Can Good Fiction Deliver What Technology Can't? | Lecture 1

What does literature offer that a smartphone never can? In this thought-provoking lecture, Dr. Cassandra Nelson — visiting fellow in literature at the Lumen Center, Harvard-trained scholar, and author of A Theology of Fiction — explores the surprising rivalry between literary fiction and screen technology.

Drawing on media theory, marketing history, and close readings of poetry and prose, Dr. Nelson examines how tech companies have quietly borrowed the language of divinity — promising omniscience, immortality, and transcendence — to sell their products. From PlayStation ads to the film Her to cloud computing metaphors, she traces the cultural myths embedded in our digital lives.

Against this backdrop, Dr. Nelson makes the case for literary fiction as a uniquely human technology: one that trains the imagination, demands active interpretation, and resists the flattening of meaning that screens so often produce.

Topics covered include:

· What distinguishes literary fiction from other media

· How tech advertising borrows the language of God

· The "ontological cut" between our online and embodied lives

· The prophetic role of speculative fiction (Forster, Asimov, and beyond)

· Faith, mortality, and what it means to be a finite human being