Review and Reflect
Blade Runner’s Posthuman Imago Dei: Retrieving Authentic Humanity in a World of Simulation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jean-Pierre Fortin
In recent years, scholars of religion have engaged the Blade Runner movies (and the novel from Philip K. Dick on which they are based) to analyze the emergence and characteristics of “posthuman” or “transhuman” society. Set in the aftermath of human generated global nuclear war and ecological destruction, the Blade Runner movies present grim living conditions and prospects on earth causing a profound redefinition of humankind’s self-understanding and relationship to the transcendent. Human biases, prejudices, and oppressive ways of living (anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism, whiteness, racism, slavery, patriarchy, [hetero]sexism, consumerism and ecological devastation) are reproduced and magnified in the persons and actions of replicants (bio-engineered humanlike servants) and their interactions with humans. The perfect simulation of human existence by replicants becomes the medium and content of a momentous revelation: human existence has been turned into an enslaving simulation. Natural humans and replicants are confronted with the challenge of (re)defining the human. This paper argues that the Blade Runner movies do not advocate for moving on to a form of existence other or beyond the human (a prevailing interpretation among post- and transhumanist scholars), but rather in favour of struggling for authentic human existence in dehumanizing living conditions (a fight uniting humans, replicants and artificial intelligence systems). The overcoming of the current social and ecological crises demands embracing human existence as ongoing healing and transformation grounded in shared history (memory of the past) and hope (vision for the future). The post/transhuman can wait; humankind has yet to become human and humane.
Our Sounds Reach the Other World: Sacred Musical Instruments and Their Spiritual Roles View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cara Schreffler
The deliberate production of special sounds, whether culturally defined as music or not, plays a vital role in virtually all global religious and spiritual beliefs. Sometimes a particular instrument is used specifically for sacred purposes and to manifest religiosity. In many cases, those musical instruments can serve as a physical representation of belief; a form of sacred text and a link between the natural, the human, and the supernatural. These musical instruments are often recognized as having their own independent agency and, frequently, are credited with supernatural powers. These powers fall within the constraints of belief: they have power because of their association with religious or spiritual practice. This paper discusses examples of musical instruments that have specifically religious, spiritual, or miraculous powers. Examples are found in multiple cultures throughout the world, and their existence helps to illuminate the role of musical instruments in religion and spirituality, as well as how those instruments, and the broader context of music, integrate into both sociocultural and religious paradigms.
Verbal Relic and Verbal Reliquary - al-Fayyumi's Takhmis al-Burdah: Islamic Devotional Poetry in the Mamluk Age View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Suzanne Stetkevych
The centerpiece of medieval Arabic Islamic devotional poetry is the praise poem to the Prophet Muhammad, the Burdah (Mantle Ode) of the Mamluk period Egyptian poet, al-Busiri (d. 1296). The Burdah's extraordinary popularity is tied to its role in the miraculous cure that its author experienced after reciting the poem to the Prophet in a dream. The poem was credited with extraordinary barakah, or blessing, and was widely believed to cure maladies, both spiritual and physical and, especially, to procure for both its original author and subsequent “performers” the intercession of the Prophet on the Judgment Day. Such beliefs generated a prodigious production of imitations, amplifications, translations, simple and ornate manuscript copies, commentaries, etc., in an attempt to acquire the blessing of the Burdah. Chief among these was the amplification termed takhmis (“fiver”), in which the new poet adds three half-lines to each original line. Of the hundreds of extant Burdah takhmisat, that of Shams al-Din al-Fayyumi (14th c.) has consistently been one of the most popular. This paper interprets the composition of takhmis in terms of the poetics of performance, both aurally--in terms of how the takhmis incorporates and amplifies through auditory techniques (rhyme, meter, repetition)--and visually--in terms of how the manuscript presentations manipulate scriptural aesthetics and techniques to achieve their performance goals. The study concludes that in both the aural and visual performances, the result of the amplification of the base text is to produce what I have termed a “verbal reliquary.”
