Join the Notre Dame South Asia Group in Washington, DC, for two panel discussions exploring religion, public policy, and development at a critical time when the Rohingya refugee crisis destabilizes Myanmar and Bangladesh, and the ongoing elections in India highlight the rise of Hindu nationalism in the world’s largest democracy.…
Read More about The Religion Factor: Why Policy in South Asia Can’t Ignore Faith
Summary
Lisa Sideris
Discourse on the relationship between science and religion frequently invokes the language of wonder, and Anthropocene discourse is no exception. My presentation will examine the moral imaginary of wonder in current debates about the application of a specific Anthropocene technology: de-extinction strategies and related genetic tools applied to extinct or soon-to-be-extinct species. I argue that wonder, as it is often invoked in discussions of de-extinction, has little to do with express concerns about the justice, rights, or well-being of organisms, and thus bears little obvious connection to conservation and restoration rationales. Instead, these uses of wonder are largely expressions of awe at human power, creativity, and ingenuity. As such, wonder-inspired de-extinction strategies actually disrupt or obviate the need to respond with grief and mourning to human-caused extinctions. Moreover, as I will suggest, these uses of wonder lay claim to a particular and problematic image of the human, a theological anthropology that posits humans as the creative, world-making being par excellence. What other visions of the human might be available to us in a world that is increasingly the product of human activity?…
Read More about Lisa Sideris, De-Extinction Technologies as Theological Anthropology: The Uses and Misuses of Wonder