This page summarises the scholarship section of a personal website for Christopher Michael Luna, as preserved in a web archive. It is written in the third person and relies only on what that section stated.
The argument
The archived text opens with an epigraph from Dr. David Morgan’s book Visual Piety, which says that the products of the humanities help governments and institutions of every kind carry out their work. From there, the author argues that the humanities are more than polite learning or a route to critical thinking. In his account, they are tools for building institutions, communicating and leading:
- Philosophy shows how systems of thought are put together. Understanding how ideas depend on one another helps in designing structures that are coherent and persuasive.
- Media and art interpretation reveals how films, texts and images move audiences to see the world differently. Knowing how media works makes it possible to use it well.
- History is treated as a long record of cultural experiments. By seeing how material conditions and human choices interacted in the past, we gain evidence for how to change conditions today.
The guiding question
After eleven years of postsecondary study, he says he divided his time between deep research and applying what he learned in community work. One interdisciplinary question steered the research: how culture is produced, shaped and spread through material production, and how that production shapes behaviour.
Education
The site describes studies at Duke University, Harvard Divinity School and Hampshire College, favouring a mix of breadth and depth over narrow specialisation.
- Hampshire College (BA, History of Science and Religion, February 2009). A thesis titled Reason Is a Choice compared how John Milton and William Blake thought about reason in relation to art, science and politics. Undergraduate work also covered the history of the book and early Christianity.
- Harvard Divinity School (Master of Divinity, May 2014). Further study of philosophy of science and nineteenth-century German philosophy, plus the history of esoteric religion in the United States. His thesis, Unfinished, examined the religious significance of questions behind artificial intelligence. He also began studying Buddhist literature.
- Duke University (PhD, Religion and Modernity, expected May 2021 at the time of the archive). Working with Dr. David Morgan, he explored material culture and used the culture of Silicon Valley as a case study of how a secular, scientific world can be understood in religious terms. The dissertation was provisionally called Uncanny Valley.
Related reading
How the pieces connect
Read together, the sections describe a researcher who moves between theory and practice. The early work on Milton and Blake looked at how ideas about reason developed alongside art and politics. The Harvard thesis took a modern technology, artificial intelligence, and asked what it assumes about being a thinking self or soul. The doctoral project then applied a material-culture lens, which asks how objects, buildings, tools and networks carry and shape beliefs, to the world of Silicon Valley.
The through-line is the claim that even a culture proud of being rational and secular tells stories about meaning, purpose and the human being. Recognising those stories, the author suggests, helps people make better decisions about the institutions and technologies they build.
Breadth over specialisation
The archived text contrasts this approach with a narrow doctoral specialisation. His stated preference was to study widely while still going deep through intensive case studies, which is why a single résumé includes the history of the book, philosophy of science, aesthetics, American religious history and Buddhist literature.
Note on dates
All degree dates and the expected completion of the doctorate come from the archive, captured in 2020. They may no longer be current.
Why it matters to general readers
The case made here is one many students and professionals meet at some point: that reading carefully, thinking historically and understanding how media persuades are everyday skills. They help in civic life, in workplaces and in any role that involves shaping how groups of people think and behave.
See the Buddhism page for the second theme of the profile, or the explainer on material culture for background on the method.