ABSTRACT
Although it is easier to consider technology by reference to technical artefacts, in this chapter I wish to assess technology more broadly. In other words, I shall be arguing that it is preferable to understand technology as devices within a technologised culture rather than a set of unrelated artefacts or tools. Understood as devices, as Albert Borgmann recommends, technology raises quite fundamental questions for culture and theology.2 Following a suggestion from Peter Hodgson, we may understand technology as raising questions in three spheres of human life: self-relatedness, wholeness and world-relatedness.3 This is to press Hodgson’s suggestion in a new direction in support of presenting the postnatural condition in which ‘north Atlantic’ humanity finds itself. The phrase ‘postnatural condition’ is my attempt to present together these three distinctive aspects of present life that affect how we should think theologically about technology.
