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Paper short abstract:

This paper will study comparatively three influential texts by religious thinkers, hailing from Conservative Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam, that engage with the ideas of emancipation, alienation and humanity in regard to technology in the second half of the 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

Over the centuries religious thinkers have nurtured ambivalent feelings and ideas towards seemingly ever-changing technologies and their impact on individuals, societies and nature. Rashi (1040-1105) famously commented that Tubal-Cain, the first blacksmith mentioned in Bereshit/Genesis, had “improved the work of Cain by providing weapons for murderers”, a reference to the destructive use of technology and an expression of scepticism towards technological progress. Yet, over recent years, when faced with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures taken to rein in its spread , religious communities and leaders have learned nolens volens to engage with new technologies to further their aims. This has not happened without much debate within various religious traditions. The roots of those discussions often were in earlier controversies regarding the challenges represented by technology for human self-definition.

In this paper I aim to look comparatively at three influential texts by religious thinkers, hailing from different traditions, namely Conservative Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam, that engage critically with the ideas of emancipation, alienation and humanity in regard to technology, broadly defined, roughly in the second half of the twentieth century. The essays I will look at are a) The estranged Roman Catholic author Jean Bernanos’ La France contre les robots (France Against Robots, 1947), b) Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951) and c) the Islamist thinker and poet İsmet Özel’s Üç Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancılaşma (Three Problems: Technology, Civilisation, Alienation, 1978). Ultimately, my aim is to reflect on how technological change as a theme has impacted the thought of thinkers within certain traditions within Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the twentieth century before the advent of the digital age.