Technology, Temporality, and Care: Weaving the Secular and the Religious

Reflection upon the role of technology in shaping our understanding—and experience—of time today calls forth tensions and ambiguities within contemporary life that should prompt us to revise widespread and long held assumptions about the meaning of secularity, the nature of religion, and relations between these two within a world now structured and driven pervasively by technology.  Countering the flight from mortal fragility that one can see as much in seemingly secular technologies as in traditional forms of religion, and rejecting the certainties of both dystopian and utopian currents in our contemporary relations with technology, this paper draws on a range of thinkers—from Nietzsche and Heidegger through Michel Serres to Donna Haraway and Mary-Jane Rubenstein—to argue that a vital experience of temporality within today's technological world requires an affective orientation of care or of love toward the transience and insecurity of our social and natural worlds alike.