Mary-Jane Rubenstein Keynote Address - 2023 ISSRNC Conference
Channel: ISSRNC Religion, Nature, and Culture
Date: 2023-02-25

Keynote Address
Saturday, February 4, 2023

“Heaven on Mars: Messianic Ecocide and the New Corporate Space Race”

Following the messianic lead of charismatic billionaires, public and private interests are racing to colonize outer space by building permanent outposts on the Moon, mining water and metals from planets and asteroids, and eventually colonizing Mars—all under the seemingly noble auspices of “fulfilling our destiny,” building a “clean, green future,” and even “saving humanity.” Such salvation, we are told, can only be accomplished by leaving the Earth, converting the cosmos itself into capital, and conquering the "final frontier.” What lessons can terrestrial extraction and colonialism teach us about this escalating effort to conquer the cosmos? How is utopian religious discourse bolstering this extravagant economic, political, technological, and scientific expansion? And how might alternative religious discourses offer different ways of inhabiting and making worlds?

- Lisa Sideris, Presiding

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Professor of Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University,
and is affiliated with the Philosophy Department and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a B.A. from Williams College, an M.Phil. from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in from Columbia University. While her early work investigated the disavowal of wonder in phenomenology and deconstruction, her more recent writing has moved into the metaphysical underpinnings of cosmology, astronomy, and space travel, general relativity and quantum mechanics, and nonlinear biology and ecology. Rubenstein is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (University of Chicago, 2022); Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia University Press, 2018); Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014), and Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Columbia University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor with Catherine Keller of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (Fordham University Press, 2017) and co-author with Thomas A. Carlson and Mark C. Taylor of Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination (University of Chicago, 2021). 

After Earth? Religion and Technology on a Changing Planet
International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture Conference
February 2-5, 2023 @ Arizona State University

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