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Cara Rock-Singer likes to joke that she’s the poster child for the benefits of a liberal arts education.

Cara Rock-Singer

Cara Rock-Singer

Rock-Singer, an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, arrived as an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2005, determined to become a molecular biologist. Her choice made a lot of sense: She had matriculated as part of a cohort of students taking intense coursework in all aspects of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). Then, in her second semester, she fulfilled a general education requirement by taking a class on modern Jewish thought.

Bam.

“I was taking this intense mix of physics, computer science and biology classes, and then I ended up taking the other half of my classes in religion,” she says. “And at some point along the way, I realized I really liked this.”

Rock-Singer, who is Jewish, found herself drawn to the ways different religions helped people experience their lives and make meaning in the world. As she pursued her graduate work at Oxford and Columbia University in New York City, she increasingly found herself combining her still-burning interest in science—in particular, in genetics and reproductive technologies—with her burgeoning fascination with religion.

“One of the things I find most compelling about the study of religion is that, at its heart, religion is about a way of organizing the world,” she says.

Which, coincidentally, is something that can also be said about science.

This fall, Rock-Singer will explore that intersection further with a new generation of students in a new class she’s teaching on religion and technology.

We tend to think of religion and science at odds with one another—think Galileo and Darwin (whose theories and evidence-based methods challenged the Bible), and the Scopes trial (in which a teacher was accused of violating a Tennessee law that prohibited teaching human evolution in any state-funded classroom). Rock-Singer, however, argues that the conflict narrative needs significantly more nuance and complexity.

“What I'm interested in doing is introducing students to a whole range of the kind of messy, entangled worlds that come alive at the intersection of these categories. It turns out that science, technology and religion have a lot to say about each other.”

Rock-Singer points to Tesla CEO and would-be Twitter scion Elon Musk’s recent fascination with traveling to space as a ripped-from-the-headlines example.

“That has implications for how we think about humanity,” she says. “What does it mean when you can see the world from above and imagine being non-terrestrial in your human existence?”

Rock-Singer hopes to explore a wide range of topics with her students. For example, the implications of assisted reproduction technologies in countries with strong Catholic traditions in places like South and Central America; the ways the Internet has transformed religion in recent years, from the advent of “Zoom Church” to individuals performing their religiousness on TikTok; and the ways technology alters how we think about our sense of connectedness. As the class evolves, Rock-Singer is hoping to shape it into a gateway course for religious studies at UW-Madison.

“What I want to do is pique people’s curiosity, but also disrupt a lot of assumptions about what it is that religion is doing, where it happens and by whom,” she says. “A lot of these things are inseparable, like the ways we live religion through technologies. You create technologies as part of religious visions, visions for how we want to live.”

The new course is part of a collection of classes Rock-Singer has building over the past several years. As part of a post-doctoral fellowship at Cornell University, she taught a course on the American Jewish Life of DNA, which she has now taught twice at UW. The class wrestles with issues like how ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities avail themselves of the benefits (and complications) of genetic testing.

“When we see this type of technology happening in a different context, that upends the assumptions and the values you bring to the discussion,” she points out. “You begin to realize that concepts of autonomy and choice are particular to a certain set of values.”

Rock-Singer envisions using the religion and technology course to build bridges with the numerous science and technology experts on campus, starting dialogues between, for instance, religious studies and computer sciences. Or physics. Or whatever topics her students bring to the table.

“I always want my classes to be like an experiment,” says Rock-Singer. ”There are no set answers. It's always about: What can you discover? That’s what makes it exciting and fun.”