Ray Kurzweil’s documentary film “Transcendent Man” should be required viewing for anyone who wants to learn more about transhumanism. Kurzweil crosses off every box we have come to associate with the movement: he believes we should fix Mother Nature’s mistakes; he sees aging and death as unnecessary; he believes that technology can and must save…

I’m a big fan of science fiction, because it can spotlight the possibilities and liabilities of technology. There is a comfort in Sci-Fi, of course: it’s fiction. Not so in the case of transhumanism: Humanity+ and other transhumanist organizations seek real transformation of the human condition through technology. The transhumanists of Silicon Valley tend towards…

Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between positive and negative freedom: freedom to be what we are meant to be versus freedom from constraint. The technological society in which we live, bolstered by centuries of the development of expressive individualism, has clearly come down on the side of negative freedom. Freedom equals choice, and technology expands the…

Can reflection on transhumanism help refine our understanding of the imago Dei? The teaching that humanity is made in the image of God is regarded as core to Christian doctrine and the bedrock of Christian anthropology—arguably, it is the reason we can speak of theological anthropology at all. But there is a surprising diversity of…

I have not written much, or for very long, but this Sapientia book symposium is easily the greatest honor my work has ever received. I am very grateful to Joey, Dan, Hannah, John, Rachel, and Russ for reading, challenging, and extending my argument, and for Matthew Wiley and Joey Sherrard for putting this together and…

In 1979, Richard Lovelace analyzed what it meant for local churches to pursue strategies of spiritual revitalization in his book Dynamics of Spiritual Life. Without being formulaic, he gave a paradigm of what are (1) the preconditions for spiritual renewal to occur (a grasp of a knowledge of God, ourselves, the depth of sin, and…

In his new book You Are Not Your Own, Alan Noble talks a lot about sex. He talks about sexual identity. He talks about the ethics of sex work. He talks about the ennui that can undermine married sex. And he talks about pornography. (He talks about pornography a whole lot.) To be fair, one…

Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own is an appeal to reclaim the anthropological sensibilities of the Heidelberg Catechism by way of a trenchant analysis of what it feels like to live in the malaise of the modern “inhuman” world. For as far-ranging as Noble’s book is, again and again I found myself being profitably…

In the introduction to The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, Charles Mathewes writes, “Hope has had a hard time since September 11. But things were not so good before then either.” Now over a decade from the publication of those words, we could replace the fall of the Twin Towers with any…

I’m grateful for all the time and effort that our commentators have obviously put into their essays. Faced with such a plethora of detailed comments, I don’t want us—especially those who have not yet read the book—to lose the forest for the trees. So I want to take a step back and look at the…

The five chapters in Part 3 of William Lane Craig’s beautifully written book In Quest of the Historical Adam turn to the scientific investigation of human evolution to answer three questions: What are the behaviors that make us humans? When do we first see these behaviors in geological time? What are the scientific objections to…

Bill Craig has presented us with an important book that does something that no other volume has done before, and that is to provide the reader with a comprehensive review of biblical, theological, and scientific data and arguments concerning the historical Adam. As a result, the book makes an important contribution to this (pun intended)…