**Preface to "Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Health: Intersections With Artificial Intelligence or Other Human Enhancement Technologies"**

Technological breakthroughs and other scientific leaps give much cause for hope as well as some cause for pause. In 2003, almost all the genes of the human genome were identified, mapped, and sequenced, contributing to the promise of the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing project, to give one prominent example. Just shy of two decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope has been launched in space, poised to probe deep mysteries about the origin, evolution, and future of the universe.

These two remarkable scientific achievements bookend two decades of dizzying scientific and technological development that can help us better understand our intertwined bodies, minds, and spirits. Such breakthroughs promise mixed impacts—good and bad—on the trajectory of our journey into and with the universe.

Thinking big and long puts the human story in perspective, but that does not relieve us of the moral task of anticipating the needs and challenges of people who stand, right now, on the brink of serious impacts from unfolding therapies and technologies. Helping navigate those impacts in ways that enhance well-being (including spiritual health) is a moral imperative that may both be informed by and nurture the best in religion. The works of pioneering scholars, like those who write in this collection, contribute to this conversation.

What do human enhancement technology (HET) and artificial intelligence (AI) have to do with religion and spirituality? This book explores the intersection of HET and AI with spiritual health, Christianity, and ethics. This exploration strengthens an emergent, robust body of publications about the ethics of human enhancement. What it means to make us "better" must also include potential spiritual implications.

Concerns about spiritual health promises to make the study of religion and human enhancement ethics increasingly pressing in the public square. Some of the most significant possible and probable spiritual impacts of HET and AI are probed in this collection. Topics include warfare, robots, chatbots, moral bioenhancement, spiritual psychotherapy, superintelligence, ecology, fasting, and psychedelics. The first five chapters of this book address spirituality in relation to HET and AI, and the following six chapters address Christianity in relation to HET and AI.

It is too early to know all the implications of mapping the human gene and peering back in time on strings of light. We can reasonably expect that they will have economic, political, social, existential, and other implications. This book strikes out to engage some of the coming religious, spiritual, and ethical impacts of the therapies and technologies fast developing all around us.

> **Tracy J. Trothen and Calvin Mercer** *Editors*
