featuring: Transhumanism & the Human Spirit
Would Jesus Listen to Black Sabbath? also inside: by Michael Gallagher ’28 Sonic Stewardship by Joe Hagerty ’27 by Luca Gandrud ’27
THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA
Sonic Stewardship
The Christian Basis of My Quest to Conserve Creation through Acoustics
By Joe Hagerty D’27
Transhumanism & the Human Spirit A Christian Response to Human Enhancement
By Luca Gandrud D’27
Crossroads
Poetry
By Joanie Wood D’27
The Weight of Sin
Dante and Christian Tradition Attack Modern Conceptions of Sin By Charles White D’27
Would Jesus Listen to Black Sabbath?
Demystifying Misconceptions about Metal Music
By Michael Gallagher D’28
EDITORIAL BOARD
Xavier Laack D’27, Editor-in-Chief
Charlie White D’27, Managing Editor
Lila Gillon D’28, Publisher
Gabriel Martin D’28, Art Director
Catherine Horner D’26, Senior Editor
Matthew Kim D’26, Senior Editor
Aleksa Sotirov D’26, Senior Editor
Adriana Bilenky D’26, Senior Editor
Joanie Wood D’27, Editor
Tyler Long D’27, Editor
Jacob Hasbun-Rivera D’28, Editor
Lauren Yoon D’28, Editor
Ainsleigh Noell D’28, Editor
Ana Arzoumanidis D’28, Editor
Everett Yau D’28, Editor
Daniel Davidsen D’28, Editor
Colin Jung D’28, Editor
Ava Tsolis D’28, Layout Editor
Clementine Sutter D’29, Layout Editor
ADVISORY BOARD
Gregg Fairbrothers D’76
Eric Hansen, Professor of Engineering, Thayer
James Murphy, Professor of Government
Lindsay Whaley, Professor of Classics & Linguistics
SPECIAL THANKS
Council on Student Organizations
The Eleazar Wheelock Society
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE?
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
We deeply value your opinions and encourage thoughtful words of support, dissent, or other views. We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.
GETTING INVOLVED
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We at the Dartmouth Apologia invite people from all intellectual, religious, and spiritual backgrounds to join us in our discussions as we search for truth and authenticity. If you would like to get involved, please feel free to email us or visit our website.
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Letter from the Editor
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the Dartmouth Apologia.
In terms of technological and political developments, 2025 was an extraordinarily eventful year. If these events have taught me anything, it is that civil and thoughtful discourse between all people, especially if they disagree, is more important now than ever before. Without it, we may lose sight of our shared humanity and our longstanding institutions can fail. The Apologia has always strived to address this problem: it exists not to proselytize or preach, but to promote a discussion of Christian perspectives on a broad spectrum of issues. To achieve this goal, we train editors and writers from a wide range of backgrounds and curate each edition of the journal for a broad audience. With that in mind, dear reader, I invite you to critically examine the articles in this journal—and everything else you read, watch, or hear. The arguments made within them are complex, nuanced and not indisputable. Consider each perspective carefully, giving it the weight you think it deserves. After you read, if you are so inclined, feel free to send us a letter as described on the previous page. We would be happy to hear your thoughts.
This year has also seen AI earn a major role in society and across most sectors of the economy. AI shows much promise, having the potential to dramatically improve productivity and automate menial tasks. At the same time, this wave of AI optimization threatens to make the degrees and skills of millions of workers across the globe obsolete. More importantly, it poses an existential threat to an entire generation’s critical thinking skills: students increasingly rely on generative AI to do their reading, writing, and thinking for them. Although AI is now used by nearly every student, professor, and administrator at Dartmouth, the ideas you will find in this journal belong entirely to student authors and have been honed over months of human-to-human discussions, writing, and revision. It is my belief that sharpening the mind remains a noble and worthwhile enterprise, even if doing so is no longer as valuable in the job market and in higher education as it once was. After all, Christians are called to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). A stronger mind means a stronger ability to love God—and that is exactly what we at the Apologia seek to do.
To appreciate this journal, dear reader, you need not be Christian or politically engaged or tech-savvy. All you need is a human mind that you seek to strengthen, and I am so thankful that you are choosing to do so with the Apologia.
Many Blessings,
Xavier Laack D’27 18th Editor-In-Chief of the Dartmouth Apologia
The Dartmouth
Apologia
exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.
by
Image
Kuviyam
SONIC STEWARDSHIP
The Christian Basis of My Quest to Conserve Creation through Acoustics
And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.”1
Since Homo sapiens’ creation and our rise to dominance, we have influenced the biosphere—the set of all of Earth’s ecosystems and the interactions between them—in extraordinary ways. From both natural history and Judeo-Christian theology in the book of Genesis, we have understood humans to be a dominant species with a choice to either answer the Lord’s call for stewardship or alternatively to cause great disturbance, loss, and peril. The ultimate peril, extinction, is a process that has ebbed and flowed over the course of our planet’s history. In total, there have been five mass extinctions in the ancient past and the argued “Sixth Extinction” during the current geologic epoch known alternatively as the Holocene or the Anthropocene.2 As the overseers of creation, we are called to conserve nature. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College pursuing a dual degree in evolutionary biology and musical performance, my call to stewardship is a sonic one. Our role in environmental preservation stems from God’s call to Adam in Genesis: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and
take care of it.”3 From biblical creation, man is set to be the overseer of the surrounding biosphere. In recent years, the Catholic Church has supported this interpretation. Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si’ that we cannot separate the beauty of nature from the existence of God, and thus we need a “new way of thinking about . . . our relationship with nature.”45 Francis accordingly advocated for environmental protection and policies to ensure this protection. Most recently, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) celebrated ten years since Laudato Si’s publication. “Over the last decade, Laudato Si’ has inspired the Catholic Church and the World to draw closer to Almighty God, the Creator of all life,” writes USCCB president Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, reiterating the conference’s commitment “to advocacy that cares for the most vulnerable and creation.”6 As such, the Catholic Church has internationally upheld the importance of stewardship in Church teaching. Pope Leo XIV has maintained Pope Francis’ stance on the need for stewardship.7
In Christianity more broadly, stewardship’s value has long been discussed. In 1998, University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental science professor Calvin DeWitt outlined in his book Caring for Creation: Responsible Stewardship of God’s Handiwork, “a biblical concept for stewardship in three ways: (a) earthkeeping, (b) fruitful-
Joe Hagerty D'27
Adam and Eve AfterTitian, by Peter Paul Rubens, from Wikimedia Commons
ness, and (c) the Sabbath.”8 “Earthkeeping” is the most straightforward, with DeWitt interpreting the Hebrew words “abar” and “shamar” from the original text as, “to serve and keep nature in dynamic integrity.” From earthkeeping DeWitt explains the second pillar of preserving creation’s abundance: “fruitfulness.” In Genesis, God instructs the birds and the fish to “be fruitful and increase in number,” highlighting the importance of creation’s abundance in its preservation.9 The final pillar ties the first two together. “Sabbath,” in DeWitt’s view, is the day of rest linked to the “rejuvenation and restoration of life” made possible through earthkeeping. The place of man within creation and the fullness of “restoration” through restoring our Earth places stewardship as a crucial pillar of the Christian faith. Even with the importance stressed by DeWitt and others, the relative value of stewardship has been debated. In 2004, the Protestant denomination Assemblies of God claimed that the impending end of times rendered all Earthly creation irrelevant. They wrote that “environmental stewardship takes a back seat to concerns directly related to human welfare.”10 In addition, the predominantly Christian nations of the West are seen by many as key perpetrators in pollution, biodiversity loss, and environmental change. In the Yale Forum on Ecology and Religion, St. Paul University professor Heather Eaton wrote, “Christian bodies have done little to restrain deforestation, species extinction, water contamination, and so on.”11 As such, there is pushback to the notion of stewardship as a central Christian value because of both its lesser importance compared to other concerns and a precedent of ignoring it.
Theologians have still supported stewardship as a core church tenet. Most noteworthy is the paleontologist and priest Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote that it is through “collaboration which he solicits from us that Christ, starting from all creatures, is consummated and attains his plenitude,” highlighting the fullness of God in the ever-evolving natural world and our obvious place in the ecological system.12 Teilhard de Chardin’s words echo DeWitt’s pillars, including the value of biodiversity, or fruitfulness, and living alongside creation in “collaboration,” which resembles the principle of earthkeeping.
In my own life as a Catholic attending Catholic school, I immediately grasped studying and preserving the natural world as a calling from God. My education and upbringing stressed science’s and curiosity’s existence parallel to faith. I recall our parish Monsignor stressing the Catholic Church’s impact on science, including a short lecture on Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître’s theory of expansion
My education and upbringing stressed science’s and curiosity’s existence parallel to faith.
from the “primeval atom,” which is the basis for the Big Bang theory.13 Outside of school, exposure to encyclopedias and BBC documentaries spurred my love of evolutionary science in concert with a Catholic upbringing. In elementary and middle school, I started the St. Francis Club, focused on spreading awareness of endangered species in my school largely through hands-on student projects on specific taxa and themed raffles to fundraise for the World Wildlife Federation. In middle school and entering high school, I worked at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums-certified Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo, which is focused on conservation outreach initiatives. As a Dartmouth undergraduate I have participated in wildlife veterinary shadowing at the Trevor Zoo again, mostly with rehabilitated raptors. Most recently as an undergraduate I was a field technician at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. At Hubbard Brook, I studied singing behavior in ovenbirds (Seiurus aurocapilla) and I collected data for annual “spot mapping” by marking all present species within the experimental plot for ongoing historical records. These projects in animal and ecosystem science have allowed me to understand more about the very systems and organisms I seek to conserve. Outside of my biological studies there is a second side to my interests: I am an avid songwriter, a classically trained singer with a knack for jazz, and a bass guitarist. As a musician, perhaps my most significant means of taking in the world around me is by “hearing it.” I found my love of music and sound in the pews of a church, and it is through this love for listening that I believe we can discover a new form of stewardship: bioacoustics.
Listening to at the sounds of nature is a new answer to the papal call to rethink our “relationship with nature.” Bioacoustics is the study of the quality of organism-produced sounds and relationships between those vocalizations within an ecosystem community. The interplay of organismal vocalizations within a community has been called the “biophony” by studio guitarist-turned-ecologist Bernie Krause. The biophony is the larger entropic system in which various organisms vocalize across a soundscape. In The Great
Animal Orchestra, Krause explains that when a habitat is altered by human presence, such as when a forest is logged and then replanted, the recordings pre-impact and post-restoration sound completely different. “When habitat alteration occurs,” explains Krause, “vocal critters have to readjust.”14 This readjustment is most notable in the “acoustic adaptation hypothesis” (AAH), in which vocalizing organisms alter aspects of their vocal bouts in order to be better heard by members of their respective species in chaotic environments. The AAH is most notable with songbirds, who may sing at a slower pace or cadence to be better distinguished from the surrounding environment.15 The readjustment of native fauna can result in differences in biophony, thus showcasing the value of sonic analysis of an ecosystem as a metric of that community’s health. The biophony is based on an ecosystem’s biodiversity, and a direct measurement of “fruitfulness,” recalling DeWitt’s pillars of stewardship.
At Dartmouth, my sonic analysis has focused on New Hampshire’s songbirds. Under Biological Sciences professor and ecologist Matthew Ayres, I presented a poster on an ongoing project entitled, “What’s in a song?” at the 2025 International Bioacoustics Congress in Kerteminde, Denmark. As part of this project, I am studying the inter-vocalization intervals (IVI), or silent periods, between oscine, or “true songbirds,” and suboscine vocalization bouts. By comparing the time to next vocalization and the average number of subsequent bouts within a 100-second period, we have evaluated whether or not these species possess non-random rhythmicity and have a set number of vocalizations to produce verifiable signals. Non-random rhythmicity, a musical element of avian biology, is the link between studying sound and answering the call of stewardship. “Rhythmicity,” or a regular cadence determined by the average amount of time between vocalizations in a set period of time, has been observed in our recent studies, perhaps as the mechanism of songbirds within the broader AAH. Vocalizing with a “rhythm” could trigger central pattern recognition circuits in the brain of a listener, thus making a species’s specific “rhythm” important in the larger system of natural sound. If birds or other fauna vocalize rhythmically, this vocal structure could exemplify a musical aspect of the natural world around us. In that case, not only are bioacoustics, or the physiological or ecological basis of vocalization alone valuable for monitoring biodiversity; monitoring and preserving “fruitfulness” may be achieved through a far more artistic understanding: music.
Songbirds
Musical elements of the natural world highlight the potential value in understanding nature’s “order.” Music has a universal quality based in our humanity, our connection to God’s image, and in the larger biotic system. This belief is backed by recent scientific and anthropological theory. University of Reading Professor Steven Mithen describes music as a precursor to language in his work The Singing Neanderthals. Mithen argues that our ancestors used holistic sounds to convey an entire message instead of multiple words strung into sentences. These holistic sounds with tonality may have resembled a basic form of music, given the ability to convey a message and change the emotion of the listener as music has been shown to do.16 Music’s emotional impact has been explored extensively in Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia and in Stanford University neuroscientist Professor Daniel Levitin’s I’ve Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. Sacks goes into depth on music’s effects within the brain, including interactions between the auditory and motor cortex in our reception of music, as well as interactions with the frontal cortex in the creation of vivid images or memories.17 Both Sacks and Levitin emphasize music’s power as a healing mechanism and a form of therapy, even for individuals suffering from dementia.18 Music has also been found to be an effective tool for individuals with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD), allowing them to more accurately express their emotions verbally after experiencing music.19 Levitin expands upon musical therapy by connecting music to our human quality of language. He compares syntax in musical scores to our creation of sentences.20 St. Augustine, author of De Musica, describes the parallel between musical properties and speech in Confessions, that “there is a rhythm written into the words and this is the aspect of music that is fundamentally musical,” and uses the example of “Deus Creator omnium – the line consists of eight syllables, in which short and long syllables alternate.”21 These words are reflected in scientific findings, with genes Coenzyme Q8A and Neurexin I found to affect both rhythmicity in birdsong and the cadence of human speech.22 In addition, Sacks stresses that as humans, “we are attracted to repetition, even as adults, we want the stimulus and the reward again and again,” highlighting the need for repeated sound in an orderly fashion to trigger reception in a listener, mirroring our own thinking in my “What’s in a song” project.23 Rhythm is a binding component of both music and language. Augustine’s focus on rhythm stems from his emphasis on order. Rhythm suggests and showcases the evidence of a higher power who has strung a system of ordered creation into existence. The relationship
Music has a universal quality based in our humanity, our connection to God’s image, and in the larger biotic system.
between rhythm and order is key to using music and sound science as a form of environmental preservation.
Outside of individual species such as songbirds or humans, musical qualities like rhythm can be observed in interspecific systems at large. These larger systems are the biophonies described by Bernie Krause. Biophonies are made up of individual “voices” from different biota that form “collective sound signatures” within the community. Krause described this collective sound while on safari in the Masai Mara, Kenya in the 1980s, where he lay listening to the evening blend of vocalizations not simply as a chorus but as one “sonic event” between spotted hyenas, tree hyraxes, lions, and other taxa.24 Krause’s recordings map onto spectrograms almost like sheet music, each sonic space and frequency occupied by different taxa. With reference to rhythm or conflict in timing, Krause writes that “the acoustic territorial disputes are sometimes solved by timing: first one bird, insect or frog might sing, and then others when that one quits.”25 In my work regarding IVIs, a large part of analysis has been eliminating countersinging, or the “back and forth” between two different individual birds in order to only count birdsong intervals between songs by the same singing bird. The timing between different singing birds has also been used as a metric to evaluate whether both songs are from the same bird or each has its own singer. The timing and relationship between different intraspecific and interspecific vocalizations create some sense of “order” to the system, with the silent “offsets” being just as important as the “onset” bouts, thus suggesting some presence of rhythmic variation or rhythmic presence. Krause reflects on this point extensively, writing that “organisms evolve to acoustically structure their signals in special relationships to one another.”26 The ability for different organisms to sing within intervals of one another has been called “niche hypothesis,” which suggests that “nonhuman animal voices must have evolved so that each can be heard unmasked and without interference,” thus mirroring and expanding
the AAH in songbirds.27 The broader art of vocalizing with purpose within your soundscape, and helping create the exact sound of your natural habitat, highlights a system of order. This “order” can be studied, and changes to this order can be documented in a way to understand environmental impacts.
On both a community scale and on an individual species level, there is a suggested common musical presence or universal musicality. Emerson University professor emeritus Don Saliers reflects these ideas with his own theological writing in Music and Theology by emphasizing the systematic nature of biophonies, like pieces of sheet music:
But every object in nature comes to sound something about itself . . . more obviously, birds, insects, and animals of every description all tell us something of themselves by ‘sounding’ . . . vibrations and sound waves take their character from features of the world of material and animate objects. Many composers and music-makers have explored the sounds of nature as part of their ‘language’ of soundmost especially birdsong . . . and more recently the sound of whales . . . even when these features of music are absent, we are hearing ordered sound.28
Saliers describes universal music from a theological perspective, implying a higher order and connection to God. On a species level as Homo sapiens, he calls our relationship as pre-borns to our mothers’ voice and heartbeat as the “primordial, prelinguistic force,” suggesting that our entrance into life begins with a steady beat.29 Perhaps rhythm is our first exposure to the gift of life. Salier’s weaving of the linguistic elements of music, specifically the presence of rhythmicity, parallels Mithen’s and St. Augustine’s, and his “ordered sound” reflects the onset and offsets in the biophony described by Krause. Writing for the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Salier proclaims that all of life must be “sung.” A foundation in Saliers’ writing could be his thinking of universal musicality, which has pervaded our natural world and inspired musicians for generations.
The order of musical and sonic elements in wildlands suggests the value of sonic stewardship as a way to grow closer to God by revealing a planned, devised system worthy of our protection. By listening to an entire soundscape and the arrangement of vocalizations, one can document both the biodiversity of this ecosystem as well as how that ecosystem has changed over time and in response to human impact. By evaluating the soundscape of an ecosystem, the listener is brought closer to God’s systematic creation and thus can become a more informed steward. When listening to nature’s acoustic components, we are drawn to order also
Woman Playing a Harp, by Caroline Delestres, from Wikimedia Commons
through the components of these sounds which we have come to understand through music theory.
Biophonic order can be understood chiefly through rhythm and other musical qualities. Music, even without an application to evolutionary ecology, has been a staple of Christian philosophy. St. Augustine famously penned De Musica, where he describes music as “a way of discerning the mathematical proportions which pervade the universe . . . [music] engages with the proportions which characterize the whole of reality.”30 St. Thomas Aquinas, while calling music “less noble” than language, asserts that music played “a crucial part of the Christian contemplative life,” especially with the intention of being sung for God rather than performed.31 Perhaps Aquinas’ view of language as a more “noble” sound came from language being perceived as having a greater structure or clearer intention. In light of Mithen, Sachs, and Levitin we can now see music to have linguistic properties in both its containing syntax and having clear emotional reception in the brain. Regardless, both Aquinas and Augustine place the value of sound in its order and intention. The setup of a soundscape is essential to the sound’s relation to God’s presence, as an ordered sound showcases God’s work while an “intended sound” toward God’s praise carries value. Both thoughts parallel musical universality and the linguistic nature to music. Regarding system level musical “order” within a larger system, renowned author C.S. Lewis described his view of Heaven’s soundscape in his famous Screwtape Letters. The demons hated Heaven’s sounds, with a fictional demon, Screwtape, writing, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end . . . the melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end,” showcasing his disdain for non-random and orderly onset and offset of sound in a musical.32 Organized sound, like music, is C.S. Lewis’s suggestion of Heaven’s soundscape and the workings of God. Through all of these theologians, music and its elements are compared to God’s ordered creation. By understanding acoustic and sonic order, we can better understand stewardship of God’s creation, made possible through conservation bioacoustics. How can sonic stewardship be executed? Bioacoustics brings two main areas of value to conservation. First are the analyses described by Krause and ornithologist Donald Kroodsma on the universal elements of soundscapes. Monitoring the sounds of a natural environment provides crucial information on biodiversity, human impact, and trends within that environment. Both human-made recordings through parabolic microphones and passive acoustic recorders deployed within a forest have gathered
6 . Chieko Noguchi and Office of Public Affairs, “USCCB Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Laudato Si’,” United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, March 20, 2025, https://www.usccb.org/news/2025/ usccb-celebrates-10th-anniversary-laudato-si
7 . Claire Giangrave, “Pope Leo XIV Calls on Catholics to See the Urgency of Protecting the Environment,” NPR, July 10, 2025, Religion, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/10/nx-s1-5459932/pope-leoxiv-calls-on-catholics-to-see-the-urgency-of-protecting-the-environment
8 . Houtan S. Van Houtan and Stuart L. Pimm, “The Various Christian Ethics of Species Conservation,” in Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Prudence in a World in Flux (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 116–47.
9 . Genesis 1:22 (NIV)
10 . Houtan and Pimm, 116–47.
11 . Heather Eaton, “Overview Essay,” Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, https://fore.yale.edu/ World-Religions/Christianity/Overview-Essay (accessed June 21, 2025).
12 Jim Campbell, “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ,” Ignatian Spirituality, https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-voices/20th-century-ignatian-voices/pierre-teilhard-de-chardin-sj/ (accessed June 21, 2025).
13 Neil deGrasse Tyson et al., “Georges Lemaître: Father of the Big Bang,” American Museum of Natural History, 2000, https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/georges-lemaitre-big-bang (retrieved September 16, 2025).
14 . Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Boston: Little, Brown, 2012).
15 . Matteo Sebastianelli et al., “A Genomic Basis of Vocal Rhythm in Birds,” Nature Communications 15, no. 1 (April 2024): 3095, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47305-5.
16 . Steven J. Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
17 . Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2008).
18 . Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2024)
19 . Megha Sharda et al., “Music Improves Social Communication and Auditory–Motor Connectivity in Children with Autism,” Translational Psychiatry 8, no. 1 (October 2018): 231, https://doi. org/10.1038/s41398-018-0287-3.
20 . Levitin
21 . Augustine (Augustinus), De Musica, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2017); Jessica Wiskus, “On Music, Order, and Memory: Investigating Augustine’s Descriptive Method in the Confessions,” Open Theology 6, no. 1 (2020): 156–67, https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2020-0116 .
22 . Matteo Sebastianelli et al., “A Genomic Basis of Vocal Rhythm in Birds”
23 . Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2008).
24 Krause, 84
25 Krause, 99
26 . Krause, 97
27 . Krause, 99
28 . Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007).
29 . Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology
30 . Peter Leithart, “Music, Time, and Augustine,” Leithart’s Blog, August 30, 2007, https://www. patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2007/08/music-time-and-augustine/.
31 . Dominic McGann, “Nobilior Modus Est: The Importance of Music in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas,” European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas 41, no. 1 (October 2023): 62–79, https:// doi.org/10.2478/ejsta-2023-0004.
32 . C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
33 . David Byrne, How Music Works (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012).
34 . Ross Crates et al., “Conserving Avian Vocal Culture,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 380, no. 1925 (May 2025): 20240139, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0139
1 . Genesis 1:28 (ESV)
Joe Hagerty D'27 is from Rhinebeck, NY and is pursuing a double major in Music and Biology.
2 . Paul J, Crutzen and Eugene F Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’’’ Yale University Press, (2000).
3 . Genesis 2:15 (ESV)
4 . Francis, “Laudato Si’: On Care For Our Common Home” (Our Sunday Visitor, 2015).
5 . Joseph Tulloch, “Laudato Si’: Pope Francis on the Environment,” Vatican News, April 21, 2025, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-04/laudato-si-pope-francis-death-environment-advocacy.html
35 . Jed Gottlieb, “New Harvard Study Says Music Is Universal Language,” Harvard Gazette, November 21, 2019, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/new-harvard-study-establishes-music-is-universal
36 . Donald Kroodsma, The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong
37 . Ross Crates et al., “Conserving Avian Vocal Culture”
38 . Robert Clark, “The Return of the Dire Wolf,” TIME, April 2025, https://time.com/7274542/ colossal-dire-wolf/.
39 . Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of DeExtinction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691209562.
and David Pearce to promote Transhumanism as a “serious academic discipline,” the organization’s goal is not only to “transcend our biological limitations by means of technology,” but also to “re-evaluate the entire human predicament [emphasis added]” so that some people may become “post-humans.”2
Their Transhumanist Declaration and Transhumanist FAQ, though since expanded upon, remain the foundational documents of Transhumanist beliefs. They envision a future featuring an interconnected world, advanced intelligent life, and humanity colonizing space.3 Nick Bostrom, arguably “the leading Transhumanist philosopher today,” also founded Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. He has argued for proliferating “technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”4
On the political front, the founder of the Transhumanist Party, Zoltan Istvan, is running for governor in California in 2026 and wants to legally designate aging as a disease.5 This is mainly a move to build a public profile for Transhumanism, as he has appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast and The New York Times to spread the message.6 Istvan frames Transhumanism as a moral crusade against our biological mortality. For him, “the fact that we all die is a preventable tragedy, because of the possibilities of Transhumanist science,” making opposition to life extension research tantamount to “involuntary manslaughter.”7
Other radicals go a step beyond the traditional enhancement-focused direction, advocating for a post-human species to succeed humanity. AI researcher Daniel Faggella, hosting a symposium featuring prominent technologists and writers, says that we have a “responsibility to design a successor, one that will advance progress to invent new sources of meaning and value.”8 Without defining what
these sources may look like, Faggella believes we must build something so advanced that “you would consider it best if it, rather than humanity, took the mantle of the future and determined the future trajectory of intelligence.”9 Not only does he disagree that this progress should be “good for humans,” Faggella believes these novel “meaning and value” points will be so much more worthwhile than any human project that they would justify a permanent end to mankind.10 He and his peers believe that if they do not participate in this technological transition, someone else will—so they might as well join the fatal march. In this ideological surrender, they ironically use human reasoning and values (for progress) to argue that human reasoning and values should become obsolete.
Our modern culture currently lacks a bioethical vision for what direction all this enhancement should take.
Our “human predicament” involves death, suffering, and limitations—Transhumanists want to leave this behind. And if that requires designing something “trans-human” or “post-human,” so be it. Certain associated Transhumanist goals, like expanding human health and developing adaptations for space exploration, are not necessarily negative. But problems arise when humanity is viewed as an antiquated shell to be discarded.
The attitude with which we build technology has a large impact on the kind of future we build. Practically speaking, a Transhumanist future could lead to an explosion in social inequality – completely dwarfing today’s inequality. Imagine a world in which the elite are not only far richer than everyone else, but also have drastically different lifespans, collective interests, and human identities. This would render competitive upward mobility impossible and entrench social stratification permanently. Or perhaps it would go the other way around: Transhumanist modifications could make large swathes of people less competitive in the world, such as by implanting technology into people’s minds that keeps them entertained in virtual worlds or integrated into a “collective mind.”11 These possibilities are reminiscent of Blade Runner 2049, in which some human lives are seen as having more intrinsic value than others.
But these hypothetical scenarios and social ramifications are ancillary to the fundamental ethical failure of this faction, which is Transhumanism’s contempt for the human experience. Transhumanists find it limiting, but in reality, it is already replete with meaning, value, flourishing, and the potential for more.
This contempt for the human experience comes from Transhumanism’s “dependence on postmodern thought” that views objective standards as a social construct, which must then be deconstructed. For Transhumanism, this results in a “strong tendency to not merely negate what the human being is, but even to forget what it is out of a desire to construct something different from the human in the future.”12 Sure, Transhumanism could potentially build an advanced, optimized future full of technological progress— but it is likely that future would not be human at all.
BuIldIng a Human Future
I believe most people, in reality, would advocate for a human-defined future, not a world that looks like Blade Runner 2049 But regardless of whether people follow Transhumanism or not, we can count on technological progress for human augmentation to continue. If our culture will build a human-defined future, we still need to pick a human-defined vision to direct this technology.
One vision is that of Antinatalism, which believes that humans should gradually cease to exist at all. They believe having more children is unethical, since the ideology holds that by bringing someone into existence, you harm him or her, causing all instances of suffering in his or her life. And according to the philosopher David Benatar, “taking into account both the good and the bad aspects of a person’s life, most lives are overall very bad and not worth having.”13 In their view, the fewer humans there are who exist and suffer, the better. Human improvement, therefore, must be directed along the goal of eventually ending the show.
This ideology’s failures are not hard to perceive. Antinatalism is totalizing, defeatist, and it provides little practical vision. There are seemingly few technologies or
developments Antinatalists are in favor of creating, since the ideology is inherently anti-creative. However, some examples were discussed at the Antinatalist Advocacy organization’s 2025 conference, which alongside other cause areas like wild animal suffering and animal agriculture, will be “supporting initiatives that address the same issues that have historically yielded a reduction in the global fertility rate.”14
While quite different ideologically, both Transhumanism and Antinatalism are ironically united by their disdain for mankind’s experience and continued existence as a human species. In a similar trap as the Transhumanists, the loathing and obsession Antinatalists have over suffering blinds them from the constructive, beautiful, and ambitious nature of the human experience today.
As technology continues to advance more rapidly, simply reacting to or dismissing new bioethical realities will not be sufficient.
So instead of either of those two visions, perhaps the best policy is to exercise caution: this is the view proposed by Bioconservatism. Bioconservatives range from “religious conservatives” to secularly minded people concerned about “science as a threat to human dignity.”15 One example is Francis Fukuyama, a self-styled liberal humanist in the Bioconservative camp. In his book, Our Posthuman Future, Fukuyama defines “human rights, human nature, and human dignity” as core to American individualism. He is concerned that the “threat of human modification in pursuit of a biotechnological revolution will have a detrimental effect on liberal democracy.”16 In his view, Transhumanism could create a genetic overclass, displacing the principle of natural human equality, and thus undermining democracy. This ideology’s cautionary nature has some merit—we would certainly like to avoid any Blade Runner 2049 scenarios. However, my principal critique of Bioconservatism is that it stands in reaction to technological development, which it perceives as upending the existing social or polit-
ical paradigm. Bioconservatism itself is not a creative force which presents a constructive vision for technology and humanity.
As technology continues to advance more rapidly, simply reacting to or dismissing new bioethical realities will not be sufficient. Our culture needs a compass to guide our direction. The resentful direction of Transhumanism, the defeatist direction of Antinatalism, and the reactionary direction of Bioconservatism are not models our culture should follow into battle as confronting bioethical challenges becomes increasingly crucial.
FIndIng a compass
It is my firm conviction that historical Christian philosophy and theology—with its emphasis on human dignity, creativity, flourishing, and martyrdom17—offers not only a more hopeful vision of the future, but also a more effective path forward. I also believe these views are accessible to both Christians and non-Christians alike.
Transhumanism, Antinatalism, and Bioconservatism fear death, suffering, or progress. Christianity offers a positive alternative perspective on human augmentation. Rather than proclaiming a defined manifesto or listing a series of prohibitions against certain technologies, this article aims to begin organizing these principles towards a constructive vision of the world driven by Christian vitality.
In order to understand how technology integrates into the Christian worldview, we must first define the mission
of Christianity. According to Pope Benedict XVI, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”18 This person he describes is Jesus Christ, and this event is our continual encounter with him, the salvation of our souls, and passing on the faith. Christians achieve this through loving God with all their own hearts, souls, and minds, as well as following Christ’s commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”19
But how does this love take hold in the world? Christ, in his own mission statement, proclaimed in the synagogue at Nazareth, articulates that “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”20 Christ came not to transcend the human condition but to restore, heal, and enliven it, declaring “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”21
Christ’s mission is not about reconciling ourselves to life’s present reality, but improving it through action. Christ commanded his followers to “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, [and] drive out demons.”22 The Christian mission is fundamentally about restoration and augmentation, bringing wholeness to broken bodies, minds, and spirits. Christ’s healing of the blind man depicts his restorative intent for human flourishing, both physical and spiritual. Once restored, we can pursue new life in Christ, augmenting the image of God within us, and drawing closer to our divine purpose.
If Transhumanism wants to augment a person into something beyond human or non-human, then what is the purpose of Christianity-aligned human augmentation? Christianity offers two answers. Firstly, to more closely resemble our creation in the image of God; and secondly, to become more like our authentic selves.
In tHe Image oF god
The belief that “God created mankind in his own image” fundamentally distinguishes Christianity from the
Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, from Wikimedia Commons
Transhumanist worldview because it gives the human spirit and form an elevated dignity, which must be respected.23 In Christianity, this is understood as a gift for every person, not a curse to be escaped.
In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas summarizes how a human can resemble the image of God in three ways. First: natural aptitude, a person’s baseline ability to know God through common intellect. Second: conformity of grace, the habitual yet incomplete knowledge of God that a believer has. Third: likeness of glory, the complete knowledge of God achieved in heaven.
Being created in God’s image means we are called to creativity, beauty, relationship, and moral reasoning.
By increasingly loving and understanding God, and by his grace, one can progress from one resemblance to the next. “The first is found in all men, the second only in the just, the third only in the blessed.”24 Furthermore, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, due to being created in the image of God, every person is endowed with a spiritual soul, rationality, and free will—all of which can be directed towards outwardly resembling “the divine image.”25 This means that by employing these natural gifts, we can increasingly love and understand God, and thus more closely resemble his image.
This principle suggests that technology, properly ordered, can benefit our capacities for spiritual growth, rationality, and free will, leading us to a greater love, understanding, and resemblance of God. Practically, one example could be human augmentation technology that advances long-term health, enabling someone to have more agency and freedom in his or her life.
Before going into other human augmentation applications, I must discuss the crucial aspect of human dignity. The Vatican’s Dignitas Personae articulates how this dignity informs bioethical decisions. The document emphasizes that biotechnological genetic interventions should “seek to restore the normal genetic configuration of the patient or
to counter damage caused by genetic anomalies,” making clear that technological enhancement is legitimate when it serves human dignity through restoration of our God-given nature, not when it treats humans as merely a set of capabilities to be improved.26 As the document states, “what is human is not only received and respected by faith, but is also purified, elevated and perfected”—technology should elevate our nature as image-bearers of God.27 This means the Catholic understanding allows technology for therapeutic and disease-preventing genetic interventions, medical restoration, and enhancements that advance genuine human flourishing (rather than instrumentalizing people as objects to be maximized in one way or another).
Furthermore, this medical restoration stretches far back in Christianity’s history. The earliest Christian hospitals emerged in the 4th century with St. Basil’s Basiliad in Caesarea—a great complex that included medical facilities, workshops, and housing for the poor. Despite skepticism of medicine at the time, due to its association with Greek paganism, St. Basil insisted “when a physician heals with medicines, we experience a miracle of God no less wonderful than those of the Bible.”28 When framed as a miracle, medical innovation becomes a gift from God to be used for greater restoration and alignment with our creation in his image, both physical and spiritual.
Being created in God’s image means we are called to creativity, beauty, relationship, and moral reasoning. Technology that furthers these capacities while honoring human dignity—whether through medical restoration, therapeutic interventions, enhanced health, and more—builds up our divine image.
more Human, not less
Technological human augmentation can also help us fulfill the potential God has placed within us as individuals—and in doing so, we become more human, not less. In seeking God, people become more like their most authentic and highest selves. Biblical figures’ and historical saints’ journeys towards God looked very different from what we might see today; they walked their journeys according to their unique personalities and potentials. For example, St. Paul lived in austerity and became known for his disciplined, “introspective conscience,” whereas St. Joan of Arc found her God-given potential through military heroism.29 In drawing closer to God, we draw closer to who we were created to be.
Technology can potentially help us advance this goal. Human augmentation can then lead us to enhancing our
unique human potential through capabilities like longterm health, learning, creativity, physical performance, discovery, and more.
However, the human condition is messy, and we often attempt to simplify the meaning of our lives into achievable goals or metrics like “progress.” Transhumanism falls into this tendency by attempting to transcend humanity for the sake of maximizing some greater utility or meaning. Maximizing is for machines, but humans are meant to live. Breaking down what it means to be human is a complex question, but we can certainly recognize what being human is not: human beings are not reducible to math.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, an Orthodox Christian, wrote Crime and Punishment, which wrestles with the question of whether the worth of people’s lives could be reduced to “arithmetic.”30 The novel follows Raskolnikov, a self-proclaimed “superior man,” who seeks to prove his superiority by showing he can commit murder and morally justify it by himself. Logically, he thinks that murdering this woman would indirectly lead to maximizing more net good in the world. After the murder, Raskolnikov finds that the real outcome for his crime is overbearing, unending guilt, and he spends the rest of the novel trying to regain his sense of humanity. The book reveals that by thinking in terms of narrowly defined progress or utility, we begin to lose our humanity and become more like machines.
Maximizing is for machines, but humans are meant to live . . . human beings are not reducible to math.
We must question: is the purpose of all this technology, all this advancement, really to transform us into “unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts?”31 Charlie Chaplin condemns the “unnatural men” in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, where he plays an analogue of Adolf Hitler who has a resurgence of heart during the finale. Giving a speech to his legions of soldiers, the Dictator proclaims that we are not machines, not cattle, but men, men with the “love of humanity in our hearts!” The Dictator then declares the words and character of Christ:
In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: ‘the Kingdom of God32 is within man’—not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power—the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.33
These views directly challenge Transhumanist thinking. Without love for the human spirit at the core of human development, apathy will take its place. The human augmentation technology in Blade Runner 2049 is used to manufacture “more useful” human replicants, programmed for obedience and designed with artificial memories. The social system creates depersonalization, which even extends to the authentic humans who progressively lose their capacity for empathy, creativity, and love. This is precisely what a Transhumanist direction would manufacture: increasingly mechanized people, and the gradual end of our great human adventure. Humans are not machines to maximize; we are people with unique potential, individuality, and abilities—and human augmentation technology should help us pursue the best the human experience has to offer.
Fear oF deatH
One key component of the human experience is death. It is this component that is fundamentally intolerable to Transhumanism. In an effort to supersede our current biological, physical, and mental capabilities—Transhumanist ideology seeks also to transcend death. Perhaps in the near-term, human enhancement will lead to longer life spans and space colonization. But in the long-term, extending this logic of enhancement upon enhancement will try to postpone death further and further.
Christianity, however, does not share this fear of physical death. St. Paul states that, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”34 Because we live in Christ, we
do not seek an earthly death prematurely, nor do we fear our inevitable passing away. Transhumanists view physical death as the ultimate enemy to be conquered through technology. Christians understand it as a natural limitation that can give urgency and meaning to our earthly existence.
Christ himself demonstrated this truth: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”35 Jesus said this in the context of mortal existence, describing the pinnacle of love possible within earthly limitations. The possibility of sacrifice—and therefore of death—makes love more meaningful. If sacrifice has no cost, then what is its value? The threat of death means we have limited time, resources, and knowledge; choosing self-sacrifice despite this requires a truly profound love. Since mortality gives our choices urgency and weight, a world without death would be a world without heroism, martyrdom, or the moving beauty that emerges from human limitations.
Our sense of aliveness comes not from selfpreservation, but from the expansion of beauty, purpose, and faith we can foster for those who come after us.
Additionally, these heroics are not performed for personal vanity, but for others. As Christians, our sense of aliveness comes not from self-preservation, but from the expansion of beauty, purpose, and faith we can foster for those who come after us. St. Paul writes, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”36 The pursuit of immortality gets in the way of this heroism, distracting us from the vitality that emerges from creating a better world for other people and future generations. In short, an earthly world without death would lack this form of love and vitality.
With Christianity, there is no longer a Transhumanist imperative to try abolishing physical death through human
The Martyrdom of SaintsTeonisto,Tabra andTabrata, by Antonio Zanchi, from Wikimedia Commons
augmentation. Rather, technology can help us live more fully in the Christian mission before we die. Technology that extends healthy life, promotes healing, and augments our ability to fulfill our potential serves the Christian vision, not because it eliminates death, but because it allows us to live our unique human purpose more fully.
usIng tHe compass
Christ came to deliver salvation and abundant life, and we can use technology to live out this abundance, aimed at building-up rather than transcending our God-given nature. In becoming more authentically human through technological restoration and augmentation, we may indeed experience more suffering and adversity—but out of this grows beauty, actualization, and fulfillment. Human augmentation, when aligned with Christianity, follows this direction.
The purpose of this article is not to construct a comprehensive stone tablet of good versus bad directions—I will not pretend to have all the answers, and technology is ever changing. But this abundant life of which Christ spoke does have practical implications.
Not simply asking what is useful, entertaining, or novel, but asking what is good.
Among various other developments, it means embracing technologies that heal genetic diseases, restore mental or physical damage, enhance cognitive health, and augment human faculties—like language learning—all while maintaining the dignity of human nature. It means dissuading technologies that try to create “post-human” beings like a hive mind, that treat human enhancement as a manufacturing process, or that seek to abolish suffering and death, and with it, the human experience. Human augmentation technologies, then, should contribute to genuine human flourishing of the whole person, rather than instrumentally maximizing cherry-picked capabilities for the sake of utility. It means not simply asking what is useful, entertaining, or novel, but asking what is good.
conclusIon
We need objective standards for what constitutes goodness and human dignity, because without them, moral reasoning for human life is not possible, and human value can be reduced to simple arithmetic and utility. Christianity offers not only objective standards, but also a vision for greater human flourishing and abundance. In exercising abundant life and in realizing and growing our human potential, we discover more of our Creator’s fingerprints on the Universe. From these discoveries, we get to build any kind of future we want. The choice is ours.
We can build from a disdain for the human condition. We can build a future where humans go “quietly into that good night.”37 We can build the acid rain-soaked dystopia of Blade Runner 2049 where “enhancement” threatens to make us less and less human, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.
Or we can build a future where our technologies promote abundant health and augment our human potential—a future that chooses growth over transcendence, authenticity over mechanization, and martyrdom over the naive pursuit of immortality. Human augmentation, when
Crossroads
By Joanie Wood '27 Poetry
A nearly imperceptible churning— as if your wristwatch skipped a tick or two, or your heartbeat lagged a fraction of a second longer between beats. No doctor would panic the time would stay the same But you would know.
Could that be the Blessed Mother’s sweet song whispering soft wisdom to me, if I only dare to listen— Or does my enemy entice me with honey on his lips tugging lightly on my pride to lead my timorous footfalls to a snare?
My heart is aflame within me, sensing either life or death, burning just the same.
Is it better to avert my eyes— as though I always lived life a couple of seconds ahead— or to reach my fingers to an unwilling hand? You have been my comfort; why have I never known Your character less than now
Have mercy on my pursuit, I plead, stretch Your arms wide to catch me wherever I land. You of all people know how it feels for the body to turn over within itself.
I cover my ears succumbing to the stirring inside while dejection claws at my wrists, frantic for me to understand: I place my soul in danger— I am already free. But I still choose the bondage of knowing.
Eyes closed in prayer, knees rooted to the earth— I fight in solitude. Sweat and tears alike drift downwards, my petitions directed to those who may not exist. Forgive me for my unbelief— rescue me from this purgatory of indecision— lest he who hesitates be truly lost.
Am I choosing to pay for what is freely given— oh, how to portray that this act of dissension is a pursuit of unity
What if this costs me everything and only grants me what I had before— And, what if, by reaching for You, I lose you altogether? Is it your will to let me fall
My eyes cast downward only to see heaven’s beauty reflected in the dust of Earth. Do not forsake me for feeling this beckoning is more right— that it reflects You so much more— than the cacophony of all other revelations here.
I used to think You could only be found in silence, but what is the struggle if not that every voice is infused with your tonality?— that the cadence in wailing and chanting and the rustling of wind— mimic the way You call out to me?
How much more, now, when strewn between two choirs of truth, does my discernment fail me
Don’t let me fall into the chasm of ambiguity which lies between Nor let my rest be found in retreat. My arm grasps for the next handhold if only I could reach beyond fear
Truth is bound in paradox— its inward parts in fracture and dismay. If held to the light, could the sun’s rays pass through or would they splinter off, illuminating different parts of the room? Would each beam be bright as the sun itself or merely incline us to glance upward towards it
Joanie Wood D'27 is from Calcutta, OH and is majoring in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics with minors in Psychology and English.
Landschaft mit Feldweg und Bauernhaus, by Pieter Diercksz Santvoort, from Wikimedia Commons
juxtaposition with Dante’s medieval, narrative take on sin, detracts from the impact of the gospel on the spiritual lives and moral outlooks of Christians.
First, it is crucial to define what is meant by sin. The foundational theologian and Catholic Church Father, St. Augustine, defines it as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law.”2 Now, Augustine in this instance describes sin as a finite action of rebellion against God, but it can be well proven both scripturally (through the Bible) and behaviorally that sin is also something like a condition or disease that brings about these utterances, deeds, and desires contrary to God’s law. Thus, sin itself is the chasm any human will find between himself and God, while Jesus Christ is the bridge. Theological literature penned by key theologians in Christian thought from St. Thomas Aquinas to the Reformed (post-reformation Christian theological school of thought) theologian Petrus van Mastricht have largely agreed on the central aspects and effects of sin beyond some minor differences which will become evident.
tHe modern pIcture oF sIn
Christians today have been heavily influenced by piecemeal salvation messages made up of theologically accurate statements that convey an inaccurate picture of sin. To attain a fair picture of how far conceptions of sin have fallen from their theological orthodoxy, we look first to where they are now in the context of modern evangelicalism.
Modern perspectives on sin can be found through analysis of adjacent concepts such as salvation and atonement. In the words of the renowned theologian, J.I. Packer, “As sinners justified by faith and heirs of promised glory, we rejoice in salvation and think no more about our continued shortcomings and how God might ‘weigh’ them.”3 Packer refers to the Christian who routinely hears Bible vers-
Christians today have been heavily influenced by piecemeal salvation messages made up of theologically accurate statements that convey an inaccurate picture of sin.
es such as: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death,” and forgets Paul’s lament just a chapter earlier: “For I do not do the good I want to do. But the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is the sin living in me that does it.”4 In both passages, Paul is speaking from the perspective of a Christian, so that even though he is set free from the law of sin and death, he is still limited by the sin condition. Churches tend to emphasize the first point to the detriment of the second point, thus weakening the call for Christians to grapple with their own sins and to turn to the Lord to help them in their dayto-day sin struggle. Associated with this phenomenon is a loss of the reality that certain sins are certainly worse than others—we do not “weigh” them
The Puritans, a protestant Christian sect from the 16th and 17th centuries, set the example for deep meditation on sin, which modern Christians have begun to lose, in favor of a more forward-facing attitude towards sin. According
to Packer, “One of their spiritual disciplines (not yet one of ours, generally) was self-examination each evening to discern what actions in particular, done or left undone, they needed to ask pardon for.”5 The process described here is the Christian practice of repentance and confession, critical for engaging daily with God’s forgiveness and judging one’s own sins to ask for his help in overcoming them in the future. The practice of confession has lost the prevalence and importance in modern times because, according to another Christian scholar, “we look towards the methods of the doctor rather than of the spiritual guide; we ask how we can shape the future rather than how we can annul the past.”6 In other words, an ambitious pursuit of progress has come at the expense of reflection; we cease to examine our own individual and societal sins and look for solutions within our own realm of feasibility rather than God’s. Self-sufficiency replaces reliance on God. Meanwhile, reliance on God is the principal way humans get closer to him.7 To lose the need to be concerned with the act of sinning is to refuse reliance on God for personal betterment, which Christians call sanctification, and to forget the need for Jesus.
cHrIstIan tradItIon on tHe eFFect oF sIn on salvatIon
The most surefire way to obtain a more orthodox account of the weight of sins is to look to both the Bible and the centuries of tradition concerning sin. The traditional view fundamentally agrees with the modern perspective but takes much more seriously the threat sin poses to salvation.
The core relationship between sin and salvation is outlined in the Bible. Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”8 It follows that “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”9 This is the rationale behind the idea that sin is a condition present in all humans, condemning us all to a spiritual death. The tragedy is that many Christians forget the wages that they do not have to collect and become deceived in their own state of sin.
That sin is a universal condition only to be overcome by the grace of God is a premise agreed upon by all denominations of Christianity. From there, however, Catholics divide individual sins into two categories regarding salvation: venial sins, which do not directly merit loss of salvation, and mortal sins, which directly merit loss of salvation.10 For the Reformed, on the other hand, according to Stephen Hampton, a theology professor at Cambridge, “all sin is mortal in nature, and all sinners would be destined to
condemnation, were it not for the death of Christ.”11 Both agree on the foundation that the condition of sin merits damnation, but Catholics choose to differentiate individual sins based on salvation while the Reformed do not. It will be made clear that this does not change the practical orthodox approach to sin, but the Catholic use of venial sins in particular sheds some light on the modern sin mindset.
The tragedy is that many Christians forget the wages that they do not have to collect and become deceived in their own state of sin.
Dante’s Limbo provides an acute understanding of the relation between venial sins and the mindset of the modern Christian. Limbo is the highest (least severe) circle of Hell, reserved for what Dante calls the “virtuous pagans,” including his guide, the Roman poet, Virgil. Virgil prefaces Limbo by telling Dante, “Now I wish you to know, before you walk further, that they did not sin.”12 In an analysis of Virgil and Limbo, an English professor at the University of New Jersey writes that this claim “is without foundation and without merit from the perspective of someone who accepts the reasoning and presuppositions of Augustine and 1 John. It is a prideful denial of the very foundation of Christian belief.”13 But perhaps Virgil was referring to only mortal sins, conveying that the virtuous pagans had not committed anything graver than venial sins. After all, “Venial sin allows charity to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it.”14 Even if it were true that the only sins the virtuous pagans committed were solely venial, they still ended up in Hell. This is because, in the words of Augustine, “do not despise these sins which we call ‘light’: if you take them for light when you weigh them, tremble when you count them. A number of light objects makes a great mass.”15 Steinberg’s point is made. Catholics and Reformed Christians agree that even if there are “light” sins, they are part of a broader, damning condition in all humans. This number of “light” sins for Virgil culminated in a crippling
pride, which prevented him from admitting his wrongs, even after death. Modern Christians influenced by the modern message of being saved once so that they never need to worry about sin, risk becoming Virgil, writing off sins as something near venial, without considering their salvation implication. This isn’t to say that a Christian who does not take his sins seriously is necessarily condemned to Hell, but rather that his spiritual life is damaged in the lack of the whole picture of redemption.
Virgil and his Purgatory counterpart, Statius, demonstrate the difference between confession and denial in the spiritual life of a Christian. It has been seen that Virgil refuses to confess his sins even after death, but Dante’s depiction of the poet Statius, “is willing to acknowledge his sinfulness, even though that sinfulness is relatively trivial and ordinary.”16 This fictitious decision by the canonically pagan Statius placed him in Purgatory rather than Hell, representing how humility before God triumphs over the weight of salvation-threatening sin. As Purgatory in Dante’s text represents the journey closer to God, Dante’s juxtaposition here demonstrates the loss of closeness a Christian will have with God without confession and repentance
from sin. In other words, an integral part of sanctification is confronting sin for what it is: a threat to salvation—but one that has been overcome.
cHrIstIan tradItIon on tHe rangIng severIty oF mortal sIns
One of the most respected attributes of the Christian faith from the outside is its morality. Even those who do not accept the doctrine generally understand that Christians are trying to be good and want to see good in the world. But a Christianity with all sins being equal lacks a concrete moral frame of reference. Without this frame of reference, how is the Christian to morally evaluate right living here on Earth?
Here, Dante’s construction of Hell paints a vivid picture of the differences in severity of mortal sins, meaning sins that are considered directly salvation-threatening from the traditional Catholic perspective. As a preface to Dante’s ranking, it is important to note that in medieval Catholic thought, “sin is the evil of the action that is committed, whereas punishment represents an evil for the one committing it,” as articulated by the Medieval studies research-
er, Florina Rodica Hariga in her study of the 14th-century French scholar Étienne Gaudet’s work on sin.17 It was common understanding that a sin’s punishment is proportional to its degree of evil. Under this conception, Dante uses his system of contrapasso to link punishment to earthly sin, thus providing a hierarchy of sins committed on earth.
Sin is crucial to Christianity, since it is the very barrier between God and man that Jesus Christ came to destroy.
The Catholic Church believes that mortal sins should be judged by the degree of “grave matter” present, meaning sin is judged by the standards of the Ten Commandments. For example, “The gravity of sins is more or less great: murder is graver than theft. One must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger.”18 The second to last human soul Dante meets in Inferno, Count Ugolino, betrays both his country and family by committing treason, condemning his sons to starvation, and then eating them.19 Ugolino commits one of the gravest sins by this metric. Not only does he kill and betray, but he kills those closest to him, and those who are most innocent. Dante conveys how some sins are more damaging in terms of their effect on others, and on the soul.
Reformed teaching aligns with this framework, going further by explaining the rationale behind this “grave matter.” J.I. Packer recounts the main elements of the Puritan Westminster Larger Catechism concerning sin. The first metric for sin “is the extent to which the transgressors know better, are in the public eye, and are objects of public trust, ‘guides to others, and whose example is likely to be followed by others.’”20 This is a direct consequence of Jesus’s words: “whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.”21
Dante’s best representation for a guide to others, who abuses his duty, is his old mentor, Brunetto Latini. Dante
places Brunetto lower than the heretics, who outrightly denied God.22 Though Latini didn’t outrightly deny God, his damage went deeper, through the improper guidance of his trusting students. Towards the end of Latini’s interaction with Dante, Latini urges Dante, “Let my Treasure be commended to you, in which I live still, and ask no more.”23 In his Treasure, however, Latini commits a sin of “theological imprecision” by altering the words of Augustine.24 Even after death, Latini is leading his sheep astray. Latini is found in Dante’s seventh circle of Hell, rather than in the sixth with the heretics, because Dante realizes the spiritual implications of dragging other innocent learners off the path of righteousness towards death.
Packer notes that another sin metric is “the extent to which, defying conscience and censures from others, the transgressors act ‘deliberately, willfully, presumptuously, impudently, boastfully, maliciously, frequently, obstinately, with delight, continuance, or relapsing after repentance.’”25 Sins are worse when they are in continual, active defiance against God. For this metric, we turn to the Simonist Popes, who used their church power for financial gain, condemned by Dante to the eighth circle of Hell. Dante re-
Poenitentiae Sacramentum, by Pietro Longhi, from Wikimedia Commons
the many rings of Hell, yet is not considered blasphemous, metal music is often used to describe the evil that exists in the world, such as war, oppression, and darkness, without celebrating it.
Much of metal music does not aim to applaud these horrors, but rather to bring them into public light.
To be able explore these topics of suffering and injustice, metal music bands must thoroughly describe them in full detail, not to glorify them, but to expose their horrors. For example, the song “One” by Metallica follows the true story of a young man who lost his limbs, sight, and hearing during World War I. Filled with poetic lyrics describing the feeling of the victim’s entrapment in his own body, as well
as jarring musical elements such as snare drums made to sound like machine gun fire, the song allows the listener to understand the horrors and unholiness of war.2 Much of metal music does not aim to applaud these horrors, but rather to bring them into public light. The band System of a Down, led by the Armenian Serj Tanikan, often uses its music to discuss the atrocities committed during the Armenian genocide. The band uses violent lyrics, loud screaming vocals, and powerful instrumentation to reflect the pain and long-lasting effect these atrocities had on the people of Armenia. They recently released a single, “Protect The Land,” to raise money for the people of Armenia after the start of the war with Artsakh and Azerbaijan. The lyrics sing the appreciation and praise of the Armenians who stay and fight for their country despite the ownership dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The song features the lyrics:
Some were forced to foreign lands
Some would lay dead on the sand
Would you stay and take command? 3
These lyrics speak of the pain of the Armenian people who were forced to leave their native land, or even killed, not
La Divina Commedia di Dante, by Domenico di Michelino, from Wikimedia Commons
only in modern times, but dating back to the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The final line is a call to action, not just for the Armenian people, but for the world.4 The lyrics seem to ask: "will you join the cause and help the people of Armenia, not just from the oppression they are facing, but from the potential genocide that they fear is imminent? This example is the paragon of how metal music, while depicting brutality and death, can be used as a call to action for people to fix these problems and fight for peace.
War has been a frequent topic of metal songs, even from its earliest stages. Black Sabbath was one of the earliest metal bands to reach widespread popularity. One of their hits, “War Pigs” was created in response to the Vietnam War. This song is filled with religious imagery, describing how politicians and those who promote war will one day face the consequences of their actions on their Judgement Day. The song ends with the following lyrics:
Day of Judgment, God is calling On their knees, the war pigs crawling Begging mercies for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings 5
These lyrics are a criticism of the war and a statement that the “war pigs” who promote and benefit from war are sinners who will be cast into eternal damnation. This song could even be viewed as a praise of God’s justice, and his wrath against the sinners who did not follow his teachings and treat their fellow man with love. One could argue that since these war pigs are “begging mercy” that they should be forgiven for their sins. Listening to the song shows that the begging is not regret over what they did, but fear of God’s wrath and justice. The last line shows that they are doomed to damnation and eternity in Hell due to their evil and selfish choices, and that is why they are “begging mercy.” The song is specifically criticizing the Vietnam War and the many humanitarian atrocities committed during the conflict. The bassist of Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler, upon hearing claims that his band was Satanic stated that “War Pigs [Generals in the Vietnam War] are the real Satanists.”6 This statement, though inflammatory, sums up what the band was trying to do with this song. It was not praising the death and violence of war but condemning it.
It was not praising the death and violence of war, but rather condemning it.
The band’s name, Black Sabbath, also offers religious interpretation. Critics could argue that simply the name of the band is blasphemous, criticizing the day the Lord set aside for rest. The name is from the horror film released in 1963. The band decided on the name due to their fas-
cination that people would pay money to be frightened. It became a sign of rebellion, a countering of the pop-culture norm of turning away from the dark and gruesome facts of the world. It then broadened, becoming a statement of rebellion against the “establishment.” 7 The church is often linked in with the “establishment,” or the structure of society that continues to oppress the lower class and less fortunate.
Metal music, by definition, is an act of rebellion, a turn from conventional music and often a statement as anti-status quo.
Due to the history of corruption in the church, it has often been an agent of oppression in the past. This historical image of the church is often used as a symbol of oppression and the overpowering establishment, colonialism being one of the most recent examples. The Christian faith, especially Catholicism, was often used as justification for the horrific actions that occurred during this period. More recently, in 2023, Pope Francis formally repudiated the actions taken by the Catholic Church during colonialism and formally apologized to the indigenous communities that were destroyed by invaders who committed atrocities in the name of the Christian faith. Pope Francis stated that “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”8 Despite the fact that the church has condemned its corrupt past and has stated that their actions went against the teaching of the Catholic faith, this oppressor church image is still one that has a grip on pop culture. Metal music, by definition, is an act of rebellion, a turn from conventional music and often a statement against the status quo. Many of the seeming criticisms of religion that people see in metal mu-
sic are simply criticisms of this historical corrupt hierarchy, not the teachings of the church. Even in the more extreme examples of bands who are blatantly anti-Christian, it is fair to assume that the members of these bands are not evil and do in fact possess morals and a genuine concern for others, despite the lyrics of much of their music. This can be proven through the charitable work that many metal bands do. Metallica, Pierce the Veil, Godsmack, and Cannibal Corpse They are not criticizing morals and “love of neighbor,” the pillars of the church; rather, they are criticizing the historical organization of the church, are just some examples of bands that raise millions for charitable causes, especially those dealing with mental health.9 They are not criticizing morals and “love of neighbor,” the pillars of the church; rather, they are criticizing the historical organization of the church, which often sadly played the role of the oppressor. While in the Catholic faith this could be interpreted as blasphemous, it is not a criticism of the religion, but a criticism of the historical organization—not criticizing the teachings of the modern church, but using the historical image of the church as a symbol for powerful organizations around the world that, unlike the modern church, oppress people.
Another way metal music is often misunderstood is through the lack of listeners’ understanding of the sardonic tones of the music. Many metal bands use satire to the fullest. System of a Down is a band that defines itself by satire, with their absurd lyrics and sardonically named album, “Steal this album!”10 They truly use satire as a means of social commentary, and this is a frequent technique in metal music that can often be taken in the wrong light. Bands use satire to bring shock to their listeners. Western cultures tend to view the church as a symbol of light and peace, so the juxtaposition of it with such dark themes is used to create this shock factor. While this could be viewed as mocking the church, it should not be. It is simply trying to create a shocking contrast. An example of this can be found in the song Toxicity, which features the lyrics:
Somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep Disorder, disorder, disorder 11
These lyrics use the words sacred and then juxtapose it with the repetition of “disorder.” This is not condemning the “sacred” part, but rather using the word “sacred” to increase the impact of disorder. Bands that do this are not going against the teachings of the church, but rather trying to shock the listeners into realization of the horror of the dark topics they explore. This satirical use of the church obvi-
ously has its limits. Ghost, for example, is a band that satirizes the Catholic Church to the point where it no longer is being used as a musical device. During live shows, their lead singer is dressed like a dark pope, featuring an upside down cross, and their lyrics often feature a seeming adoration of Satan. These symbols are no longer being used as a means of satire, but rather as a direct criticism of the church. While some groups cross the line of blasphemy in their use of religious imagery, a blanket term of blasphemy cannot just be applied to every metal band.12
Every one of these explanations as to what metal music does in relation to faith has lines that can be crossed. This genre of music, just like any other genre, has some artists who simply go against the teachings of the Christian faith. More importantly, it is a rich and complex expression of emotion that cannot be reduced to stereotypes and unfounded assumptions. Music, at its most basic definition, is an expression of human emotion, and often of the ugly and unpleasant emotions. Just because the emotion is not a positive one does not mean that it should not be addressed and understood. Understanding and processing our emotions is essential to living life in control of our actions, which is important when living by the teachings of Christ. Metal music provides many people an outlet for these emotions, allowing them to live a more peaceful life.
Charity Relieving Distress, by Thomas Gainsborough, from
Additionally, metal music provides a medium for people to stand up and rebel against oppression. Metal music can be viewed as a “devil’s advocate” in society, pointing out flaws and the oppression, and urging us to act against them.
Michael Gallagher D’28 is from Huntington, New York and is majoring in Government with a minor in Spanish.
1 . Al Melchior, “We Have Assumed Control: The Otherworldly Meaning of “2112” by Rush,” American Songwriter, February 2, 2024, https://americansongwriter.com/wehave-assumed-control-the-otherworldly-meaning-of-2112-by-rush/.
2 . “One - Metallica,” Genius, https://genius.com/Metallica-one-lyrics.
3 . System of a Down. Protect The Land. November 6, 2020.
4 . Kory Grow, “Hear System of a Down’s First New Music in 15 Years, ‘Protect the Land’ and ‘Genocidal Humanoidz’,” Rolling Stone, November 6, 2020, https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-features/system-of-a-down-new-songs-protect-the-landgenocidal-humanoidz-1085942/.
5 . Black Sabbath. War Pigs. September 18, 1970.
6 . Nic Fildes, “War Pigs – How Black Sabbath’s song paved the way for heavy metal,” Financial Times, October 12, 2020, https://ig.ft.com/life-of-a-song/war-pigs.html.
7 . Jacob Uitti, “Behind the Name and Meaning of the Band Name: Black Sabbath,” American Songwriter, November 9, 2022, https://americansongwriter.com/behind-themeaning-and-history-of-the-band-name-black-sabbath/.
8 . Bill Chappell, “The Vatican Repudiates ‘The Doctrine of Discovery,’ which was used to justify colonialism,” National Public Radio, March 30, 2023, https://www.npr. org/2023/03/30/1167056438/vatican-doctrine-of-discovery-colonialism-indigenous.
9 . Jake Richardson, “14 Rock + Metal Artists That Give Back,” Loudwire, Townsquare Media Inc., updated October 28, 2023, https://loudwire.com/rock-metal-bands-thatgive-back/.
10 . System of a Down. Steal This Album. November 26, 2002.
11 . System of a Down. Toxicity. September 4, 2001.
12 . Kelsey Chapstick, “Ghost’s Tobias Forge On Path To Satanism, On Why Jesus ‘Was Kind Of A Chill Dude,’” Revolver, Veeps Inc., December 14, 2018, https://www.revolvermag.com/culture/ghosts-tobias-forge-path-satanism-why-jesus-was-kind-chilldude/.
A PRAYER FOR DARTMOUTH
This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging at the entrance of Parkhurst Hall.
O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.
— The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.
NICENE CREED
We, the editorial board of the Dartmouth Apologia, affirm that salvation is given through faith in Jesus, that the Bible is inspired by God, and that we are called to live by the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. We affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”
We [I] believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
We [I] believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstanstial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.
We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son], who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the Prophets.
We [I] believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We [I] confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and we [I] look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.
[1 Peter 3:15]