Authors

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373 AD) was one of the most influential theologians in Christian history, serving as the twentieth Pope of Alexandria and playing a decisive role in the development of Trinitarian doctrine. His lifelong defense of the Nicene Creed against Arianism earned him the title ‘Father of Orthodoxy,’ while his writings on the incarnation articulated a vision of human transformation that continues to resonate in Eastern Orthodox theology and beyond. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Athanasius received a thorough education in Greek literature, philosophy, and Christian scripture. As a young deacon, he accompanied Bishop Alexander to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, where he witnessed the formulation of the creed that would define Christian orthodoxy. Three years later, at approximately thirty years of age, Athanasius succeeded Alexander as bishop of Alexandria—a position he would hold for forty-five years despite being exiled five times by various emperors sympathetic to Arianism. Athanasius ’ s most enduring theological contribution appears in his treatise On the Incarnation , written when he was still a young man. In this work, he articulated the doctrine of theosis—the belief that God became human so that humans might become divine. This concept, sometimes expressed as ‘God became man that man might become god,’ became central to Eastern Orthodox spirituality and has profound implications for understanding human potential and destiny. Throughout his tumultuous career, Athanasius faced opposition from Arian bishops, imperial persecution, and periods of exile in the Egyptian desert, Rome, and elsewhere. Yet he persisted in defending what he understood as apostolic faith against theological compromise. His friendship with the desert monks, including Anthony the Great, influenced his biography of Anthony, which became foundational for Christian monasticism and hagiography. Athanasius’s doctrine of theosis resonates profoundly with transhumanist themes. His vision of humanity’s potential for transformation and participation in divine nature anticipates contemporary discussions of human enhancement and transcendence. The idea that humans are destined for a radical elevation of their nature—not merely moral improvement but ontological transformation—connects ancient Christian theology with modern aspirations for human flourishing beyond current limitations.

Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (354–430), commonly known as Augustine of Hippo or Saint Augustine, was a theologian, philosopher, and Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy. Augustine's major works include Confessions , a pioneering spiritual autobiography, and The City of God , a monumental defense of Christianity against pagan criticism following the sack of Rome. His theological contributions shaped doctrines on original sin, divine grace, predestination, and the nature of the Trinity. Before his conversion to Christianity, he explored Manichaeism and Neoplatonism, and his synthesis of Christian doctrine with classical philosophy profoundly influenced medieval thought, the Protestant Reformation, and modern philosophy alike. Augustine's concept of deificatio (divinization) — the idea that humanity is called to participate in the divine nature — resonates with Mormon Transhumanist themes of theosis and the elevation of human potential. His emphasis on humanity's restless longing for God ("Our hearts are restless until they rest in You") speaks to a vision of human beings as fundamentally oriented toward transcendence. However, significant tensions exist between Augustine's theology and Mormon Transhumanist thought. Augustine's doctrine of original sin and total human depravity, his skepticism of unaided human will, and his emphasis on predestination stand in marked contrast to Latter-day Saint affirmations of human agency, moral capacity, and an optimistic anthropology. Additionally, Augustine's commitment to creatio ex nihilo and the absolute ontological distinction between Creator and creature diverges from Mormon theology's more materialist and continuity-oriented understanding of God and humanity. Nevertheless, Augustine's enduring call to seek wisdom, his insistence that faith and reason are complementary, and his vision of humanity's ultimate union with the divine ensure his lasting relevance to conversations at the intersection of faith, philosophy, and human flourishing.

Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), known as Basil the Great, was a bishop, theologian, and monastic reformer whose intellectual and institutional labors helped shape the foundations of Eastern Christianity. Born into a devout Christian family in Cappadocia (present-day Turkey), he studied at the finest schools of his age—Athens and Constantinople—before returning to establish a monastic community and eventually serving as Bishop of Caesarea from 370 until his death. Basil’s achievements were as practical as they were theological. He founded what historians regard as one of the earliest organized charitable complexes in the ancient world, a compound outside Caesarea that included a hospital, a hospice for travelers, and care facilities for the poor—a concrete expression of his conviction that faith without compassionate action is hollow. As a theologian, he contributed decisively to the articulation of Trinitarian doctrine and authored influential monastic rules that still govern communities of Eastern Christian monks today. Together with his brother Gregory of Nyssa and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, he formed the Cappadocian Fathers, whose synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian revelation became a cornerstone of classical theology. Basil’s deepest legacy may lie in his vision of human transformation through divine participation. In his treatise On the Holy Spirit , he described a soul indwelt by the Spirit as one that becomes spiritual itself, capable of “foreknowledge of the future, understanding of mysteries, apprehension of what is hidden”—a soul that advances through illumination toward what he did not hesitate to call “the being made God.” This is the doctrine of theosis : the idea that created intelligence, shaped by virtue and suffused with grace, can ascend toward genuine likeness to—and participation in—divinity. For Basil, that ascent was not a flight from the material world but a transformation of the whole person: mind, moral life, and communal practice included. His combination of rigorous intellectual formation, institutional care for the vulnerable, and fearless theological aspiration about humanity’s divine potential makes him a persistent and generative voice in any serious conversation about the relationship between intelligence, virtue, and the destiny of human beings.

Ben Blair holds a PhD in philosophy and education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is the co-founder of Newlane University—a platform focused on deinstitutionalizing education. An active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Blair’s work and perspective explore the intersection of religious community and secular ideals. He is particularly interested in how religious and post-religious communities can work towards shared goals, and he questions the equation of any particular organization with the broader concept of the 'kingdom of God'. Blair, along with his wife, Gabrielle Blair, resides in France and they are the parents of six children. He presented at Sunstone West and is an attendee and speaker at Mormon Transhumanist Association conferences, where he explores the philosophical implications of faith, community, and progress.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a British literary scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist whose work shaped twentieth-century imagination across academic, literary, and theological registers. Born in Belfast, educated at Oxford, and later Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, Lewis combined philological rigor with a gift for popular exposition that few peers matched. His academic contributions, including The Allegory of Love (1936) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), established him as a leading medievalist. But his wider influence came through fiction and apologetics: The Screwtape Letters (1942), Mere Christianity (1952), The Problem of Pain (1940), The Great Divorce (1945), and the seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). A member of the Inklings alongside J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis moved from youthful atheism to a self-described “reluctant” Christian conversion in 1931, an arc he traced in Surprised by Joy (1955). Lewis’s legacy resonates with Mormon transhumanist themes more deeply than his Anglican context might suggest. His doctrine of theosis —that the purpose of Christian life is to become “little Christs,” that God intends to make “the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature”—is among the most striking modern Protestant articulations of divinization, and it sits comfortably alongside Joseph Smith’s teaching that humanity’s destiny is to inherit the divine nature. His ecumenical instinct, expressed in the parable of Emeth in The Last Battle , suggests that sincerity and virtue can be received by Christ even when offered under other names—a posture friendly to syncretism and pluralism. Lewis was no technologist, and his suspicion of scientism in The Abolition of Man (1943) cautions against any easy equation of progress with goodness. Yet his moral seriousness, his confidence that human beings are unfinished creatures undergoing a long and sometimes painful transformation, and his insistence that the universe itself may have been created for the purpose of drawing creatures into divine life all converge with the central Mormon transhumanist conviction: that becoming gods, by grace and through participation, is the actual point.

Carl Teichrib is a Canadian researcher, writer, and lecturer who has spent more than two decades documenting the ideological and spiritual currents reshaping Western civilization—with particular attention to transhumanism, globalism, and the re-enchantment of secular culture. He is the author of Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment (2018) and served as editor of Forcing Change , a research journal tracking transformative movements in politics, religion, and technology. Teichrib’s work is rooted in on-the-ground investigation: he has attended and reported on events ranging from Burning Man to world federalist conferences to transhumanist gatherings, bringing an ethnographic sensibility to ideological terrain that most commentators treat from a distance. His research focuses on the convergence of technological aspiration, spiritual seeking, and political vision—the overlapping currents through which humanity is, in various ways, reaching for transcendence. Writing from an evangelical Christian perspective, Teichrib approaches transhumanism critically, as a symptom of a deeper human longing that he believes is being misdirected. That diagnosis differs from a Mormon transhumanist reading, which holds that the longing itself—for greater intelligence, longer life, expanded capacity, and participation in divine creative work—is genuine and worth pursuing through rigorous, ethical, technologically-engaged means. Still, Teichrib’s careful documentation of transhumanist aspirations, his recognition that the movement addresses real spiritual hunger, and his insistence that ideas about human transformation carry profound moral weight make him a serious interlocutor for anyone thinking carefully about where humanity is headed and why.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215 CE) was an early Christian theologian and teacher whose synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith made him one of the most intellectually ambitious figures of the patristic era. Born likely in Athens and educated across the Mediterranean world, he eventually settled in Alexandria—then the preeminent center of learning in the ancient world—where he led the Catechetical School and shaped the intellectual tradition of early Christianity. Clement’s major works— Protrepticus , Paedagogus , and Stromata —form a trilogy that moves the reader from conversion through moral formation toward deeper philosophical and spiritual knowledge. He drew freely from Plato, the Stoics, and Jewish wisdom literature, arguing that Greek philosophy was not an enemy of the Gospel but a preparatory gift, a kind of divine pedagogy for the Gentile mind. His vision of the gnostikos —the mature Christian who combines rigorous intellectual inquiry with devout practice—was a portrait of the fully integrated human being, one in whom reason and faith become indistinguishable. What gives Clement enduring significance is his unambiguous teaching that the purpose of human life is transformation into the divine. His own words carry the weight of this conviction: “The Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.” This is not rhetorical flourish—it is a theological program. Clement understood salvation as an ongoing ascent, a journey from moral discipline through illuminated knowledge toward a state in which the human person becomes, in his phrase, “God-bearing and God-borne.” The redeemed, in his vision, are ultimately “called by the appellation of gods,” destined for “everlasting contemplation” alongside those perfected before them. This is theosis stated with unusual directness and intellectual confidence: divinity is the natural telos of an intelligence that cooperates with grace, learns earnestly, and loves deeply. For those who hold that human beings are meant to grow without limit—that intelligence, creativity, and moral aspiration are not merely useful traits but the very substance of our divine inheritance—Clement offers a patristic voice of striking resonance. He refused to separate the life of the mind from the life of the spirit, insisting that the same God who is Logos invites human beings into an ever-deepening participation in that reason and light. His is a theology not of passive redemption but of active, educable, transforming ascent.

Cyprian of Carthage (c. 200–258 CE) was one of the most influential bishops and theologians of early Christianity, whose writings on ecclesiology, martyrdom, and the nature of the Church shaped Latin Christian thought for centuries. Born in Roman North Africa, likely to a wealthy pagan family, Cyprian converted to Christianity around 246 CE and rose rapidly to become Bishop of Carthage within two years. His episcopate was defined by crisis: he led his community through the Decian and Valerian persecutions, navigating fierce debates over how to treat Christians who had lapsed under imperial pressure. His treatises—among them On the Unity of the Church , On the Lapsed , On Mortality , and On Works and Almsgiving —combined pastoral urgency with theological precision, establishing principles of communal discipline, sacramental life, and episcopal authority that would echo through Western Christianity. He was martyred in 258 CE under the Emperor Valerian, becoming one of the most venerated figures in the early Church. Cyprian’s theological legacy is most vivid where it touches the question of human transformation. His conviction that Christ assumed the fullness of human nature so that humanity might ascend to share in the divine—captured in the axiom that what humanity is, Christ was willing to become, so that humanity might become what Christ is—places him in the ancient tradition of theosis, the teaching that the divine-human gap is not a fixed boundary but a trajectory of becoming. This vision of participation in the divine life, grounded in incarnation and sustained by community, finds deep resonance with the Mormon transhumanist intuition that human potential is genuinely open-ended, that the relationship between humanity and God is one of shared nature and increasing likeness rather than infinite ontological distance. Cyprian did not frame this hope in technological terms, but his insistence that moral transformation, communal practice, and the grace of Christ collaborate in making humanity more than it currently is speaks across centuries to anyone who takes seriously the possibility that the divine future of the human person is real, not merely symbolic.

David Henry Fowler was an American educator, writer, and civic leader in the state of Utah, known for his decades of service in public education and his editorial contributions to early twentieth-century Latter-day Saint periodical literature. Born on May 8, 1879, in Hooper, Weber County, Utah, Fowler was the son of Samuel Fowler and Rachel Taylor. He was raised in a pioneer Latter-day Saint household during a formative period in Utah's territorial and early statehood history, and from an early age demonstrated an aptitude for study that would shape the trajectory of his life's work. In 1906, Fowler was called to serve a proselytizing mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Northern States Mission. His capabilities as a writer and communicator were soon recognized, and he was transferred to the mission headquarters in Independence, Missouri, where he was appointed Associate Editor of Liahona, the Elders' Journal . This publication—one of the principal periodicals serving missionaries and members outside the Intermountain West—provided doctrinal instruction, mission news, and devotional literature to a wide readership. Fowler's editorial labors placed him among a small circle of early twentieth-century Latter-day Saint writers helping to amplify the voice of the Church during a period of expanding national presence. Fowler pursued higher education at the University of Utah, completing his degree in 1919. His academic pursuits translated directly into a career in public education, where he rose to serve as both a high school principal and a superintendent of schools in Emery and Summit counties, Utah. In these roles, Fowler shaped the educational foundations of two rural communities at a formative moment in Utah's development as a state, helping to build institutional structures that would serve generations of students. Fowler's career reflected a lifelong conviction that education, faith, and community progress were inseparable. As an administrator, he worked to extend the reach of secondary schooling into communities whose economic realities often competed with classroom attendance, and as a writer and editor he helped articulate the intellectual and spiritual aspirations of his religious tradition for a dispersed readership.

David Oman McKay (1873–1970) served as the ninth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1951 until his death. Born on his father’s farm in Huntsville, Utah, to Welsh and Scottish immigrant parents, he graduated as valedictorian from the University of Utah in 1897. He served as principal of Weber Academy and married Emma Ray Riggs in 1901. Ordained an apostle in 1906, McKay served as an active general authority for nearly 64 years, longer than anyone else in Church history. He was superintendent of Sunday Schools, the Church’s first Commissioner of Education, and counselor in the First Presidency to both Heber J. Grant and George Albert Smith before becoming Church President. Under McKay’s leadership, Church membership tripled from 1.1 million to 2.8 million. He traveled more miles than all previous Church presidents combined, emphasizing worldwide Church growth. His teachings are captured in famous mottos including “Every member a missionary” and “No success can compensate for failure in the home.”