Page - 13 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

“I Sing the Body Electric” – Editorial | 13www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 9–14 In “The Pedigree of Dualistic and Non-Dualistic Media: Grasping Extramedial Mean- ingsPedigree of Dualistic and Non-Dualistic Media”, Stefan Sorgner starts with the observation that human reasoning often makes stark distinctions between the mate- rial and the immaterial and that these distinctions often come with moral ideas and ascriptions of good and evil. In his discussion, he locates the roots of these dualities and of dualistic thinking in the philosophy, arts, and architecture of antiquity, in par- ticular ancient Greece. He identifies the birth of ancient Greek drama with its theatre buildings and its separation of actors and audience as one source that paved the way for dualistic thinking. As such, Sorgner shows how media and artistic practices, includ- ing the roles they introduce, their material objects, and the architectural practices and spaces they give rise to, shape our thinking about the world. In her article “The Body and Voice of God in the Hebrew Bible”, Johanna Stiebert explores the bodiliness of God in biblical scripture. Drawing on a rich variety of scrip- tural sources, she focuses on how the ephemerality of God’s voice can be seen as a form of divine embodiment. Stiebert thus offers us an exegetical reading of bodily and anthropomorphic images the Hebrew Bible uses to refer to God, God’s kingship, and God’s relationship to God’s people. She shows that the biblical authors use the divine voice as a medium that expresses and communicates ideas of divine power and reflects God and God’s likeness. Claudia Setzer’s article “ ‘This Voice Has Come for Your Sake’: Seeing and Hearing in John’s Gospel” offers a fascinating approach to reading transhumanism in light of John’s gospel or, in other words, to reading John’s gospel through a transhumanist perspective. Her article is grounded in a detailed exegesis of John and his treatment of our human experience of our finite bodies. She particularly focuses on the role the human senses play in John’s thinking. The ability to hear God’s voice is not only an act of faith but also closely related to the ability to “see” God, as Setzer argues. John’s emphasis on the senses offers Setzer a link to transhumanism. She argues that our sense of self, our self-hood, “is bound to voice” and links this recognition to tran- shumanist ideas of enhancement. Aware of the ethical issues that come with tran- shumanism, Setzer invites us to think about John’s emphasis on human senses and the implications of the enhancement of our senses for self-hood in a transhumanist context. In in his article “Voicing the Technological Body: Some Musicological Reflections on Combinations of Voice and Technology in Popular Music”, Florian Heesch looks, at the combination of voice and technology in popular music from a musicological perspec- tive. He starts with the observation that recorded popular music is characterised by the (important) presence of a voice, but also by the simultaneous absence of a human body. He then looks at microphones, which can intensify this presence of the voice in a new way, and technological apparatuses such as the vocoder that can significantly