Cursor_ Zeitschrift für explorative Theologie

Editorial: Theologies of the Digital

Frederike van Oorschot — 2024-03-05

Digitization is a sometimes radical, sometimes very subtle process of transformation in all areas of our social, church and personal lives. The Corona pandemic in particular has once again brought this home and led to a sharp increase in digital communication in many areas of life. Sound theoretical modeling and theological reflection often lag behind real developments and the imaginaries spun around them. What can theological reflection contribute to the analysis, conceptualization, and evaluation of the emerging logics and narratives of the digital age? Conversely, how is theology challenged to interrogate the way it thinks about particular issues?

From Sovereignty to Omniscience

Hanna Reichel — 2024-03-05

In this article, I thus want to propose and motivate a much-needed complement to the landscape so far: digital theology as a political theology of the digital. Given that the term political theology is itself used in a variety of different ways, I will first draw out further what I mean by political theology as a specific mode of power analysis, and what benefit I see this mode of analysis to have yielded historically both for political theory and for theology. I will then propose an expansion into digital theology and sketch a few conceptual mappings such a lens may produce.

Jesus in the eShop

Torsten Meireis — 2024-03-05

By starting out with Hannah Arendts concept of power this paper follows Anthony Giddens and his attempt to take up on Weber\'s and Parsons\' ideas. With the gained understanding of power the paper examines the relationship between power and digitalization. Especially the internet as an place of equal opportunity and asymmetric power is taken into account. The author then observes a threefold challenge to (Christian) religion by the power structures resulting from digital capitalism.

Purifying Dirty Computers

Kate Ott — 2024-03-05

Virtual reality, especially neural network technology, provides a theologically imaginative experience of otherness that disrupts racialized, sexual, and cultural logics that undergird dominant Christian white cisheterosexual theologies. These technologies not only enable users to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” or the other they wish they were, users feel, embody, and are other in ways only hinted at by Jesus’ hybrid existence proposed in Matthew 25: 35-46. I use a digital sexual storytelling method to explore an indecent incarnational theology of the cyborg which uncovers the persistence of anti-blackness and anti-queerness in digital Christain theology as well as evidences strategies of indecency to combat them.

Exploring in-person

Debbie Creamer — 2024-03-05

During COVID-19 related isolation the words "synchronous" and "asynchronous", "in person" and "virtual" have become commonplace terms to describe our connections with each other in professional settings. In this reflection, we wish to explore and challenge the binary nature of both of these sets of terms, because we see these terms as being unhelpful
descriptors of relationality and embodied presence, leading to unnecessary and unhelpful limits to what we understand as "in-person."

Media/lity – Between Image Ban and Eucharist

Frederike van Oorschot — 2024-03-05

In this paper, we want to reflect digital media’s function to bridge absent entities theologically, inspired by two discourses: the thinking about the biblical image-ban after the iconic turn on the one hand and the debates about the Lord’s Supper on the other. Of course, this will not lead to a full theory or concept of media and mediality. But it leads to the following main suggestions: We will argue, that the common dualities of “reality” vs. “virtuality” and “embodied” vs. “disembodied” are not appropriate for reflecting digital mediality. Rather, the difference between different media and different media-practices is decisive. This difference is also more decisive than the difference between seemingly unmediated presence and mediated presence. The focus on media all too often hides that seemingly unmediated practices are media practices as well. We will show how different practices – particularly the practice of Eucharist – are already media practices that partake in the dialectic between presence and absence, between making present and withdrawal.

Empathy in an Age of Deepfakes

Clifford Anderson — 2024-03-05

What is the potential of empathy in helping us see through and beyond deepfakes? Deepfakes are synthetic media that depict individuals acting in falsified circumstances. With growing concern about the propagandistic uses of deepfakes, researchers are actively working on countermeasures to detect synthetic media. This paper examines whether empathy can play a role in differentiating deepfakes from genuine media. After exegeting the phenomenological interpretation of empathy in the works of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, the paper explores whether empathy could play a gnoseological role in an interdisciplinary campaign against deepfakes.

Webs of Harm?

Selina Palm — 2024-03-05

This paper explores the escalating reality of online child sexual abuse around the world and pressure on faith actors to respond effectively. It argues that faith actors must be equipped to play both social and spiritual roles if they are to disrupt harm and create safe spaces

Interrogating the Church’s Relationship to Technology Through Pandemic Internet Memes

Heidi Campbell — 2024-03-05

This paper explores how studying memes can reveal popular narratives that people hold about the relationship between technology and the church, informing perceptions of the move from offline to online worship services during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Of most interest in this article are the stories that memes tell about religion and religious groups during the pandemic related to technology. I argue that this provides a unique insight into the Digital Theology that is emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the dominant theological assumption about technology widely circulate online and promoted via memes.

Network Sanctorum

Frederike van Oorschot — 2024-03-05

We must consider: how does the image of the network relate to other ecclesiological descriptions of the church? I propose we sharpen the image of the network in order to clarify its ecclesiological potentials and limits. This is of particular interest because the “network” is widely discussed not only in the field of digital church life but also in practical theology with a view to analog and digital church life. In the context of this conference and referring to the broad oeuvre of Heidi Campbell on this issue I will primarily focus on the debate about digital ecclesiology in the broader field of digital theology.