The session explores constructive resonances between divine and human making through lenses of aesthetics, ecotheology, evolutionary theory, and theologies of technology. Themes of seeing, making, and playing open up perspectives on creativity, co-creation, and becoming, in engagement with ancient, medieval and contemporary theologians as much as with a diversity of disciplines.
My paper explores the untapped potential of the Song of Songs as an ecotheological text. I unlock this potential by synthesizing insights from a pair of pioneering ecotheological readings of the Song by Ellen Bernstein and Ellen Davis with related themes from one of the most influential allegorical interpreters of the Song in the Christian tradition, John of the Cross. Bernstein and Davis explore the Song’s ecological vision of relational wholeness and the non-possessive reciprocity that makes this wholeness possible. John of the Cross takes up the motifs of relationality and reciprocity but uses them to explore foundational theological and spiritual themes. My thesis is that, according to a constructive synthesis of these readings, the Song offers both a Christological ideal of restored relationality between humanity, the environment, and God, as well as a spiritual path of radical non-possessiveness and Trinitarian reciprocity which makes the realization of this ideal possible.
Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century mystical theologian, and Martin Heidegger, the twentieth-century philosopher of technology and aesthetics, offer complementary accounts of human creativity, art, and design that can serve as antidotes or alternatives to the aesthetic, social and ecological deterioration that unchecked forces of modern automation and mechanization can cause. Through their treatments of the interrelated themes of creation and creativity, they offer resources for articulating an artistic humanism that is not radically autarchic, but rather one that appropriately appraises the way that freely creative human subjects are also subjected to an openness that exceeds them. They explore the revelatory function of works of art that can produce normative totalities for their communities. They provide perspectives from which we can reconsider our modern aesthetic and technological condition, in order to allow both the constancy of wisdom and the disruptive novelty of genius to shape our artistic, scientific, and spiritual pursuits.
In the last line of latest work, famed biologist Andreas Wagner writes, “The thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas was onto something when he wrote that God created the world in play.” Wagner’s contention concerned the emerging evidence that evolution itself might be regarded as genuinely creative. In this paper, I incorporate the work of Wagner and the philosopher of science Denis Walsh with the trinitarian theology of Nicholas of Cusa and the doctrine of Christogenesis in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to arrive a Christian theology of ongoing creation (*creatio continua*). To begin, I argue Nicholas’s suggestion that the Logos is the “art” of God reflects a belief that this intra-Trinitarian poiesis grounds *ad intra* all creative activity *ad extra*. Then, I integrate this with Teilhard’s concept of Christogenesis, whereby the creative activity of nature becomes the means through which God’s eschatological embodiment is effected.
This paper argues that reflection on theories of sexual selection can be theologically generative, and that it presents needed counter-emphases to discussions about theological anthropology fueled by reflection on natural selection. It introduces sexual selection and provides an overview of different approaches to sexual selection found within evolutionary biology today, before transitioning to a reflection on one theologically relevant insight from sexual selection—namely, the importance of play. It argues that the mating and play behaviors of animals reveal the non-competitive relationship between necessity and gratuity, and thus provide theologians with an example of grace building upon, and not destroying, nature. Play is sometimes depicted in philosophical and theological accounts as the achievement of culture, but sexual selection can help to illuminate how culture is dependent upon nature, and play is a natural phenomenon that provides resources for cultural elaboration.
In this paper, I seek to develop a “post-anthropocentric” doctrine of creation by incorporating insights from current natural sciences and new technologies. My idea is that not only human beings but also non-human creatures and technological artifacts can be legitimately called “created co-creators” (Philip Hefner) or “co-created co-creators,” for non-human creatures, including artifacts, have been taking part in the continuous creation of the world. Meanwhile, the extended application of the idea of created co-creator should not lead to a naïve “flat ontology” in which all different forms of creatures claim the same status. Anticipating this misunderstanding, I will then suggest elaborating a qualitatively differentiated ontology by drawing insights from Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway, Karan Barad, Bruno Latour, and the Bible. Thereby, in the final analysis, I hope to lay a foundation of a renewed doctrine of creation for the age of science and technology.