Cyber-Theo: Reflections on the Theological Roots of Contemporary Digital Technologies

Digital technologies that permeate our everyday lives are primarily introduced to us as "new." The advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality open fresh avenues of human experience. However, the promises of digital technologies, the desires we aim to satisfy through them, the powerful imagery they cultivate, and the narratives surrounding them are far from new. In fact, they are deeply rooted in foundations shaped by religions over millennia, experienced concretely by human communities, and articulated into concepts and dogmas through theological reflection. This article aims to outline a research program to illuminate this intricate and often controversial background, and to understand how concepts and ideas from theological traditions transform throughout contemporary technological evolution, ultimately shaping the discourses and metaphors we use to describe our experiences with new technologies today. Firstly, a methodological introduction will address conceptual pairs such as continuity/discontinuity, disenchantment/re-enchantment, new/archaic. Secondly, key issues such as haptic icons, representation and presence, bilocation, resurrection, divine vision, free will, creation out of nothing, will be examined in the mirror of exemplary case studies selected from the contemporary technoscape.