Submitted by Mrs Jane Wallace on Tue, 29/04/2025 - 08:48
You are warmly invited to a panel discussion with Dr Timothy Jenkins (Reader Emeritus in Social Anthropology of Religion, Cambridge) on his new series of books on the relation between religion and machine and human thinking in the long history of UFOs.
Panellists include Prof Joseph Webster (Professor of the Anthropology of Religion, Cambridge), Prof Simeon Zahl (Professor of Christian Theology, Cambridge), Prof Beth Singler (Assistant Professor in Digital Religion, University of Zürich), and Dr Giles Waller (Senior Teaching / Research Associate in Theology and Literature, Cambridge).
Wednesday 14th May, 3.00 - 5.00 p.m., Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity
The seminar will be hybrid, and available on Zoom. Please contact Giles Waller (gew25@cam.ac.uk) for the link. The seminar will be followed by a drinks reception in the Faculty.
Description:
Flying saucers first appeared in the late 1940s, in the aftermath of the Second World War. They immediately became the subject of fascination, and their mystery has persisted. They can be understood through three lenses, that of science and technology, popular culture and, at the human level, personal experience. In general, approaches to flying saucers concentrate either on military and space hardware, or on science fiction and film, or on religious and occult ways of thinking. This mini-series brings these different perspectives into conversation for the first time, tracing the appearances of UFOs and their development. It explores how machines and humans learn to think together, producing new objects in a world that is dominated by technology and yet continually escaping our control.