The study of man today is divided in three ways that it should not be: between the humanities and the social sciences, between natural and metaphysical philosophy, and between faith and reason. This book bridges these three divides to build toward an integrated understanding of human being that begins with the revealed truths of Christian faith. Because its humanism draws upon diverse fields of art, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology, the book should be of interest to scholars and students of all kinds. And because its humanism is all about us, the book should interest be of interest to anyone who happens to be human.

In recent years, Google s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy players. Digital technologies with hardware, software, and networks at their core will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.

In The Second Machine Age MIT s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee two thinkers at the forefront of their field reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.

Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds from lawyers to truck drivers will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.

Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.

A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress."

What is 'digital health'? And what are its implications for medicine and healthcare, and for individual citizens and society? Digital health is of growing interest to policymakers, clinicians and businesses. It is underpinned by promise and optimism, with predictions that digital technologies and related innovations will soon 'transform' medicine and healthcare, and enable individuals to better manage their own health and risk and to receive a more 'personalized' treatment and care. Offering a sociological perspective, this book critically examines the dimensions and implications of digital health, a term that is often ill defined, but signifies the promise of technology to 'empower' individuals and improve their lives as well as generating efficiencies and wealth. The chapters explore relevant sociological concepts and theories; changing conceptions of the self, evident in citizens' growing use of wearables, online behaviours and patient activism; changes in medical practices, especially precision (or personalized) medicine and growing reliance on big data and algorithm-driven decisions; the character of the digital healthcare economy; and the perils of digital health. It is argued that, for various reasons, including the way digital technologies are designed and operate, and the influence of big technology companies and other interests seeking to monetize citizens' data, digital health is unlikely to deliver much of what is promised. Citizens' use of digital technologies is likened to a Faustian bargain: citizens are likely to surrender something of far greater value (their personal data) than what they obtain from its use. However, growing data activism and calls for 'algorithmic accountability' highlight the potential for citizens to create alternative futures-ones oriented to fulfilling human needs rather than techno-utopian visions. This ground-breaking book will provide an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the socio-cultural and politico-economic implications of digital health.

This book is an invitation to reflect on how a minority culture emerged from within "Third World" liberation movements. It considers not only the historical and cultural journey between Ethiopia and Jamaica, but also the psychological dynamics of subalterns between the East and the West. In this work, the author discusses the various beliefs and ideologies of the RastafarI movement in relation to Ethiopia, and challenges the RastafarI misogynistic attitude by rehabilitating the position of women within the movement through the figure of the Queen of Sheba.

Providing a global perspective on the development of American technology, Technology and American Society offers a historical narrative detailing major technological transformations over the last three centuries. With coverage devoted to both dramatic breakthroughs and incremental innovations, authors Gary Cross and Rick Szostak analyze the cause-and-effect relationship of technological change and its role in the constant drive for improvement and modernization. This fully-updated 3rd edition extends coverage of industry, home, office, agriculture, transport, constructions, and services into the twenty-first century, concluding with a new chapter on recent electronic and technological advances. Technology and American Society remains the ideal introduction to the myriad interactions of technological advancement with social, economic, cultural, and military change throughout the course of American history.

Instrumental Lives is an account of instrument making at the cutting edge of contemporary science and technology in a modern Indian scientific laboratory. For a period of roughly two-and-half decades, starting the late 1980s, a research group headed by CV Dharmadhikari in the physics department at the Savitribai Phule University, Pune, fabricated a range of scanning tunnelling and scanning force microscopes including the earliest such microscopes made in the country. Not only were these instruments made entirely in-house, research done using them was published in the world's leading peer reviewed journals, and students who made and trained on them went on to become top class scientists in premier institutions. The book uses qualitative research methods such as open-ended interviews, historical analysis and laboratory ethnography that are standard in Science and Technology Studies (STS), to present the micro-details of this instrument making enterprise, the counter-intuitive methods employed, and the unexpected material, human and intellectual resources that were mobilised in the process. It locates scientific research and innovation within the social, political and cultural context of a laboratory's physical location and asks important questions of the dominant narratives of innovation that remain fixated on quantitative metrics of publishing, patenting and generating commerce. The book is a story as much of the lives of instruments and their deaths as it is of the instrumentalities that make those lives possible and allow them to live on, even if with a rather precarious existence.

Unplugging Popular Culture showcases youth and young adult characters from film and television who defy the stereotype of the "digital native" who acts as an unquestioning devotee to screened technologies like the smartphone. In this study, unplugged tools, or non-digital tools, do not necessitate a ban on technology or a refusal to acknowledge its affordances but work instead to highlight the ability of fictional characters to move from high tech settings to low tech ones. By repurposing everyday materials, characters model the process of reusing and upcycling existing materials in innovative ways. In studying examples such as Pitch Perfect, Supernatural, Stranger Things, and Get Out, the book aims to make theories surrounding materiality apparent within popular culture and to help today's readers reconsider stereotypes of the young people they encounter on a daily basis.

By the twentieth century, science had become so important that religious traditions had to respond to it. Emerging religions, still led by a living founder to guide them, responded with a clarity and focus that illuminates other larger, more established religions' understandings of science. The Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and Heaven's Gate each found distinct ways to incorporate major findings of modern American science, understanding it as central to their wider theological and social agendas. In tracing the development of these new religious movements' viewpoints on science during each movement's founding period, we can discern how their views on science were crafted over time. These NRMs shed light on how religious groups--new, old, alternative, or mainstream--could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late twentieth-century America.

In this engrossing book, Zeller carefully shows that religious groups had several methods of creatively responding to science, and that the often-assumed conflict-based model of "science vs. religion" must be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how religions operate in our modern scientific world.

In The Future Is Analog, David Sax points out that the onset of the pandemic instantly gave us the digital universe we'd spent so long anticipating. Instant communication, online shopping, virtual everything. It didn't take long to realize how awful it was to live in this promised future. We craved real experiences, relationships, and spaces and got back to real life as quickly and often as we could. In chapters exploring work, school, religion, and more, this book asks pointed questions: Is our future inevitably digital? Can we reject the downsides of digital technology without rejecting change? Can we innovate not for the sake of productivity but for the good of our social and cultural lives? Can we build a future that serves us as humans, first and foremost? This is a manifesto for a different kind of change. We can spend our creativity and money on building new gadgets-or we can spend them on new ways to be together and experience the world, to bake bread, and climb mountains. All we need is the clarity to choose which future we want.

What is 'digital health'? And what are its implications for medicine and healthcare, and for individual citizens and society? Digital health is of growing interest to policymakers, clinicians and businesses. It is underpinned by promise and optimism, with predictions that digital technologies and related innovations will soon 'transform' medicine and healthcare, and enable individuals to better manage their own health and risk and to receive a more 'personalized' treatment and care. Offering a sociological perspective, this book critically examines the dimensions and implications of digital health, a term that is often ill defined, but signifies the promise of technology to 'empower' individuals and improve their lives as well as generating efficiencies and wealth. The chapters explore relevant sociological concepts and theories; changing conceptions of the self, evident in citizens' growing use of wearables, online behaviours and patient activism; changes in medical practices, especially precision (or personalized) medicine and growing reliance on big data and algorithm-driven decisions; the character of the digital healthcare economy; and the perils of digital health. It is argued that, for various reasons, including the way digital technologies are designed and operate, and the influence of big technology companies and other interests seeking to monetize citizens' data, digital health is unlikely to deliver much of what is promised. Citizens' use of digital technologies is likened to a Faustian bargain: citizens are likely to surrender something of far greater value (their personal data) than what they obtain from its use. However, growing data activism and calls for 'algorithmic accountability' highlight the potential for citizens to create alternative futures-ones oriented to fulfilling human needs rather than techno-utopian visions. This ground-breaking book will provide an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the socio-cultural and politico-economic implications of digital health.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God's perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

Roger S. Gottlieb is internationally known for his groundbreaking studies of religious environmentalism, passionate account of spirituality in an age of environmental crisis, and enlightening vision of the role of religion in a democratic society. Political and Spiritual brings together for the first time his most powerful essays on these and related themes. The book's wealth of topics includes spiritual deep ecology, ethical theory, animal rights, the Holocaust, the environmental crisis, and the experience of disability-as well as new essays on the human meaning of technology, facing death, and a fascinating intellectual autobiography. As a whole, Political and Spiritual reveals Gottlieb's unique ability to connect our collective struggles for a just, rational, and caring society with our personal strivings for contentment, wisdom, and compassion.

First published in 1970. This book is concerned with the examination and assessment of the impact of changes in technology on companies in three selected industries: printing, steel and chemicals. Its main focus is on the employment and associated labour market effects of technological change; but part of the rationale for the study as a whole has been to relate these effects to the technological environment of each industry. Accordingly, a good deal of attention has been paid to the character of the innovations themselves and to their implications for the industries in general terms. This title will be of interest to students of Business Studies and Economics.

Is the legal protection that is given to the expression of Abrahamic religious belief adequate or appropriate in the context of English medical law? This is the central question that is explored in this book, which develops a framework to support judges in the resolution of contentious cases that involve dissension between religious belief and medical law, developed from Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC). This framework is applied to a number of medical law case studies: the principle of double effect, ritual male circumcision, female genital mutilation, Jehovah's Witnesses (adults and children) who refuse blood transfusions, and conscientious objection of healthcare professionals to abortion. The book also examines the legal and religious contexts in which these contentious cases are arbitrated. It demonstrates how human rights law and the proposed framework can provide a gauge to measure competing rights and apply legitimate limits to the expression of religious belief, where appropriate. The book concludes with a stance of principled pragmatism, which finds that some aspects of current legal protections in English medical law require amendment.

Do technologies have sex? Until recently popular stereotypes have associated technology strongly with masculinity. But in the new digital age, wired women are populating cyberspace and embracing technological change. The cyborg figure has fired the feminist imagination as an icon of women's power and freedom from biological sex difference. What does the new global information society - interconnected, genetically engineered, digitally designed, remotely controlled - hold for women? While most commentators assert that everything in the digital future will be different, how true is this for the social relations of gender?

This timely and engaging book argues that technoscientific advances are radically transforming the woman-machine relationship. However, it is feminist politics rather than the technologies themselves that make the difference. "TechnoFeminism" fuses the visionary insights of cyberfeminism with a materialist analysis of the sexual politics of technology. Drawing on new perspectives in postmodernism, feminist theory and science and technology studies, Judy Wajcman explores the ways in which technologies are gendered both in their design and use. At the same time, she shows how our very subjectivity is shaped by the technoscientific culture of the world we inhabit. This book provides a lucid, accessible and succinct interpretation of some of the most complex and urgent debates of our times.

After the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, theologians were faced with the dilemma of God creating through evolution. Suddenly, pain, suffering, untimely death and extinction appeared to be the very tools of creation, and not a result of the sin of humanity. Despite this paradigm shift, the question of non-human suffering has been largely overlooked within theodicy debates, overwhelmed by the extreme human suffering of the twentieth century. This book redresses this imbalance by offering a rigorous academic treatment of the questions surrounding God and the suffering of non-human animals. Combining theological, philosophical, and biblical perspectives, this book explores the relationship between God and Creation within Christian theology. First it dismantles the popular theological view that roots violence and suffering in the animal kingdom in the fall of humanity. Then, through an exploration of the nature of love, it affirms that there are multiple reasons to suggest that God and creation can both be "good", even with the presence of violence and suffering. This is an innovative exploration of an under-examined subject that encompasses issues of theology, science, morality and human-animal interactions. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars and academics of religion and science, the philosophy of religion, theodicy, and biblical studies.

Attitudes towards science, medicine and the body are all profoundly shaped by people's worldviews. When discussing issues of bioethics, religion often plays a major role. In this volume, the role of genetic manipulation and neurotechnology in shaping human identity is examined from multiple religious perspectives. This can help us to understand how religion might affect the impact of the initiatives such as the UNESCO Declaration in Bioethics and Human Rights. The book features bioethics experts from six major religions: Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. It includes a number of distinct religious and cultural views on the anthropological, ethical and social challenges of emerging technologies in the light of human rights and in the context of global bioethics. The contributors work together to explore issues such as: cultural attitudes to gene editing; neuroactive drugs; the interaction between genes and behaviours; the relationship between the soul, the mind and DNA; and how can clinical applications of these technologies benefit the developing world. This is a significant collection, demonstrating how religion and modern technologies relate to one another. It will, therefore, be of great interest to academics working in bioethics, religion and the body, interreligious dialogue, and religion and science, technology and neuroscience.

As the internet and new online technologies are becoming embedded in everyday life, there are increasing questions about their social implications and consequences. Children, young people, and their families tend to be at the forefront of new media adoption, benefiting from early experiences to the new opportunities afforded by the internet, mobile and broadband content, online games, and peer-to-peer technologies. However, they also encounter a range of risky or negative experiences for which they may be unprepared. These risks, the everyday contexts in which they occur, and the ways in which they are being addressed, are all subject to continual change. This book examines the opportunities and risks at hand for children who have access to online technology. Each chapter has a distinct pan-European focus. With its unique comparative approach, the book captures the diverse, topical, and timely expertise generated by the EU Kids Online project, which brings together 60 researchers from

For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others. Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."

Rights, Regulation and the Technological Revolution confronts a central question facing modern government - how can regulators respond to both the challenges and opportunities presented by a technologically-driven society without sacrificing legitimacy for effectiveness, or weakening the essential conditions of a stable, aspirant moral community?
Analyzing developments across biotechnology, information and communications technology, nanotechnology and neurotechnology, the book explores the difficulties facing the public control of rapid technological change, focusing on the problems of regulatory effectiveness, connection, legitimacy and compliance. The book argues that as regulators struggle to find adequate frameworks to limit, license and support new technologies, they will increasingly rely on a technological approach to complement, enhance, and even replace traditional legal strategies.
The book breaks new ground by offering the first overarching commentary on the relationship between regulators, industry, and wider society as the new technologies of the twenty-first century achieve an ever-greater penetration in our daily lives.

The first philosophy of technology, constructing humans as technological and technology as an underpinning of all culture Ernst Kapp was a foundational scholar in the fields of media theory and philosophy of technology. His 1877 Elements of a Philosophy of Technology is a visionary study of the human body and its relationship with the world that surrounds it. At the book's core is the concept of "organ projection"d: the notion that humans use technology in an effort to project their organs to the outside, to be understood as "the soul apparently stepping out of the body in the form of a sending-out of mental qualities"into the world of artifacts.Kapp applies this theory of organ projection to various areas of the material world-the axe externalizes the arm, the lens the eye, the telegraphic system the neural network. From the first tools to acoustic instruments, from architecture to the steam engine and the mechanic routes of the railway, Kapp's analysis shifts from "simple"tools to more complex network technologies to examine the projection of relations. What emerges from Kapp's prophetic work is nothing less than the emergence of early elements of a cybernetic paradigm.

From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. By exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages to persuade their peers and shape the public mind, Joel Penney offers a new framework for understanding the phenomenon of viral political communication: the citizen marketer. Like the citizen consumer, the citizen marketer is guided by the logics of marketing practice, but, rather than being passive, actively circulates persuasive media to advance political interests. Such practices include using protest symbols in social media profile pictures, strategically tweeting links to news articles to raise awareness about select issues, sharing politically-charged internet memes and viral videos, and displaying mass-produced T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers that promote a favored electoral candidate or cause. Citizens view their participation in such activities not only in terms of how it may shape or influence outcomes, but as a statement of their own identity. As the book argues, these practices signal an important shift in how political participation is conceptualized and performed in advanced capitalist democratic societies, as they casually inject political ideas into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture. While marketing is considered a dirty word in certain critical circles - particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle - some of these very critics have determined that the most effective way to push back against the forces of neoliberal capitalism is to co-opt its own marketing and advertising techniques to spread counter-hegemonic ideas to the public. Accordingly, this book argues that the citizen marketer approach to political action is much broader than any one ideological constituency or bloc. Rather, it is a means of promoting a wide range of political ideas, including those that are broadly critical of elite uses of marketing in consumer capitalist societies. The book includes an extensive historical treatment of citizen-level political promotion in modern democratic societies, connecting contemporary digital practices to both the 19th century tradition of mass political spectacle as well as more informal, culturally-situated forms of political expression that emerge from postwar countercultures. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer approach, as well as how it has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, Penney charts the evolution of activism in an age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation.

Few issues engender so much heat between Christians as the topic of creation. Reasonable, calm, and supremely well informed, this is a book written by someone who is passionate about both science and the Bible. 'I hope,' says Denis Alexander, 'that reading it will encourage you to believe, as I do, that the 'Book of God's Word' and the 'Book of God's Works' can be held firmly together in harmony.' This substantial new edition updates the science, and extends the author's discussion of the theological implications.

Use your imagination! The demand is as important as it is confusing. What is the imagination? What is its value? Where does it come from? And where is it going in a time when even the obscene seems overdone and passé? This book takes up these questions and argues for the centrality of imagination in human cognition. It traces the development of the imagination in Kant’s critical philosophy (particularly the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment) and claims that the insights of Kantian aesthetic theory, especially concerning the nature of creativity, common sense, and genius, influenced the development of nineteenth-century American philosophy. The book identifies the central role of the imagination in the philosophy of Peirce, a role often overlooked in analytic treatments of his thought. The final chapters pursue the observation made by Kant and Peirce that imaginative genius is a type of natural gift (ingenium) and must in some way be continuous with the creative force of nature. It makes this final turn by way of contemporary studies of metaphor, embodied cognition, and cognitive neuroscience.

Anthropocene has become an environmental buzzword. It denotes a new geological epoch that is human-dominated. As mounting scientific evidence reveals, humankind has fundamentally altered atmospheric, geological, hydrological, biospheric, and other Earth system processes to an extent that the risk of an irreversible system change emerges. Human societies must therefore change direction and navigate away from critical tipping points in the various ecosystems of our planet. This hypothesis has kicked off a debate not only on the geoscientific definition of the Anthropocene era, but increasingly also in the social sciences. However, the specific contribution of the social sciences disciplines and in particular that of political science still needs to be fully established. This edited volume analyzes, from a political science perspective, the wider social dynamics underlying the ecological and geological changes, as well as their implications for governance and politics in the Anthropocene. The focus is on two questions: (1) What is the contribution of political science to the Anthropocene debate, e.g. in terms of identified problems, answers, and solutions? (2) What are the conceptual and practical implications of the Anthropocene debate for the discipline of political science? Overall, this book contributes to the Anthropocene debate by providing novel theoretical and conceptual accounts of the Anthropocene, engaging with contemporary politics and policy-making in the Anthropocene, and offering a critical reflection on the Anthropocene debate as such. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, global environmental politics and governance, and sustainable development.