Late last week, I made my debut at Q Ideas, which has become a hub for lots of interesting and thoughtful content by and for the younger evangelical crowd.
I’m thankful for my new friend Jonathan Merritt for the opportunity, and for helping me craft the article. I’m still learning the ropes of trying to find unique and interesting article-sized angles into the book, and Jonathan’s advice was immensely helpful.
“We like to hack hardware and software, why not hack our bodies?”
That’s Tim Chang, an advocate of the “self-quantifier” movement, which is dedicated to tracking individual lives through technological add-ons. The dream of monitoring not just our movements, but our emotions, responses and behavior is quickly becoming a reality, even while it might be a nightmare for those raised onThe Thief in the Night. The Nike iPod, baseball’s sabermetrics and the obsession with quantitative investing by financial advisors are just a few examples in a ubiquitous trend of measuring every nook and cranny of life.
The problem for Christians is the fundamental assumption of the body-hacking trend. Beneath the numbers, graphs, and computer-generated metrics lies an assumption that the body is no more than a machine. Sure, the body is machine-like—as any high school biology teacher can attest. As I argue in my book, Earthen Vessels, a Biblical understanding of the body suggests it’s far more than that.
Read the whole thing, and then let me know here what you think.
Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.
