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On Sunday, February 18, from 3:00–5:00 pm, Drake University’s The Comparison Project, in conjunction with the “Iowa Interfaith Exchange,” hosts a “Roads to Religion” in the Olmsted Center (Parents Hall) on Drake’s campus. The event, which is free and open to the public, features dozens of local religious communities, collectively representing 10+ religious traditions. These communities will be arranged throughout the hall as if on a map of the metro area. Visitors will receive a map to guide them in their exploration of them.

The event will also include a four musical and recitational interludes, one each by the Java Jews, the Hindu Cultural and Educational Center, Masjid an Noor, and St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church. Food and drink will be provided by Drake’s catering service.

The Comparison Project engages in the practice of comparative philosophy of religion, increases understanding of local-lived religion, and cultivates interfaith literacy and leadership. It is supported by Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Drake’s Center for the Humanities, Drake’s Stringellow and Hay Lectureships, Drake’s Slay Fund for Social Justice, Drake’s Principal Cener for Global Citizenship, Humanities Iowa, and Cultivating Compassion: The Dr. Richard Deming Foundation.

The ”Iowa Interfaith Exchange” includes Drake’s The Comparison Project and three other local nonprofits: CultureALL, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, and Interfaith Alliance of Iowa.

On Thursday, April 11 at 7:00pm in Sussman Theater (Olmsted Center, Drake University) Seth Villages, Postdoctoral Fellow for Boston University’s Computing and Data Sciences, will offer our “Comparative Philosophical Conclusions”

Seth Villegas is a postdoctoral fellow for Boston University’s Spark! Program and the Computational Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Initiative. In this role, Seth teaches data science ethics in Spark! courses and acts as a risk consultant on Spark! projects. He designed an assessment process that helps undergraduates to understand the risks associated with their projects.

Seth earned his PhD in Theological Studies at Boston University. His research interests include the ethics of experimental life-extension technologies and of posthumous chatbots, AI companions designed to mimic lost family members and friends. Seth hosts a podcast, called DigEthix, that he hopes can demystify the ethical challenges of emerging technologies.

Below find the audio and PPT of Seth’s lecture.

On Thursday, March 21 at 7:00pm in Sussman Theater (Olmsted Center, Drake University) Jennifer Huberman, Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Missouri-Kansas City, will speak on “The Magic, Science, and Religion of Pet Cloning: An Homage to Malinowski.”

Jenny Huberman is a cultural anthropologist with wide-ranging research interests. Her first ethnography, Ambivalent Encounters: Childhood, Tourism and Social Change in Banaras, India (Rutgers University Press 2012), explored interactions between Western tourists and children working in the informal tourist economy in the city of Banaras, India.  Her second book, Transhumanism: From Ancestors to Avatars (Cambridge University Press 2020), examines the values and visions animating the Transhumanist Movement in the United States. It shows how transhumanist attempts to use science and technology to usher in an enhanced post-human species speak to long-standing concerns within the discipline of cultural anthropology. Jenny’s third book, The Spirit of Digital Capitalism (Polity Press Forthcoming 2022), explores the ideological transformations that have accompanied the rise of digital capitalism, and it asks, how are digital technologies making new forms of capital accumulation and domination possible? Jenny has also published numerous chapters and articles on death in the digital age, and in the future, she plans to explore how and why boredom has emerged as a central dis-ease of contemporary society. She likes to remind her students that the one of the great things about studying anthropology is that “the grist” for “the anthropological mill” is only as limited as their imaginations.  

This talk explores how Bronislaw Malinowski’s seminal essay, Magic, Science and Religion offers anthropologists new perspectives on the phenomenon of cloning. Taking ViaGen Pets as a case study, I show how cloning is conceived as a technology of immortalization that enables pet owners to secure continuing bonds with their deceased pets. I also argue that while making of clones may begin as a technoscientific endeavor, predicated upon cell cultivation technologies in a laboratory, it is only completed in and through “the magical thinking” that pet owners bring to the process. Pet cloning thus reminds us, that magic, science, and religion, as Malinowski famously proposed, can and do exist together because they each fulfill different needs.

Below, please find a recording of Prof. Huberman’s PPT and talk (audio).

On Thursday, February 22 at 7:00pm in Sussman Theater (Olmsted Center, Drake University) Phillip Reed-Butler, Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems at Iliff School of Theology, will speak on “Space Dust: Blackness, Its Expansion, and Transfinite Exploration.”

Philip Butler is an international scholar whose work primarily focuses on the intersections of neuroscience, technology, spirituality and Blackness. He uses the wisdom of these spaces to engage in critical and constructive analysis on Black posthumanism, artificial intelligence and pluriversal future realities. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities. Philip has theorized artificial cognitive architectures for synthetic evolving life forms (SELF), presented on emotionally regulating and spiritual experience inducing brain computer interfaces, and has constructed block chain protocols and conceptual logistics infrastructures for a world leader in the industrial hemp space.

Dr. Butler is Partner Director of Iliff’s AI Institute where he leads the 8020 project, where the institute works to change how computers see people, relate to culturally iterative languages and build the bones for a data ownership model that hopefully creates a relational framework for the way AI is made around the globe.

He is also the author of Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Spirituality and Technology and most recently the editor of Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations. He has published in journals such as The Black Scholar, Journal of Posthuman Studies, and the Journal of Future Studies. He is currently working on his second monograph Still Black Posthuman: A Theory of Uncertainty and Disorder.

Below, please find a recording of Dr. Butler’s lecture with powerpoint.

Below, please find a response to Dr. Butler’s lecture by Dr. Seth Villegas.

On Thursday, December 7, at 7:00 pm, in Sussman Theater (Olmsted Center), Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Director of Jewish Studies and Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism at Arizona State University and author of “Transhumanism as Secularist Faith,” will speak about “The Preciousness of Being Human: A Judaic Perspective on Embodiment, Death, and Immortality.”

Please find below a recording of the lecture and powerpoint!

Below, please find a response to Dr. Tirosh-Samuelson’s lecture by Dr. Seth Villegas.

On Saturday, December 2, from 9:00 am – 12:00 pm, The Comparison Project hosts a “meditation workshop and dialogue” in Meredith Hall on Drake’s campus. The event, which is free and open to the public, features meditation instructors representing different religious and spiritual traditions and techniques. Light breakfast fare will be available. 

Attendees will have the opportunity to learn and practice three different meditation styles at concurrent sessions during the first half of the event. Instructors of these sessions collectively represent the meditative traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Christianity, as well as Transcendental Meditation and other meditation practices unassociated with religious traditions. During the second half of the event, all nine of the instructors will be available for dialogue and Q&A

On WEDNESDAY, November 15, at 7:00 pm, in Sussman Theater (Olmsted Center), Muhammad Faruque, the Inayat & Ishrat Malik Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati, and author of Sculpting the Self: Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing (Michigan, 2021), will speak on “Immortality through AI? Transhumanism, Human Nature, and Islamic Philosophy.”

Muhammad U. Faruque is Assistant Professor and a Taft Center Fellow at the University of Cincinnati. He also holds a Visiting Scholar position at Harvard University. His highly acclaimed book Sculpting the Self (University of Michigan Press, 2021) addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of selfhood and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic literatures, including modern philosophy and neuroscience. Dr. Faruque is the author of three books and over forty-five academic articles, which have appeared (or are forthcoming) in numerous peer-reviewed journals. He gives public lectures on a wide range of topics such as climate change, AI, ethics, and selfhood. He is also a recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Templeton Foundation Global Philosophy of Religion grant and the Title IV Grant, U.S. Dept. of Education.

Immortality through AI? Transhumanism, Human Nature, and the Quest for Spiritual Machines

In a series of publications such as The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), and The Singularity Is Near (2005), the MIT-trained futurist and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil argues that at some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence which is going to create artificial super-intelligence (ASI). Moreover, he envisions a transhumanist future in which technology will enable human beings to transcend the human condition by way of the Singularity (i.e., merging human intelligence with machine intelligence). According to Kurzweil and other transhumanists, the Singularity will generate many solutions to human limitations including the problem of aging. Drawing on Islamic philosophers’ insights on human nature, I first analyze and then argue against Kurzweil and others’ reductionist views of consciousness. In contrast to most contemporary theories of consciousness that either treat it as an epiphenomenon or psychologize it in terms of qualia and subjective feel, I argue that consciousness forms the bedrock of reality, which is at once self-luminous and self-cognizant. The problem of AI and transhumanism ultimately hinges on how we define our values, selfhood, and personhood, which are the ultimate determinants of what it means to be human in a google-driven world.

See below for a recording of Dr. Faruque’s PPT presentation and audio:

Below, please find a response to Dr. Faruque’s lecture by Seth Villegas.

On Sunday, November 5, from 1:00-3:30 pm, the Des Moines Zen Center (6901 SW 14th St, Des Moines) will be hosting an open-house, including a reception and tours of the center.

Members of the “teacher rotation group” will lead small groups around the building to view the space and see the zendo, library, dokusan room, children’s room, and more. They will talk about how Americans came to practice Zen Buddhism, the history of Zen in America, the establishing of Ryumonji Monastery, and the history of the Des Moines Zen Center.  

The Des Moines Zen Center (DMZC) is an American Zen Center. It celebrated its 30-year anniversary in 2022. In 2021 it received recognition as an international temple of Soto Zen Buddhism by the Japanese Soto Zen School. The temple is called Shinsenji, which translates “Deep River Temple.”

On Saturday, October 21, from 5:30-7:30pm, the Hindu Cultural and Educational Center (1940 E Army Post Road, Des Moines) will be hosting a celebration of the annual festival of Navaratri (for the Hindu goddess Durga) that includes bhajan singing and dancing.

Join the local Bhutanese Hindu community for a bhajan celebration as part of a Navaratri celebration, a nine-day festival for the Hindu goddess Durga (the other events of which guests are also welcome to attend—see the image below). Guests are welcome to join in the dancing and singing. (Wear comfortable, though modest clothes; remove shoes at door; do not point outstretched legs toward the statues of the deities or the priests.) A traditional meal (“prashad”) will be served at the conclusion of the service.

On Thursday, October 19 at 7:00 pm in Sussman Theater (Olmsted Center), Eric Steinhart, Professor of Philosophy at William Patterson University and author of Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death (Palgrave, 2014), will speak on “Transhumanism vs. Christianity.”

Eric Steinhart grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. He received his BS in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University. Many of his algorithms have been patented. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from SUNY at Stony Brook. He teaches at William Paterson University and is a regular visitor at Dartmouth College. He uses new digital ideas to solve old philosophical problems. He is especially interested in new and emerging religions and spiritualities. He has written many books including Atheistic Platonism: A Manifesto, Believing in Dawkins: The New Spiritual Atheism, and Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death. He loves New England and the American West, and enjoys hiking, biking, chess, and photography.

Transhumanism vs. Christianity: A dialog between a Christian and a transhumanist reveals their opposed religious faiths. For the Christian, holiness is unsurpassability. The first principle is a maximally perfect person with a holy creative will. Paradoxically, evil erupts in this will, creation falls, and humanity falls with it into sin and death. Paradoxically, grace erupts in this fallen nature, so that humans are offered the opportunity to be lifted up into immortal bodily life in the presence of God. For the transhumanist, holiness is self-surpassivity. The first principle is the holy law that all things shall surpass themselves into greater things. Against Christianity, the transhumanist argues that original unsurpassability necessarily entails paradoxes, which show that a holy will is logically impossible. Only the law can be holy. The transhumanist argues that the holiness of the law is revealed by the progress of physical, biological, technological, and cosmological evolution. The self-unfolding and self-revealing law will drive humans to perpetually greater heights of superhuman divinity. For the transhumanist, the faith in a person with a holy will is a form of idolatry which the law itself will overcome. In the end, the holy law shall be all in all. 

See below for a voice/PPT recording of Dr. Steinhart’s lecture:

Below, please find a response to Dr. Steinhart’s lecture by Dr. Seth Villegas.