This is the last in a series of posts discussing the work of a
handful of scholars exploring the historical relationship
between Christianity and technology. First, second, third,
fourth, and fifth post. In his 2005 book, Nature, Technology,
and the Sacred, Bronislaw Szerszynski traces the evolving
understandings of nature and the sacred in order to provide an
alternative account of secularization and disenchantment, two
processes in which technology has traditionally been assigned a
critical role. To begin with, he argues that the best way to
understand the evolution of ideas about nature from pre-modern
to modern societies is, in fact, not as a process of
secularization or disenchantment, but rather as a process of
depersonalization. The advent of Christianity did not, as Lynn
White (among others) suggested, simply empty nature of its
metaphysical content leaving it vulnerable to exploitation.
Rather, Christianity removed personal agencies that inhabited
nature and replaced them with a semiotic layer of mea