religion

In an age of seemingly endless possibilities for modifying our bodies, this presentation explores the value of limited embodiment, arguing that constraints and limitations may be prerequisites for cultivating joy, freedom, and connection rather than obstacles to overcome. Drawing on Brian Kershisnik’s painting “Dancing on a Very Small Island,” the speaker examines how recent cognitive science has undergone an “embodied makeover,” recognizing intelligence as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. The talk raises theological questions from the Latter-day Saint tradition—particularly Joseph Smith’s vision of resurrection as precise bodily restoration—suggesting that progress might paradoxically occur through condescension, sacrifice, and abnegation rather than purely through increasing autonomy and agency.

Jonathan Jardine, drawing on Clay Christensen’s strategic frameworks, examines how decentralization of church practice—not doctrine—can help build Zion. He traces LDS innovations like seminaries, the Primary, and the welfare program back to emergent strategies that bubbled up from local leaders solving real problems, later adopted and standardized by general authorities. Jardine contrasts this with recent decades’ shift toward deliberate, centrally planned initiatives, arguing that the church needs both approaches and should empower members to exercise their “spiritual muscles” through local innovation.

This presentation proposes that Joseph Smith believed his firstborn son Alvin held special rights to the golden plates because Joseph saw himself as fulfilling the biblical levirate law—raising up seed to his deceased brother Alvin, who had been present when Moroni first appeared and died shortly thereafter. The speaker uses abductive reasoning to argue that Joseph’s marriage to Emma was itself an adaptation of this ancient practice, making their union spiritually polygamous from the start. This hypothesis offers explanatory power for several puzzles in early Mormon history, including Joseph’s outsized expectations for his firstborn son, his need to marry Emma before obtaining the plates, and the later development of proxy work for the dead and plural marriage.

Chris Bradford explores the tension between technological instrumentalism and genuine human relationship, drawing on Martin Buber’s distinction between “I-It” and “I-Thou” encounters. He argues that a purely technological approach to the world risks reducing people and nature to mere objects, and that Mormon transhumanism must complement its technological aspirations with the cultivation of empathy, charity, and recognition of the divine in others. Bradford contends that the grace saturating the world—visible when our “eyes are opened”—calls disciples of Christ to see and serve God in every neighbor, making the transhumanist project a fundamentally religious endeavor.

This presentation examines how communal narratives function in religious communities, arguing that God consistently bursts self-assured narratives rather than confirming them—as seen in Moses’s life being repeatedly disrupted from Egyptian prince to fugitive to prophet. The speaker critiques both the LDS Church’s institutional narrative and ex-Mormon counter-narratives for missing the “sought goods” that justify any narrative, suggesting that disputes over historical and doctrinal claims miss the more essential question of whether these structures actually deliver salvation. Mormon transhumanism offers a framework where religious aspirations like immortality and eternal life need not remain abstract mysteries but can become serious goals with practical benchmarks, transforming narratives from self-justifying stories into accountable claims measured against real outcomes.