Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary’s project, “Race, Technology, and Healing: Science and Religion in Dialogue,” brought critical focus to the questions about human identity, trauma, and livelihood, exploring scientific, socio-cultural, psychological, and theological ways to understand a mutual and flourishing notion of the human.
Project leaders, the Drs. Rolf Nolasco and Anne Joh, incorporated science into their co-taught course, Person in Community, in part through the inclusion of Dr. Jay Forsythe – biochemist at College of Charleston, South Carolina. Dr. Forsythe visited class to discuss human origins and his experiences navigating evangelical Christian and evolutionary scientific communities, prompting spirited student conversation around faith, theology, and science. In a final project for the course, students responded to the question, “what does it mean to be a person-in-community during this time of the pandemic?” Their projects integrated scientific, theological, spiritual, and psychological dimensions of human personhood and engaged creatively and critically with structural and intersectional -isms that impact human ways of being in the world.
A virtual campus event, “Science is not Enough to Save Us,” brought Dr. Philip Kurian – theoretical physicist of the Howard University Quantum Biology Lab, -into dialogue with seminary faculty on topics in the history and philosophy of science, and provided space for a student roundtable on the project’s science engagement theme. Watch the event recordings online at the following links: Recentering our Knowledge Systems in a Relational Cosmos I, Recentering our Knowledge Systems in a Relational Cosmos II, Race, Trauma, and Technology Roundtable).
The project also supported a group of Ph.D. students and faculty in monthly meetings to discuss, reflect on, and analyze Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. This space enabled the group to learn about the role of automated technology in exacerbating racial division and racial trauma.
Garrett-Evangelical is a Methodist-affiliated seminary located in Evanston, Illinois.
