DR2577: GOD, SEX AND DEATH IN OUR TECHNOLOGICAL AGE (2018-2019)

We live in a world that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined, with the progress of science and technology opening to us the workings of the universe and new ways to live within it as human beings. Rapid technological advancements in computing, robotics, materials, genetics, biological engineering other technical fields hold immense promise for the augmentation and transformation of our humanity, but they pose deeply disorienting questions about just what it means—and what it will mean in the future—to be a human being at all. Can any of the ways of thinking about human being and significance that were held in the past be sustained today, or in the future? Are the issues less straightforward than those who have grown up in the modern West or the Global North might assume? Can they be explored simply through scientific analysis, or do we require other, more imaginative ways of reflecting on them? The pace of change and the diversity of human experience ensure there is no one story to be told here: but our preoccupations with life at its extremes—its origins and ends, its most intimate and intense, and in relation to questions of ultimate reality and meaning—invite open- ended questioning of what we are making of ourselves, or indeed, what is being made of us, in our technological age.

This course invites students to engage in wide-ranging explorations of who we are now and where we are going by a series of interdisciplinary explorations of the human condition in our technological present and future. The intertwining of three themes of fundamental existential importance—God, sex and death—offer a path of inquiry into these questions and issues.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

More Information about Week Numbers

1st Attempt: 

• Summary (precis) 1: students will prepare a summary (precis) of an assigned reading, isolating its argument and identifying critical issues. (20%)
• Summary (Precis) 2:students will prepare a summary (precis) of an assigned reading, isolating its argument and identifying critical issues. (30%)
• Reflection on a Cultural Text: Students will prepare a reflection on how a cultural text of their choosing (a novel, movie or other work) renders some of the issues discussed in the course (50%)

There are no assessments for this course.

Formative feedback will be provided through tutorial/class interaction and through written feedback on work submitted for summative assessment.

• • The course will enhance the cultural literacy of students and their capacity for analytical and critical reflection on contemporary cultural phenomena and questions of value and meaning which attend them.
  • Students will acquire knowledge of a range of specific debates concerning the impact of technology upon contemporary humanity by exposure to an extended interdisciplinary conversation modelling various academic perspectives and methods.
  • Students will acquire a practical awareness of how to think across disciplinary boundaries and to reflect on intrinsically complex issues
  • Students will acquire a knowledge of different religious perspectives on ethical and philosophical issues they may have only considered previously from within their own tradition