John Lardas Modern is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. He will be in conversation with CCSR Postdoctoral Fellow Suzanne van Geuns. His most recent book asks how the brain has become the locus of who we are. It takes us from Jonathan Edwards's imprint on cognitive science to electrical shocks being administered in the making of both a heterosexual mind and the "normal" religious person.

Modern is the author of The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001), Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), and most recently, Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (2021), winner of the International Society for Science and Religion's 2022 ISSR Best Book Award. Modern is also the Principal Investigator for Machines in Between (2021-23), a multi-media project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Center for Sustained Engagement with Lancaster. Machines in Between is an audio-visual experiment that reimagines our present state of technological saturation. It is part mixtape, surreal performance, and philosophical experiment, asking "What do we love when we love our machines?"

This event is part of the Religion and the Public Conversation series. The theme for the 2022-2023 year is "Religion and Technology: From Codex to Coding."