Innovation and Religion with Dr. Marco Ventura - S4E11 (Part 1 of 2)

Dr. Marco Ventura is Professor of Law and Religion and Religious Diplomacy at the University of Siena in Italy. Trained in bioethics and biolaw at the University of Strasbourg, he has advised the European Parliament, the OSCE, and various governments on the intersection of religion and rights. He directed the Center for Religious Studies at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento and chairs the G20 Interfaith Working Group on Religion, Innovation, and Technology and Infrastructures.

Marco is the author of numerous books, including From Your Gods to Our Gods and Nelle mani di Dio, la super religione del mondo che verrà. Over the past decade, he has helped shape the emerging field exploring the encounter between religion and innovation.

In this episode, we explore Marco's work on bioethics and technoscience, their influential position paper mapping out this emerging field of religion and innovation, and what innovation really means in a religious context.

In this first part of our conversation, we discuss:

1. The balance between tradition and contemporary art
2. The story of St. Francis and “repair my church” as a metaphor for renewal
3. Catholic Church’s response to reproductive technologies
4. Why “innovation” was chosen instead of simply “technology.”
5. Distinction between technological innovation and social innovation
6. Two categories of innovation
7. Why religious actors want a voice in innovation-driven global agendas
8. The use of innovation in a religious context

To learn more about Marco’s work, you can find him at: 

• https://credo.unisi.it/about/secretariat-and-experts/person/marco

Links Mentioned:

• Religion, Innovation, Position paper, FBK 2019 - https://isr.fbk.eu/en/about-us/position-paper/ 
• Fondazione Bruno Kessler – https://www.fbk.eu/ 
• G20 Interfaith Forum – https://www.g20interfaith.org/ 
• Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – https://www.osce.org/

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Transcript

(preview)

Marco: How do we conceptualize the encounter of religion and innovation? We adopted a triangular shape to express this encounter, starting with how religious communities and traditions understand and experience innovation within—through their resources, through their capital, through their dynamics—and then moving to the second corner, the second dimension, which is how then religion contributes to innovation in society, in the market. And third, a third corner, a third dimension: How does innovation per se can become a faith, can become a quasi-religion?

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Innovation has become one of the most powerful words in our culture. It shapes law, markets, technology, and even religion. What is the relationship between innovation and religion? How can we best conceptualize and study this relationship, and why does this question even matter?

Addressing these questions is my guest today, Professor Marco Ventura, one of Europe's leading scholars at the intersection of law, religion, and innovation. Marco teaches at the University of Siena, and has long worked on questions of freedom of religion or belief in European and international law. He's advised the European Parliament, the OSCE, and several governments on religion and rights; directed the Center for Religious Studies at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento; and chairs the G20 Interfaith Working Group on Religion, Innovation, Technology, and Infrastructures. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including From Your Gods to Our Gods and Nelle mani di Dio: La superreligione del mondo che verrà.

In this episode, we explore Marco's work on bioethics and techno science, and the way he and his colleagues reframed their research center around the encounter between religion and innovation. We look at their influential position paper mapping out this emerging field. And along the way we ask: What does innovation actually mean in a religious context? How does it relate to law, policy, and the Sustainable Development Goals? And what happens when innovation itself becomes a kind of religion?

Let’s get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Hi, Marco. It's really great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Marco: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Brandon: Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. So I usually like to ask my podcast guests, when we start, to share a story about an encounter with beauty from their childhoods. And so I wonder what kind of story came to your mind when I posed that question.

Marco: Well, this is probably not early childhood, but slightly later, when I was an early teenager. I grew up in Perugia, which is a city in Italy, very close to Assisi, the place of St. Francis. Growing up in a Catholic Church, we used to go to Assisi and visit the place. At the time—say, mid- to late '70s—there were a lot of newly-established, pretty spontaneous Christian communities on the mountain of Assisi, which is called Monte Subasio. I remember one visit which really struck me and which was really defining for my life. It was a visit to this place—a very simple, a very spontaneous community, not definitely Catholic even, more generally Christian, sort of into denomination. There was a little chapel, sort of a Romanesque chapel style of the place.

Within this chapel, which was just enlightened by a few candles, there was a painting by a contemporary painter. So in that sort of traditional environment, Romanesque church, very much of natural surroundings, all of a sudden, I saw this image of Christ in a contemporary art style. Very colorful, very bright, very modern, even postmodern, really avant-garde contemporary art. This was, to some extent, to me, I felt it. I really felt there was something which was complete and perfect in that experience, which I would now consider—well, of course, also for the sake of our conversation—a sort of perfect balance, a moment of grace about the balance between something old and traditional, made of man genius, in a way, the Romanesque architecture going back in centuries, but also naturalistically very powerful in the context of Monte Subasio. And at the same time, you also had the modern and contemporary genius and the idea that a very modern painting could fit in that place, which really spoke to both my need to be in touch with my time in the future, while feeling that my spiritual quest could be rooted in a long-lasting effort of mankind.

Brandon: Wow. Yeah.

Marco: This is the episode that comes to my mind.

Brandon: Yeah, that sounds fantastic. It seems to integrate not just tradition and innovation, but also the sense of a future-minded, like a longer-term, sustainable way in which the tradition can adapt and survive and extend itself in some kind of creative way.

Marco: You remember that one of the early experiences that changed the life of St. Francis was the encounter with a church in ruin. In my imagination of the time, it would have been exactly more or less the same case. You know, this little chapel somewhere, that very place, or a few meters away. When St. Francis had this experience, it is said to have heard a voice, a voice telling him, “This is the church. This is my church. We have to repair my church.” So there's a sense of something broken to be repaired, something ruined to be restored. The fact that this could be done in modern times—not just by recreating the things exactly as they might have been in the past, in a sort of pristine state, but as they can be, imagining a new way for the future—this is also, I believe, very powerful. So "repair my church," in that case, which of course can be a metaphor of a much broader meaning, it doesn't necessarily point at just looking at the past. It's really about looking at the future, in a sense, which is what the spirituality of St. Francis was all about, by the way. So that's where I grew up. That's where I grew up in all senses—not just geographically, but also spiritually.

Brandon: Wow. That's profound, yeah. Thank you.

Talk a little bit about your career trajectory. I mean, what drew you to the study of law and then to that relationship between law and religion and then eventually to this topic of innovation? Could you just trace for us a little bit of that journey?

Marco: Yes, I've always been interested in the technological challenge to religions in general, Christianity in particular—and, being Italian, the Catholic Church even more particularly. Of course, my generation in Italy was strongly impacted by the debate on abortion and legalization or decriminalization of abortion in Italy. Catholics were somehow divided about the issue. So this was a time of debate and even renewal in the Catholic Church. In the end, the law was adopted and even voted for confirmed in a referendum. I'm not going into any legal technicalities here. But there was really a strong popular support in a country which was, at the time, at least formally much more Catholic than today—which means that Catholics were in favor. This was a crucial distinction at the time, not necessarily of abortion as such—this was not the point—but on the right to choose protected by the state. Well, in that context, of course, abortion was not that much about technology. It was about medicine. At the time, some early already emergence of bioethical discussions. So, of course, that was a time after the Second Vatican Council where bioethical and sexual moral issues were very much under discussion.

But when I then, in '89, started my PhD in Strasbourg, in France, I thought that the debate on assisted reproduction, which was exploding at the time, could be the ideal place for me and the ideal subject for me to develop that investigation, that research. So it was going back very much to developments in especially Western Europe about abortion rights. But technology was now playing a very relevant role in assisted reproduction. I mean, in 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church adopted a document which basically condemned all forms of assisted reproduction. So there was a reference. I was doing my legal research, my legal studies. So that was very interesting from a legal perspective. Plus, I was in France. France was starting the discussion, which then led, in 1994, to the adoption of the bioethical laws. In that context, I started taking this strong interest for the encounter of technologies—in that case, the human body and religion. So this was really the starting, the initial point. Then I developed it through biotechnologies. So this traveled after my PhD into biotechnology. Little by little, digital technologies became more and more relevant. One example of that transition, that journey, in terms of interest and investigation from technologies applied to the human body discussion of the '80s, into a more general interest about technology. And I think that's where my interest in religion and innovation is really rooted. That was the train to experience. I don't know if you want me to already take that or you want to ask me something.

Brandon: Yeah, feel free to say a bit more.

Marco: I had the opportunity to write a report to the European Parliament on the perspectives about the patentability of human materials. That was in the early 2000s. So it was already transitioning, as I mentioned, from assisted reproduction to a much broader work, on the patentability of the human.

Then we can jump almost 15 years later. I was appointed as the director of a research center in a northern Italian research institute, which is called the Fondazione Bruno Kessler. My task was to actually rethink the mission of a small center for religious studies in the context of a pioneering institution for research on ICT, technologies of information and communication, in Europe. Because FBK was one of the early places for even artificial intelligence in the late '80s in Europe.

The work that had been done in this Center for Religious Studies was already very strongly focused on a conversation with engineers and computer scientists. So it was a pretty easy task from my side to make it more relevant, to give some shape, because that's what I did with the group of researchers. We just gave a different shape to what had been done already in advance. And when it came to find a way, an efficient way, to describe what it was all about, the idea came not to just focus on technology—not technology and religion, not internet and religion—but rather to broaden the scope of the investigation, I think, of innovation as the key word and concept. So the center was reframed as a center for the research and action on the encounter of religion and innovation.

Brandon: You said a bit about what the term innovation means in that sense and how did you all define it. Were there any controversies around the use of that term and the choice of that term?

Marco: Well, of course, technology is important. To some extent, the term "innovation" was adopted because it clearly pointed to technology. But at the same time, we didn’t want to just take technology, which seem to us to be very flat and somehow superficial in terms of where we wanted our research and action to go. Innovation is technology, but innovation is also beyond technology. And so our understanding of innovation as we then worked it out was, on the one end, innovation in science and technology for the business—the more sort of traditional understanding of innovation—but also social innovation. This was very, very important for our group.

Now, these two concepts are still conventional concepts of innovation, both of them. There's a, of course, community of reference, of course, with strong differences. The way social innovation is understood at the University of Stanford is not the same as it is understood at the Commission of the European Union, of course. But it is a sort of technical expression. It's a conventional expression. Social innovation refers to a debate, to a community, to literature. And even more so, of course, innovation in science and technology for the business. So this really was the core of our work. But because of the, I'll say, social and cultural salience of this use of the word innovation, we know then that that word travels. That word is then looked at as a reference in linguistic and conceptual from communities, research communities, and people, and possibly organization, which do not focus on innovation as it's specifically defined. So we can then think of theological innovation, or legal innovation, or spiritual innovation. This was also a part of our mission to some extent.

So we divided—this was our approach, to divide—the understanding and definition of innovation in two categories. One category is conventional innovation, which will go from innovation of science and technology to social innovation. On the other side, innovation as a term which is used without a specific accepted meaning in a given context, which is still used significantly so.

Brandon: Your group convened a number of workshops and experts from really a variety of domains. And then you came up with a position paper that really, I think, is quite influential in setting out an agenda, mapping a conceptual framework, as well as an agenda for research on this theme. Would you be able to summarize perhaps some of the key highlights of that position paper and the conclusions that your group arrived at?

Marco: Yeah. Well, first of all, as myself a legal expert on religion, my work is strongly influenced by policies on religion—public policies or governmental policies of religion. Just think of religious freedom issues, for instance, to policies of religious authorities and religious organizations, faith-based organization. I wanted this sense of strategizing and positioning to be center in our work. In other words, our work was not understood as a merely speculative work. Our interest was to engage actors, to be able to talk to actors.

Brandon: To inform policy primarily?

Marco: Yeah, in terms of listening from actors and engaging with actors. This is why the Sustainable Development Goal agenda was important. Because, of course, the framework at the UN level and, of course, in other contexts had emerged by that time as a framework of reference based on innovation. At the same time, we were observing an increasing and growing mobilization from the religious actor's side to have a voice at that table in that context. So we really wanted to start our position paper by the acknowledgement that we were observing both trends—a trend which puts innovation at the center of growth and at the center of the SDG's challenge and, on the other side, religions wanting to play a role in that context.

So this is how we formulated our central question. If religions want to have a voice at the SDGs, in the effort towards the SDGs, that effort needs to be based on innovation. How will we connect innovation and religion? That's the first image, the first graphic figure, that we wanted in the position paper. Then the second step was: How do we conceptualize the encounter of religion innovation? We adopted a triangular shape to express this encounter, starting with how religious communities and traditions understand and experience innovation within—through their resources, through their capital, through their dynamics. And then moving to the second corner, the second dimension, which is how then religions contribute to innovation in society, in the market. And third, a third corner, a third dimension: How does innovation per se can become a faith, can become a quasi-religion or a religion?

Finally, third step, we offered 11 recommendations. We tried to sort of concentrate the outcome in a set of recommendations which are methodological recommendation, possibly guiding reflection, but also the encounter of actors. One very important point for us, which is probably very telling in terms of the work, was the 11th recommendation. So a sort of closing close, which is: when you engage with innovation and when you engage with religion, let's keep it as open-ended as possible. You don't need to be the progressive pushing religion to necessarily change in one direction of the other. So let's make room for conservatives in this discussion. Let's make room for the language of tradition. At the same time, you don't need to be an innovation guy. You don't need to be an enthusiastic, if not, a fanatic of innovation, to be involved in this discussion. We want the discussion to be critical of innovation. So this was our closing recommendation: Let's make room for a critique of innovation. Let's make room for a critique of religion from all possible sides.

Brandon: Great. Could you perhaps share any of the tensions within the group that emerged, any points of disagreement, maybe especially around the use of the term innovation? Because certainly, there are, in some religious communities, I think, a lot of suspicion around the concept of innovation. But it would also in the European context, just because of its baggage, that it's tied to the world of business and capitalism, particularly Americanism around it. I'm curious to know what kinds of tensions emerged in critiques of that concept of innovation?

Marco: Well, Brandon, I would use an example here, okay?

Brandon: Sure.

Marco: Let's think of any high-tech lab in Germany, or France, or Italy. Let's figure out, let's imagine the people at their desk or at their screens and the people who do innovation in their different capacities and roles. Let's assume that that lab is an industrial lab, without any faith orientation at all at any level, okay? Can we imagine that someone in that workforce, in that lab, has a spiritual view, has a faith orientation? Well, I suppose that there will be someone. Not all of them. All of them would have their orientation, their worldview, however you categorize it. How do we categorize that person?

Well, this would be the more easy example to give. Let's imagine that one of them is a Muslim, or that she is a Hindu, or even beyond that. You don't need that person to be clearly belonging to any official faith. How do we make sense of their presence in the lab? Can we categorize the contribution of that man or that woman to that lab, to that enterprise of innovation, somehow connected to religion and innovation? This is the challenge. This is the challenge that we face in my group, which is a challenge of categorization. Because of the novelty and challenge of this categorization, it's a challenge in terms of lack of state of the art, in terms of lack of literature. Because if you don't frame your research in those terms, there's no literature. And has this not been done, there's no literature.

Serious researchers will somehow stop at that, simply because it's not being done. And when you work out a deduction — because mind is a deduction. Of course, we have various hobbies. I'm not saying that nothing has been done. But very little has been done. You really need to look for that little, starting with some assumptions from some hypothesis. This is the biggest challenge. But I'm extremely grateful to my group of researchers—extremely, extremely serious. Because they were really challenging me at this level in terms of even the reputation of our lab, even the reputation of our research group. How can we move in that direction with no literature, with no state-of-the-art? How can you do that?

Well, in the end, we were somehow able to move forward. We used some references in digital religions sometimes, some projects, some partnership with the tech guys within our institution. Then we also ran ourselves some interviews. So when we wrote a policy paper for the EU, we referred very much to interviews that we had run with respondents, with faith-based respondents. Some of their statements were actually in the paper. I remember a statement from a Jehovah's Witness person, a scientist, a scientist who qualified himself as a Jehovah's Witness, who said, "Of course, what I do with artificial intelligence as an engineer belongs to my faith." He gave some theological explanation on how this was playing out. And so we were able somehow to go beyond that difficulty. But we needed to fully acknowledge that objection, to fully acknowledge that challenge. Because that's a serious objection and that's a serious challenge.

Brandon: I suppose when you're building a field that doesn't exist, this is going to always be the state of affairs, where there really isn't an established body of work. Yeah, I mean, I think perhaps Benoît Godin was one of the few scholars who had been working on this theme, but not very many others. I think it still remains a challenge, even in a number of disciplines, to see this as a fruitful lens through which one can study religion. Aside from the question of literature, there do seems to be a number of other obstacles. I think, yeah, there's still an uphill battle to try to build such a field.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everyone, that's a great place to stop the first half of our conversation.

In the second half, we turn more directly to: the beauty and burdens of this work, the difficulties of building a new field of study, the way markets and technologies function as rival meaning systems, the tensions between resistance and retrieval in religious responses to innovation, and the risk of political polarization. We also hear why Marco thinks that artists should be crucial partners in reimagining our economic and religious futures.

See you next time.