Ilia DELIO. Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019. pp. 218 + xiv. $24.00 pb. ISBN 9781626983472. Reviewed by Calvin MERCER, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858.

This is a delightful autobiographical account of the author’s journeys from scientist to theologian and from cloistered nun to a post-Vatican II experiment in religious life. I say “delightful,” because along the way we get plenty of personal stories about youthful pranks, delivering the high school salutatorian address in Ukrainian, smoking her last cigarette sneaked into the monastery, and exploring gender identity issues.

Currently Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, Delio began her academic career in science with a doctorate in pharmacology. In her third year of doctoral studies, she happened upon a Time magazine article on a book about Thomas Merton. She ran out to purchase Monica Furlong’s Merton: A Biography and spent the night absorbed in the story. Many people have their own version of an encounter with Merton. For Delio, “My heart was on fire, and by morning I knew that my career in pharmacology would come to an end.” (p. 49) Just like that.

Delio stood before a promising scientific career in a field rich with many research possibilities. “I was on the brink of a successful career, the dream of every immigrant family, and I was now going to renounce this career for a life of poverty and asceticism.” (p. 55) Her PhD was granted in 1984, but by then she was already settled in a Carmelite cloistered monastery. Even though introduced to monasticism by Merton, Delio was staunchly conservative, avoiding the reforms of Vatican II. Her migration to the Franciscans led to her studying theology at Fordham University with a leading Bonaventure scholar, Ewert H. Cousins. Cousins introduced her to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, which began an important phase of her professional life working to reconcile religion and science. Her monastic journey issued in founding with a friend a noncanonical experimental community.

Her academic journey continued with teaching stints at Washington Theological Union, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown College, and finally Villanova University. Teilhard became increasingly important as she grappled with issues in religion and science and, in particular, radical human enhancement technologies. “Teilhard’s vision is my vision as well.” (p. ix) She taught a course called “Facebook and Jesus,” and her explorations into religion and the technological future brought her into contact with tech pioneers like Martin Rothblatt, who writes on mind uploading and digital immortality. While she left science for theology, her pharmacological work in physiology and neuroscience provides a strong background for understanding the breakthrough radical human enhancement therapies and technologies.

Delio is among an increasing number of Christian voices leading the church to understand, critique, and play a role in our technological future. Given the pace of technological development and the important theological issues at stake, those voices are coming none too soon. Delio contends that the speed of evolution is one of the major problems facing the church, and “… it is unlikely that the church can survive indefinitely into the future in its present form: the church must either reorganize along the lines of evolution or resign itself to becoming a minor sect.” (p. 185) As a self-identified “Christian cyborg,” Delio stands with those who believe that religion and science have plenty of common ground and that the world of technology and artificial intelligence, bringing into being techno sapiens, is “… integral to God and not outside the sphere of God’s love.” (p. xiii) The final two chapters, quite Teilhardian in tone, are a mystical meditation on love.

Increasingly, theologians and ethicists providing important critiques of the exploding technologies and therapies of radical human enhancement come out of graduate school with this as their area of expertise. Delio’s journey is illustrative of those scholars who come to this topic via traditional academic routes. She is the author of numerous books, including Christ in Evolution, The Emergent Christ, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, and Making All Things New: Catholicity, Cosmology, Consciousness.