Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology and the Postnatural

Peter Manley Scott offers a theological and ethical reading of our postnatural situation. Due to the vigour of its re-engineering of the world by its technologies, western society has entered into a postnatural condition in which standard divisions between the natural and the artificial are no longer convincing. This postnatural development is liberating u both theologically and politically.

Scott develops an anthropology that does not repeat Christianity's history of anthropocentrism but instead criticizes it by exploring the mutual entanglement of animals, humans and other creatures. Deeply disrespectful of traditional centres of power, his ethical critiques of 'pioneering' technologies expose their anti-social and anti-ecological tendencies and identify possible paths of oppositional political action.

This is ethical theology at its best: deeply informed by theological tradition, immersed in contemporary political-technological problematics in radically oppositional ways, and yet fiercely hopeful of a good outcome for animals u human and non-human u and other life in history.

Peter Manley Scott is Senior Lecturer in Christian Social Thought and Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. He is author of Theology, Ideology and Liberation (1994), A Political Theology of Nature (2003), and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (2004).