CTI Launches Film on Astrobiology & Humanities

The Center of Theological Inquiry is proud to launch Planetary Humanity: Astrobiology’s Invitation to the Humanities. This film documents the dialogue at CTI between scientists and scholars in the humanities on astrobiology, the science of life in the universe. What questions does this science raise for religion and society? The film’s contributors consider planetary scientist David Grinspoon’s idea that to understand life on Earth, we must look at it on a planetary scale. That’s what the film does!

Written and narrated by CTI’s Director William Storrar, the film takes us from the drama of Iceland’s volcanic islands to the quieter streets of Princeton New Jersey, the Center’s home. There a group of scholars consider the implications of Grinspoon’s scientific view of life for the religious views of nature they study in Abrahamic and Asian traditions. CTI’s conversation with Grinspoon then moves to the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study to meet with South African scholars, concerned about sustaining life on our planet amid drought in the Western Cape. Returning to Iceland’s shifting tectonic plates, the film concludes with a reflection on the academy’s rift between the sciences and the humanities, bridged by astrobiology’s invitation to planetary thinking on religion and society.

Planetary Humanity will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars and students of science and society, and to citizens concerned about the future of life on Earth.