Deus v. Machina – Graduate Conference at the Centre for Ethics

Events on Campus

Graduate Associates Annual Conference

http://graduateassociates.wix.com/conf2016

Keynote Address

“Thinking About Cognitive Scientists Thinking About Religion”

John Lardas Modern, Franklin and Marshall College

April 29th, 4- 6 PM

Room JH 100A, Jackman Humanities Building

Modern teaches classes in American religious history, literature, technology, and aesthetics. Modern is the author of The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Secularism in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Modern’s work has appeared in journals such as American Literary History,Social Text, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Church History, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion as well as in a range of on-line venues.  Modern’s work has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. He is currently at work on two projects: “The Religion Machine, or; A Particular History of Cognitive Science” and “Akron Devo Divine: A Delirious History of Rubber At the End of the World.” Modern is an editor-at-large for The Immanent Frame. He was also co-curator of Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality and is currently co-editor of Class 200: New Studies in Religion (both with Kathryn Lofton)

This lecture offers a genealogical perspective on the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD), a central concept in the contemporary cognitive science of religion. HADD is a machine of sorts, inside your head right now. Indeed, HADD is the machine that makes your prayers possible. It is a prayer machine by any other name. It scans the horizon for movement and pattern and alerts us to forces of otherness, variously construed. It is the machine that runs the programs of prayer, of sensing God as a fully realized agent. It is on all of the time, a form of troubleshooting the lines of transmission between you and what is on the other side of the screen. And it is the thing, this machine—for if we are talking about science we must be talking about the talking about materiality—that is said to offer some purchase on the phenomena of religion.

Register for the Keynote

Fri, Apr 29, 2016
08:00 AM - 06:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place