motivation.
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- The flip side of this is that our tangible technologies are also tied to intangible beliefs—in the power we assign to the tools, the worlds we imagine they can create, and the absolute value many of us place in material objects. That is, belief in technology can be a kind of religion.
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- As you read Peters, be able to answer the following questions:
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- What does a calendar do? What are some examples of how calendars merely approximate time (rather than represent it absolutely accurately)? What calendars do we see in the Jewish account of creation (Genesis 1:1–2:4a)?
- What are some of the differences between clocks and calendars as time-keepers? Where and when did the first clocks appear? How is the clock a "religious technology," especially now that Peters says it stands "for secularization, for the standardization and integration of the world" (p. 35)?
- Towers extend our capacities to see, to be seen, and to be heard. Be able to explain each of these functions and their relationship to those in power. What is wrong with the building of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9?
- What "logistical technologies" do you use to track and control your time (day and year), and your space?
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- Assigned Readings
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- Primary: Genesis 1:1–2:4a; 11:1-9
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- Secondary: John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower,” in Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (ed. Jeremy Stolow; New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) 25-42, 288-90 (Camino); online class prep
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- Slides for Lecture
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- Today's Authors
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John Durham Peters is Professor Emeritus of Communications Studies at the University of Iowa and Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University, he spent most of his career at the University of Iowa teaching courses on communication, media, and digital media. Here is a list of his publications. |
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- Further Reading
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- Aveni, Anthony F. Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures. New York: Kodansha America, 1994.
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- Cook, S. D. N. "Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on Genesis 1–3." Judaism 45:4 (1996) 412-20.
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- Crouch, Carl. "Markets, Temples, and Palaces." Studies in Symbolic Interaction 7 (1986) 137-59.
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- Guillaume, Philippe. Land and Calendar: The Priestly Document from Genesis 1 to Joshua 18. New York: T & T Clark, 2009.
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- Metzger, Paul Louis. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the Savior of the World: Space, Time, and Structural Evil." Cultural Encounters 1:1 (2004) 85-93.
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- Zerubavel, Eviatar. "Easter and Passover: On Calendars and Group Identity." American Sociological Review 47:2 (1982) 284-9.
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- --------. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. New York: Free Press, 1985.
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- Links
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- Religious Calendar - A list of upcoming cyclical dates in the various world religious calendars, maintained by The Pluralism Project at Harvard University.
- Calendar Converter - Harvard's Fourmilab in the Math Department hosts this page that converts dates in common time into or out of a host of international calendars.
- The Official NIST US Time - hosted by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the U.S. Naval Observatory.
- What Are the Main Jewish Festivals? - A description of the festival calendar of Judaism, maintained on the BBC's Religion & Ethics page.
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- Acknowledgements
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