Bloomsbury Love, Technology and Theology

This volume explores love in the context of todays technologies. Although hard to grasp fully given its affectivity, it is difficult to separate love from romanticist ideals of authenticity, intimacy, and depth of relationship. These ideals have resonance with theological models of love that highlight the way God benevolently created the world and continues to love it. Technologies, which are designed in response to our desires, do not necessarily enjoy this romanticist resonance and yet they are now remodelling the world. Are technologies then antithetical to love? For the first time themes of theology, technology and love are brought together in this volume by leading theologians exploring different areas where notions of love and technology are problematised. In a world where algorithms and artificial intelligences interact with us and shape our lives in ever more intricate and even intimate ways, we might feel attachments to and through machines that suggest sentiments of love while also changing how we think about love. Does love always have to be reciprocal? How can we enact love and care for others with technologies? Whose desires do technologies serve consumers, corporations, creatures? In response to these issues, this volume offers a systematic review of the challenges of living in a technologically saturated world, by means of critical application of, as well as reflection on, theological discussions about love.