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.

Brigham Henry Roberts (1857–1933) was a historian, theologian, and General Authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely regarded as one of the most rigorous and intellectually ambitious thinkers Mormonism has produced. Born in Warrington, England, and emigrating to Utah as a child, Roberts rose from a difficult, impoverished youth to become a missionary, editor, congressman-elect, and a member of the First Council of the Seventy from 1888 until his death. Roberts’s career bridged ecclesiastical leadership and serious scholarship. He served missions in the American South and presided over the Eastern States Mission, and he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1898, though he was denied his seat in a national controversy over plural marriage. He devoted decades to writing and editing, producing the six-volume Comprehensive History of the Church , editing the seven-volume History of the Church , and authoring theological works including The Mormon Doctrine of Deity , The Truth, The Way, The Life , and Studies of the Book of Mormon . In these works he engaged geology, biology, biblical criticism, and comparative religion with a candor unusual for his time and office. Roberts’s legacy resonates deeply with themes of human potential, intelligence, and the entanglement of faith with progress. He read the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—railroads, electric light, wireless telegraphy, aviation, the spread of liberty—as “collateral rays” of the same light that opened the heavens to Joseph Smith, suggesting that the millennium might already be quietly underway in the works of human hands. He insisted that scientific research, including evidence of life and death long before Adam, belongs on the side of “development” rather than “contraction,” and that to engage such inquiry is “to link the church of God with the highest increase of human thought and effort.” Equally striking is Roberts’s generosity toward other traditions and his impatience with mental laziness. He refused to identify any particular church—Catholic, Protestant, Greek, Buddhist, Muslim, or even the societies of deists and atheists—as the “church of the devil,” reserving that phrase for the kingdom of evil wherever it appears, and affirming that wise teachers and prophets are raised up among all peoples. Against “simple faith” understood as ignorant acquiescence, he championed an intelligent, rational faith that strives “up to the very limit of man’s capacity” to know. In his confidence that intelligence is the glory of God and of humanity, that revelation invites rather than forecloses inquiry, and that the children of men are “moving up to a higher and truer conception of the things of God,” Roberts remains a vital voice for those who see in technology, science, and expanding moral imagination the natural shape of a divine future.

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.

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) was one of the most influential and theologically deliberate leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born on September 10, 1924, in Brigham City, Utah, the tenth of eleven children, he overcame childhood polio, served as a bomber pilot in World War II, and earned a doctorate in education from Brigham Young University before dedicating his life to religious service and teaching. Called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1970, he served as its acting president from 1994 to 2008 and as its president from 2008 until his death on July 3, 2015. Packer’s career spanned more than five decades of general authority service. He worked extensively within the Church Educational System, overseeing seminary and institute programs, and served as a mission president in New England. He served on the scripture revision committee that produced the landmark 1979–1981 LDS editions of the Bible and standard works. He dedicated temples and missions across multiple continents and was a prolific author and teacher. He was also a gifted visual artist, known for his paintings and sculptures of birds—a dimension of his character that reflected a disciplined attention to the natural world and a belief that beauty and truth are inseparable. Packer’s theological legacy is marked by a deep reverence for the eternal sweep of Mormon cosmology. In one memorable interview, he cited the hymn ‘If You Could Hie to Kolob’—that most expansive of Mormon texts, celebrating eternal progression, a plurality of Gods, and worlds without end—and connected it to Brigham Young’s conviction that learning is not a process approaching a terminus but one that opens onto ‘an eternity of knowledge.’ That orientation—toward an unending, ever-expanding intelligence—runs beneath much of Packer’s teaching about the relationship between mortality and eternity, between what we now see and what God sees.

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 Youngblood co-founded the MTA in 2006 and has served as its President and CEO since 2021. He is engaged with the Association’s efforts to explore the intersection of Mormon theology and transhumanist philosophy. Among the many initiatives that Carl has been involved with, he has designed and built the Association's current website, which unifies all prior content in a single location using inspiring visuals and animations. Youngblood’s professional career spans more than two decades of full-stack software development at the intersection of Silicon Slopes and Silicon Valley. He was an early employee at Omniture (acquired by Adobe), a founding engineering leader at Divvy (a Utah-based unicorn startup), co-founder of Blockscale LLC (a blockchain services firm eventually contracted into Coinbase), and Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS. His technical fluency ranges from scalable web architecture to blockchain infrastructure—the kind of deep engineering experience that grounds his theological speculation in working knowledge of the systems he writes about. Under his leadership, the Association has developed its mission of promoting abundant human flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology, fostering dialogue across secular and religious audiences and arguing that each has something essential to learn from the other. His writing, collected on his blog From the Depths , spans over a decade of conference presentations and theological essays: meditations on participatory resurrection, the alignment of artificial intelligence read through the Grand Council narrative, intelligence as eternal and multifaceted, and religion as social technology. He writes, as a colleague has observed, with warmth and accessibility on questions of momentous practical consequence—how to navigate faith crisis without losing faith’s power, how to think about resurrection as something we actively participate in rather than passively receive. Youngblood’s distinctive contribution to transhumanism is the integration of serious technical expertise with serious theological reflection. He embodies the Mormon transhumanist conviction that scientific and spiritual development are not parallel tracks but a single path—that the learning required to build better systems is continuous with the exaltation Mormon theology envisions, and that human ingenuity, rightly oriented, is itself a divine imperative.

Carver Mead (born 1934) is an American engineer, physicist, and pioneer of modern microelectronics whose foundational contributions to semiconductor theory and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) helped make the silicon age possible. A Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology, Mead spent decades at the frontier of what computation could become, both as a theorist and as a practical builder of systems. Mead’s career achievements span an extraordinary range. He developed key models for understanding transistor behavior at the nanoscale, co-authored (with Lynn Conway) the landmark 1980 textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems , and essentially invented the methodology by which engineers design the dense integrated circuits that now inhabit every corner of modern life. He also pioneered neuromorphic engineering—the design of circuits that mimic the computational architecture of biological neural systems—and founded companies that applied these principles to sensory processing and analog computation. In 2022, he was awarded the Harold Pender Award; earlier recognition includes the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. What distinguishes Mead as a thinker is not only what he built but how he understood the act of building. He insisted that Moore’s Law is fundamentally a story about human belief: “Moore’s Law is really a thing about human activity, it’s about vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.” In this reading, technological progress is not an autonomous material force but a function of expanded imagination—a civilizational act of faith in possibility. This framing resonates deeply with traditions that locate human creativity within a larger divine economy, where intelligence, rightly directed and disciplined by moral courage, participates in the ongoing work of creation. Mead’s insistence that the boundary between what is and what could be is first a boundary of belief, and only second a boundary of physics, echoes the Mormon transhumanist conviction that humanity’s divine future is not given passively but willed, practiced, and built—one hard-won increment of understanding at a time.

Charles W. Penrose (1832–1925) was a British-born Latter-day Saint apostle, editor, poet, and theologian whose six-decade career as a writer and church leader made him one of the most intellectually formidable figures in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mormonism. Born in London, Penrose converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1850 and emigrated to Utah in 1861. He served as editor of the Deseret News for two significant stints and became one of the church’s most prolific public intellectuals, writing doctrinal essays, hymns—including the beloved O Ye Mountains High —and polemical defenses of Mormon theology. He was ordained an apostle in 1904 and served as Second Counselor in the First Presidency under Presidents Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant until shortly before his death. What distinguished Penrose among his contemporaries was the rigor he brought to questions of religious authority and rational inquiry. His conviction that revelation must be investigated rather than merely received—that the Saints should weigh prophetic claims with active, disciplined intelligence rather than passive deference—reflects a deeply epistemically serious faith. “We respect him,” he wrote of a sitting church president, “but we do not believe his personal views or utterances are revelations from God; and when ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ comes from him, the saints investigate it.” This is not skepticism at the expense of faith; it is faith disciplined by the same intelligence that Mormon theology declares co-eternal with God. Penrose understood that genuine trust in divine communication requires the full exercise of human reason, not its suspension. That conviction connects naturally to the broader Mormon vision of theosis—the idea that intelligence, rightly cultivated, is itself the stuff of eternal progression. Penrose spent his life insisting that Latter-day Saints be not merely believing but thinking believers, capable of distinguishing personal opinion from revelation, tradition from truth. In a tradition that affirms the mind and the spirit as inseparable, his legacy is a reminder that the path toward Godhood runs through honest inquiry as surely as it runs through covenant and community.

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.