Cyborgs and Sacraments­: The Redemption­ of Cybercultu­re

Is the Matrix already a reality? We look at our culture's fascination with cyberspace and electronics, and see the diverse ways in which to realise our desire to go beyond our bodily limations through cybernetic means.

At first glance, Christians may look at these as instruments to make life easier, and even see them as new avenues of building community and spreading the Gospel. But do these conveniences blind us to an anti-theology of the Body, that produces an atomistic and even anti-sacramental way of life?

How are we to make sense of cyberculture? Is it all bad? If not, can it be redeemed?

Cyborgs and Sacraments: The Redemption of Cyberculture

Is the Matrix already a reality? We look at our culture's fascination with cyberspace and electronics, and see the diverse ways in which to realise our desire to go beyond our bodily limations through cybernetic means.

At first glance, Christians may look at these as instruments to make life easier, and even see them as new avenues of building community and spreading the Gospel. But do these conveniences blind us to an anti-theology of the Body, that produces an atomistic and even anti-sacramental way of life?

How are we to make sense of cyberculture? Is it all bad? If not, can it be redeemed?

The Gospel(s) of the Lord(s)

Are we aware of what our culture is doing to us, how it is doing it, or what we can do in the face of it?

We look at how we inhabit our culture and how our culture acts on us as a type of evangelisation that counteracts the Christian Gospel, often without our knowing it.

What then can the bearers of the Christian Gospel do? Do we need an expansion of what it means to evangelise?

The Marriage of Christ, Krishna and Leviathan: War Memorials or Shrines of the State?

Presented together with Jillian Prideaux and Alexander Pound

Religion’s challenge to the sovereign state is a question that has recently received wide ranging attention and has been the subject of a number of different arguments. Such arguments range from Hastings’s viewpoint that the Christian religion unwittingly inspired the ideology of nationalism, to Anderson’s argument that nationalism replaces traditional faiths as a new secular religion. The debate over this interaction becomes even more complex when attempting to understand how different religious expressions interact with the diverse nations and nationalisms found across the globe. However, this very diversity amongst individual nationalisms generally, and the wider general divide between Western and Eastern nationalisms, makes it imperative to pinpoint and analyse key similarities. In this presentation, we argue that a key trend amongst diverse nations both in the East and the West is the conscription of traditional religious ideologies to sacralise the ‘official’ nation as defined by the state.

In demonstrating our case, we will utilise war memorials as a common form of nationalist expression that bridges the gap between nations of all cultural persuasions across the East and the West. We will examine two war memorials, the National War Memorial in Canberra (Australia) and a regional war memorial in Denpasar, Bali (Indonesia). We argue that despite obvious external differences, they are united in their utilisation of the dominant local religious faith, namely Christianity and Hinduism respectively. This utilisation occurs through their juxtaposition of religiously themed artwork and architecture, with the symbols of the official state-sanctioned version of nationalism in order to create a narrative where religion implicitly supports and deifies the nation-state. In examining these two cases, we will discuss key similarities and differences. Examples of these include that Australia is a largely secular society, whereas Indonesia is constitutionally a religious society. Similarly, while Christianity is the most familiar religion to Australians, Hinduism is a minority religion in majority Muslim Indonesia. The differences between these two examples highlight the common processes occurring in both eastern and western states to link official nationalism to local religious practise and symbols.

In examining these two different war memorials and their utilisation of religious forms, we will argue that nationalism does not occur as a replacement of religion due to a decline in religious affiliation. Instead, using the framework developed by William T. Cavanaugh, we will demonstrate how the state actually conscripts forms of religious devotion, distorting that devotion through the injection into the original religious narrative of quasi-religious counterparts. Furthermore, we will develop his theory, to show how the state uses this to sacralize its official version of the nation, to the exclusion of other interpretations. We argue that the presentation of nationalist symbols, imagery and narratives in ways that mimic the original religious aesthetics and discursive threads have the effect of justifying the aggrandisement of the official nation as consonant with religious devotion. At the same time, we argue that through such mimicry there is a simultaneous steering of that religious devotion away from their original divine purpose, via a process of placing the state, through quasi-religious devotion to the official nation, as the pinnacle of the religious expression above the original divine object of worship.

Reason, Politics and Evangelisation

Benedict XVI's call to expand reason's horizons requires attention to the political frameworks that allows any enlarged reason to operate. A re-hellenised reason cannot fully operate in the current secular "public sphere" framework. Not only are the framework’s horizons so narrow as to bar faith from entry in discourse. The presumption of the framework’s neutrality, allowing equal freedom to all perspectives, ignores the fact that the framework itself is an evangelical force that preempts Christianity and turns citizens into captive "disciples" of an inherently violent agnosticism before communication even begins.

Expanding reason's horizons must be coupled with interrupting the existing framework’s hegemony, an inescapably political project since it involves the transformation of political communities. This transformation is evangelical to the extent that it consists in the recruitment of people into practices that sustain political communities. What distinguishes Christian frameworks from the current is that the former is built on the force of truth whilst the latter is built on the truth of force.

Recognition of the link between reason, politics and evangelism gives the Church legitimacy as a political actor, allows its politics to retain its evangelical mission, and provide a political context for authentically ecumenical and inter-cultural relations.

The Liturgical Transformation of International Political Community

Paper published in Conference Proceedings

Paper explores how the content of religious practices, particular the Christian Eucharistic Liturgy can be mobilised bring about changes to political communities, and with that build the conditions for the more peaceful coexistence.

Drawing mainly from the Radical Orthodoxy tradition, this paper also explores how the rituals of the Eucharist can engender a communal reimagination of the way we perceive the political communities we inhabit, and going further create new webs of relations to challenge those of the nation state.

The paper argues that the liturgy reinforces an ontology of participation contra the state’s ontology of violence. It argues that the rituals also redefine terms of citizenship, providing an avenue to engage with difference and provide an economic alternative to current political communities disciplined by capitalism.

Conversion/Politics

Christians place great currency on freedom. With this in mind, the Church’s evangelical mission is often paralleled by attempts in establishing intercultural harmony or universal credibility as a member of civil society in the current state-centric political framework. This task of maintaining the freedom of citizens through these measures is seen as something isolated from the task of winning converts, yet compatible with its evangelical mission.

The Church cannot simultaneously carry out both these tasks. This is not because of the inconsistency of these goals, but because the current political framework’s banner of freedom masks the fact that the framework is an evangelical force, converting citizens bodies into “disciples” well before the Christian Gospel reaches their minds. Remaining in civil society therefore, is to assist in the spread of a secular Gospel.

Politics is therefore fundamentally evangelical to the extent that creating and maintaining any political framework overlaps with the recruitment of people’s bodies into practices that sustain political communities. Therefore, the Church’s contemporary evangelical mission must be intimately tied to the task of transforming the existing political framework by creating space for a reconfiguring the bodies therein. Recognition of the link between politics and conversion via corporeal recruitment gives the Church legitimacy as a political player and allows its politics to retain its evangelical mission.

Sarah Coakley and the Prayers of the Digital Body of Christ

This paper will investigate the future salience of systematic theology by applying Sarah Coakley’s work on contemplative prayer as a lens to evaluate a cultural context increasingly circumscribed by the internet. More specifically, it will evaluate the Church’s enthusiastic embrace of cybernetic forms, from online services to the establishment of churches in Second Life, as part of its evangelising mission and of cybernetically extending the Body of Christ. This paper argues that a sharp critique of this enthusiasm can be launched with the realisation that deep parallels exist between the processes of immersing oneself within cyberspace and those of contemplative prayer as outlined by Sarah Coakley. Ultimately, this paper will argue that far from a neutral instrument or even a cultural form, cyberspace constitutes an interesting, but ultimately deficient version of Christian contemplative prayer. This paper argues that cyberspace is a manifestation of a posthuman anthropology that has several important overlaps with Christian subjectivity, decentring the autonomous Enlightenment subject, affirming the deep need for others in defining self, and rehabilitating the necessity for submission to authority. However, an uncritical celebration of cybernetics’ promises often ignores theological undercurrents that lie beneath their manifestations. Attention is given first to a neo-Gnosticism which denigrates humanity as embodied subjects. Also, the centrality of coding evinces an anti-incarnationalism that encourages the breaking up of concrete bodies, biological and social, for the sake of more universally superior, digitised alternatives. The paper concludes by proposing a way for the Body of Christ to navigate these poles by reference to the linking and juxtaposition of the Church’s cybernetic context to its sacramental worship.

War of the Worlds? Trajectories of the Intersection of Religion with Peace and Conflict Studies

Published paper in Conference Proceedings

Bringing Apocalypse Now: Eucharistic Liturgy and Peacemaking

This presentation explores the potential contribution that particular sets of religious practices can make to the building of conditions for peaceful coexistence. It integrates and extends the literature on the political implications of the Christian Eucharistic Liturgy (more specifically the Roman Rite in its traditional and current forms), to provide a comprehensive focus on the specific issue of peacemaking.

It argues that the rituals of the Eucharist reimagine of the political status quo. Such reimagining is coupled with practices that together enact a “social imaginary” that resists the violence of the state. The Eucharist provides a counter-ontology of original peace contra the ontology of violence inherent in state disciplines. Also, liturgical narrative practice can resist discursive reappropriation of disembodied “values” to justify bellicose actions by the state. Finally, the liturgy generates an alternative web of relations that counters the violence of capitalism.

Finding God: Incorporating the Sacred in Research on Religious Peacemaking

The author proposes a method of analysis that incorporates theology into the analysis of religious actors and peacemaking activities. Such a proposal forms part of a doctoral thesis concerning the relationship between theology and politics in Roman Catholic peacemaking. This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of subjective motivations behind religiously animated political activity, and simultaneously make new contributions in uncovering alternative methodologies that thoroughly engage with increasingly salient areas in international politics. This raises two questions for consideration, the first being the reasons behind the incorporation of theology into social scientific analysis in the first place, the second concerning frameworks in which theological considerations can be conceptually housed. The answer to the first question lies in the exposure of inadequacies in orthodox social scientific analysis into the activity of religious political players, which center around the maximisation of power and utility, and artificially close off consideration of salient (in the eyes of the religious subject) though conceptually ill-fitting (in the eyes of the scientist) variables in political activity, the key variable here being the transcendent sphere; in answering this question consideration is also given to the inadequacies of popular constructivist methods grounded in the formation and maintenance of identity, which lack conceptual depth and replicate, rather than overcome, the limitations of methodological orthodoxy. Answering the second question warrants a brief revisitation of metaxic understandings of social action proposed by Eric Voegelin, where all social action is seen as participation in an “in-between” stage between the temporal and transcendent spheres.

The Body of Christ, The Person of Man and the Logic of Cyberspace

Does the Body of Christ belong in cyberspace? This question branches into diverse and pertinent topic areas, from the practical (Should we have online Confession/Eucharistic adoration?) to the ecclesiological (Can there be a Cybernetic Body of Christ?).

This presentation attempts to provide a preliminary answer to this question by using Christian personhood as a unifiying theme.

On the one hand, reference to Christian personhood helps identify important inroads for Christian mission opened up by cyberculture, such as the destablisation of Modern myths of radical individuality. On the other hand, the bodiliness of Christian personhood also helps identify either areas where cyberculture's "postmodernity" eventually replicates many Modern themes or even advocates a bodilessness which, if left alone, threatens to digitally dissolve the Body of Christ.

The presentation concludes with a brief sketch with how the Body of Christ in the Eucharist provides a site that anchors the Church's extension into cyberspace, while redeeming cyberspace's logic of virtuality. In so identifying areas of promise and concern with cyberspace, this paper also hopes to contribute towards providing a preliminary roadmap for the Church's negotiation with its 21st century wired-urban environment.

Prayer as Political Theory

Where are the boundaries between our spiritual and political lives? Does it stop at the “public sphere”? Does the line remain hidden within the soul? Is there even a line at all?

This paper asserts that prayer is not incidental to politics but in itself constitutes a politics. Prayer bears in its practices a political theory that on the one hand provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many presumptions of secular political theory.

This paper will demonstrate the political valency of prayer by reference to six topic areas, a sample of which include the theory/practice divide, the implication of biological and social bodies, time and citizenship.