religion

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher known for his early work in mathematical logic and his later development of process philosophy. Born in Ramsgate, Kent, he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there as a fellow and lecturer for more than two decades, teaching and publishing on algebra, geometry, and the foundations of mathematics. His most consequential early achievement was Principia Mathematica, written with his former student Bertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. The work attempted to derive the whole of mathematics from a small set of logical axioms, and it became one of the central texts of twentieth-century logic, shaping subsequent debates in the philosophy of mathematics even where its technical program was later challenged by Gödel's incompleteness results. In 1910 Whitehead left Cambridge for London, where he taught at University College London and then Imperial College, and where his interests broadened from mathematics into the philosophy of science and education. He wrote on the concepts of space, time, and matter in relativity theory, proposing his own alternative account of relativity distinct from Einstein's, and he served on commissions concerned with the reform of secondary and university education, arguing against rote learning in favor of teaching ideas in their living connections. In 1924, at age sixty-three, Whitehead moved to Harvard University, where he spent the rest of his academic career and produced the metaphysical works for which he is best known, including Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929). These books developed what came to be called process philosophy, which treats reality as composed of events of becoming rather than fixed substances, and which assigns value, experience, and a kind of creativity to the basic constituents of nature. Process and Reality also includes an account of God as a factor within the cosmic process rather than an unchanging sovereign outside it, an idea that later gave rise to process theology as a distinct field. Whitehead's influence has been most durable in philosophy of science, metaphysics, and theology, particularly through process theologians who built on his account of God and creativity, and his work on education and the unity of knowledge continues to be cited in discussions of curriculum and pedagogy. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947.

Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) stands as the most widely read English novelist of the Victorian era, a writer whose serialized fiction shaped how an entire society saw its own poverty, ambition, and capacity for change. Born in Portsmouth to a navy clerk whose debts landed the family in financial ruin, Dickens spent part of his boyhood laboring in a London boot-blacking factory while his father sat in debtors’ prison. That early exposure to want and humiliation never left his fiction, and it gave his later success an unusual moral urgency: he wrote not as an observer of the poor but as someone who had briefly been counted among them. Dickens built his career through serialization, publishing novels in monthly or weekly installments that reached readers across every social class. The Pickwick Papers made him famous almost overnight, and he followed it with Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities, among many others. He also founded and edited periodicals, Household Words and All the Year Round, which let him pair fiction with journalism and social commentary in the same pages. His public readings, performed with theatrical intensity across Britain and America, turned authorship into a kind of ministry, delivered aloud to audiences who wept and laughed together. His fiction worked by insisting that character is not fixed. Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation across a single night, prompted by visions of what he had been, was, and might yet become, remains the clearest statement of a conviction that runs through nearly everything Dickens wrote: that a human life, however hardened by circumstance or self-interest, retains the capacity to be remade. He gave that conviction institutional teeth, campaigning for sanitation reform, public education, and the abolition of debtors’ prisons, treating fiction as a lever for actual social transformation rather than mere entertainment. That conviction resonates with a Mormon transhumanist sense of human potential: the idea that growth has no fixed ceiling, that compassion toward the suffering is not sentiment but obligation, and that redemption is available to anyone willing to see differently. Dickens located his hope in moral imagination rather than in theology or technology, and he had no occasion to anticipate debates about engineered futures. But his lifelong case that people and the institutions they build can always become more generous than they currently are gives his work a natural kinship with the aspiration to a more compassionate, more fully realized humanity.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist whose work probes faith, suffering, freedom, and guilt with a depth few writers have matched. Trained as a military engineer in St. Petersburg, he turned to literature in his twenties, and a death sentence for revolutionary activity, commuted at the last moment to Siberian exile, marked him permanently. He emerged from four years of prison and years more of enforced military service a changed writer, one who had stared at his own execution and returned to ask what a human life, once spared, owes to others. His major novels, among them Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, stage philosophy as lived crisis rather than abstract argument. Characters murder, doubt, confess, and rebel, and Dostoevsky lets their reasoning run to its full conclusion before testing it against conscience. He wrote for serialized journals under constant financial pressure, supporting a household through gambling debts and illness, and still produced sentences that interrogate free will, suffering, and the possibility of God with an intensity that philosophy departments have never stopped reading. That intensity drew on personal loss as well as literary conviction. In 1868, grief over the death of his infant daughter Sofya surfaces in his letters in the image of the cross, a measure of how far private suffering pressed against the edges of his faith rather than a settled answer to it. The Brothers Karamazov carries that preoccupation with suffering and responsibility into its fullest statement of theology. Through the dying monk Zosima, Dostoevsky teaches that each person must recognize himself as guilty before all people, on behalf of all and for all, for every human sin, and that only there does unity become possible. The claim describes redemption as shared labor rather than a transaction completed by one party for passive others, a position with some resonance to what Mormon theology calls participatory atonement, though Dostoevsky’s own framework stayed rooted in Orthodox asceticism and submission rather than in human beings as co-creators with the divine. His recurring argument, that freedom without love collapses into nihilism, remains relevant to any account of human improvement, religious or technological, that separates moral transformation from compassion.

Jason Anthony is a religion journalist and games designer based in New York City. He brings a unique perspective to discussions of next-generation religion, shaped by his diverse experiences and intellectual curiosity. Anthony’s career has spanned various aspects of the media landscape. He has served as the editor of America’s oldest religious magazine and written extensively about the national faith landscape. His observations and reflections following the events of September 11th at the World Trade Center—where he witnessed the intense religious reactions and motivations—led him to delve deeper into the study of religion. Driven by both personal experience and the evolving media landscape, Anthony’s work now extends to the realm of game design. This exploration is epitomized by his project, “The Ten Year Game,” an initiative through which he explores future religious frameworks. Anthony’s involvement in business writing and familiarity with both legal and illegal gambling traditions further enrich his understanding of complex systems and human behavior, lending a multifaceted perspective to his projects.