Research Talk by Travis DeCook

The Secular Bible: Disenchantment at the Intersection of Theology and Media Theory

Media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Eugene Thacker have addressed the relationship between ideas about media and enchantment, the world’s permeability to the supernatural. This talk explores the intersections between this concern and a persistent tendency in theology to associate the Bible’s transition into early modernity with disenchantment. It offers a critique of this tendency and its assumptions about media, and in doing so raises complications for contemporary thinking about secularity.