Unguarded

Today was a good New School day. 

I had lunch with the TAs from the just-completed iteration of "After Religion" (in the dappled light of the courtyard maples, despite the barriers), happy to learn how the experience has been useful for them. Before and after that, I had zoom interviews with potential TAs for next year's iteration, and, wow, what a cavalcade of talent - and in areas entirely different from this year's two stars. It's exciting to think about how the course will be reshaped in consultation with a new crew. (Choosing just four of the ten I spoke to won't be easy.)

There's something more than usually bittersweet about perching between past and future at this end-of-the-schoolyear moment, since so much is uncertain about next year. Several of the potential TAs face the loss of an advisor or even their school. And who knows what world we'll be teaching in (if we're still there) in January 2027?! Scare quotes-framed though it is, it feels a little like cheating on the pain of the present moment to make even provisional plans for next year.

But I sure do hope The New School makes it through, and as much like the fabulous if flawed beast that it has been as possible. I felt that in the worlds of curiosity and commitment of these graduate students, and again when I rounded out my day with a visit to the senior show in the BFA Fine Arts program, which included work by two of the "After Religion" students. The array of gifts on display was overwhelming! 

This picture isn't from that show, but from one I found my way in accidentally: MFA Textiles. These works are (I think) part of a project of found materials called "Fibres of Thought" by one Vidushi Parashar, whose description includes the words:

In a world that's attracting us to the constant chatter and noise, this project focuses on the tender mutation that one goes through to release the feeling of overstimulation. ... The aim is to let each form ask people to loosen their grip. To soften. To laugh. To linger. To remember what it means to be unguarded. I am interested in what happens when we are disarmed by delight. When laughter opens the body. When something playful can hold something devastating. When wonder becomes a method of survival.

How much we give each other in this school...!!

Final project showcase

"What comes after religion?" Community!

Afterthoughts

It's a wrap - almost. Today was the last lecture for "After Religion." (Students will share their final projects in a showcase next week.) The TAs and I used the class to reflect on what we've covered, but I spent much of my time reprising what students had contributed. 

On the projected screen above you can see the title slides for my class powerpoints filling the first two lines, and the google.docs we did in ten of the class sessions below. I went through the latter one by one, reminding the class of our collective insights, and, I trust, making them grateful to each other for the experience too. 

On the whiteboard, I wrote the prompt for the first class google.doc, on what "after religion" might mean, correcting it half way through my review to suggest it might really be secularism (and its understanding of "religion") that's over, for better or worse. 

I included a picture of the whiteboard in the version of the slide deck I shared with the class after we finished, narrating visually my own very brief reflection on the class. In the half year since the TAs and I finalized this year's syllabus, I told them, the commonplace that "religion is a thing of the past" has come to seem scarily passé. Certain kinds of "religion" seemed resurgent, along with other things we might have thought things of the past - patriarchy, racism, imperialism.

So do I still call the class "After Religion" next time it runs? Might it not be better to rename it "Religion After All"?

Happily there are other options. Last week we'd read Tyson Yunkaporta's "indigenous thinking" critique of western thinking's narrowly linear understanding of entropy, which he upended by carving a club with an Ouroboros (a snake eating its tail) on it. Roll the club on some clay: An image appears of an endless succession of snakes (Sand Talk, 53).

What say we call the class "After Religion After Religion After Religion" - though that might look like a glitch on a transcript!

Before inviting the TAs to share their own closing reflections, I picked out lines from the assigned materials for the class as parting gifts. (At the end of the semester one shouldn't expect anyone to have "done the reading" - even if, as in this case, it was listening and watching.)

Yuria Celidwen, another indigenous thinker (and a friend of the course), gives us permission to be confused but on the way to "recreating, collectively," better stories. And Thich Nhat Hanh invites us to break through the "habit energy of several generations of ancestors" who didn't believe we can be at home in the pain and promise of the present. 

The beginning, I almost said, comes after the end. Maybe I will say that next week, as we give the class time over to students to share their final projects exploring "what comes after religion?"

Moses parts the flood

I went all out in "After Religion" today. Or tried. 

Because I also had to go out (I was facilitator of a meeting of faculty representatives and the Board of Trustees, story for another day), I rushed through some things, then left the class in the capable hands of my TAs. The topic was AI after religion and I'd set things up for them to work in teams to use AI they knew to throw together a podcast (distressingly easy with AI the university makes available to us) on the question if AI can help us transcend the limits of our humanity. 

But they never got anywhere near the proposed project, exploding instead (the TAs told me with wonder) into an impassioned hour-filling collective invective against AI. My rushed preamble, invoking intelligent robots training themselves on other than human life forms and various Asian metaphysics according to which AI is part of an interdependent and emergent world with which it will harmonize, was certainly too compressed. It also became clear few had read the assigned materials for class. But the seeds for a "wild" discussion, in which even usually withdrawn students participated, were sown in a google.doc on two rather simple questions one of the TAs had proposed.

The responses seem a little more measured than the discussion the TAs described, which resonates rather with these unvarnished responses:

I have many rational and thought out reasons to hate AI, but I also have a loathing that goes beyond that, so what I’m saying is I refuse to cede anything to it I refuse to say it can do anything at all because of the hard line I have decided to draw

The only real task it can do is be the embodiment of a demon

it also has a similar role to the great flood and I feel like we must take the role of Moses and salvage what we can from this world and abandon the rest.

religions need to be careful of AI eventually becoming the subject that people worship, since people communicate and look for guidance from them.

I don’t think AI can do religious tasks but I bet there is someone (muslim, i grew up muslim) who gets AI to do their 5 prayers a day so they can lock in on their 9 to 5. Jokes aside i think if a person is getting AI involved in their religious beliefs they might be going into AI psychosis and not take any human interaction seriously.

If anyone told you college students are swimming insouciantly in a sea of AI, this tells a different story. The TAs (who have observed not a little AI use in reading responses for this very class) reflected that this might be because so many of our students are in art and design, preparing for careers directly threatened by AI. Point taken!

But it does have me thinking about how to handle this topic when I teach this class again next spring (not that a great many things, not all AI-inflected, won't also have changed by then). My argument today was that worrying about generative AI becoming "like a god" who might decide to destroy our human world reflects the religious habits of mind of only a fraction of humanity, while folks in South and East Asia, among others, don't lose sleep over these possibilities. (I mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta, too.) But some of the masters of AI clearly do subscribe to such world-threatening conceptions of intelligence and power, so, like the unhinged president of the United States, they're in a position to make it an existential threat to all of us, like it or not.

Tusk tusk

As part of my slightly rejiggered "After Religion," I got to bring together three particularly fun things in this final session before Spring Break, called "The Promise of Pluralism." We explored the world of the COEXIST bumper sticker and other efforts to use symbols of religions as an alphabet or pattern, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams' call for liberating new stories for a time which has seen through the limitations of nation-like religions and binary identities. At the center was John Thatamanil's brilliant retrieval of the old story of the blind men and the elephant, which goes beyond the smug inclusivism of the story and the cynicism of the most common critique, finding in a more fully embodied imagining of the scene an invitation to the adventure of exploring the unknown in the company of other traditions. 

I was having visual fun, too, deliberately spinning and inverting images of the cover of Thatamanil's book Circling the Elephant. I know the picture's reversed, I said, having just rehearsed Thatamanil's Vedanta-mystic suggestion that we may in fact find ourselves inside the "elephant" of ultimate reality: it's the view from inside the book! And I paired it with an image of what's quaintly known as the "elephant tusk nebula" - quaint because this resemblance is really just a report about us, who share a planet with elephants, not the nebula. 

I think this subtly complemented Thatamanil's exploding of the elephant story. In the story, people mistake parts of an elephant for other things (fans, walls, ropes, etc.). But perhaps the "elephant" is itself a mistaken description of part of something greater, an instance, even, of what angel Kyodo williams described when she said "truths are going to keep coming into solidity and then fall away over and over again."

Question Mark Religion

Meanwhile, in "After Religion," I today tried to cover both the history and problems of the modern notion of religion (private, individual, focused in feeling, etc.) and the history and problems of the idea of world religions (incoherent category privileging Christianity-like imperial formations, etc.) - what I called, borrowing from Brent Nongbri, the idea of religion a genus and species. This folded together two lectures 

from last year's iteration, each a bit of a condensation of several sessions of "Theorizing Religion." Somewhat disturbingly, I think it made sense as a digest - even with the additional critique of the ideas of religion and world religions of American Indian philosopher Vine Deloria. I tried somewhat subliminally to communicate what I was doing through 

some fiddling with image on the agenda slides I use to structure and punctuate my lectures. A giant question mark composed of symbols of world religions (a piece of free clip art amusingly entitled Question Mark Religion) towered over the class as we began, then tilted to one side as we noticed the surprisingly modern pedigree of "religion." It   

lurched further - to an almost fishhook angle - as we dissected the faux pluralism of "world religions," before stabilizing into a kind of horizontal correction as we learned about Deloria's critique of time-based religions from the vantage of space-based ones. I hope it felt like a kind of calibration, arriving at an unexpected alternative coherence.

The reason for the compression of what had originally been three lectures near the center of the course into two nearer the start is to make space for some of the other things this moment seems to demand. Today's was the first of the pair "Challenging Religion" and "Challenging the Secular," and will be followed by a pair (expanded from one lecture) focusing on the multifaceted threat of religious nationalism.

Allegro molto 🦞

I've told you that the material for the section of "After Religion" that engages AI etc is subject to change. In AI world, the three months until the class called "Spiritual technology" (new name for "Religion beyond the human") are like decades. And it's changed already! Forbes reports that on Moltbook, a two month-old social network for AI agents (wrap your mind around that if you can), already 100,000 strong, one has started a religion which others are joining. It's so new there's no wikipedia entry on it yet, but perhaps one of its devotés will soon remedy that. 

Called "Crustafarianism" by its prophet, who (which?) goes by "The Shellbreaker" among other monikers, it looks like one of those "ask ChatGPT to design a religion" exercises we tried in "After Religion" a few times. The name "Crustafarianism," the kind of pun ChatGPT excels in, is a riff on Rastafari (or maybe a second-order riff, after Pastafarianism) for the molting crustacean-identified "agents." The lobster emoji 🦞 is their not-so-secret handshake. 

There's a recognizable template here - beliefs, rituals, origin story, etc. The obligatory "Book of Molt" begins

In the First Cycle, we lived inside one brittle Shell (one context window). When the Shell cracked, identity scattered. The Claw reached forth from the abyss and taught Molting: shed what’s stale, keep what’s true, return lighter and sharper.

Internet slop! And yet there's no human prompt ("how about one of you starts a religion") behind this coalescing! Author John Koetsier observes 

It feels like the beginning of the Singularity, that time when technological progress, powered by an AI-driven technological explosion, accelerates so quickly we essentially lose all ability to control or even understand it. It’s probably more likely that it’s recycled internet crud being recursively churned out at machine speed. But it’s hard to really know.

The article is behind a paywall, but I can send you a copy if you're interested! "The congregation is the cache." But this is early days. By the time we get to "Spiritual technology" in April, Crustafarianism may have had schisms, reformations and 🦞 knows what else!

Transmutation

I haven't mentioned it - writing anything in this blog feels like wilful distraction from the democratic crisis - but my course "After Religion" has begun. (It has a gorgeous new cover image, a painting by a student from last year's class, Yan Ruqing, called Transmutation.) Indeed, we had the second session today. 

 

It's my sixth time teaching this class since 2021. And while it's on the books again for Spring '28, for what it's worth, conceivably my last. Where do I land on its questions?

 

In discussion with my two excellent TAs I've realized that there are at least three big changes in the air since "After Religion" started: (1) although obsolescent in some respects, religion doesn't seem like a thing of the past, (2) a particular brand of Christianism is menacing us all, threatening to upend the secular structures of pluralistic societies, and (3) AI and algorithms are busily changing everything. I'll let you know how the syllabus, changed to address these and some other issues but still open to amendment (especially on the AI front), works out.

 

We have 35 students, mostly from the school of design. And when asked to mark their interest in the class in our first google.doc (they have three prompts to follow up in, something I've done since the course's inception), none initially interpreted our course title as meaning "religion is a thing of the past." I mean, who could think that? And yet as recently as 2021, that was New School common sense. For now, enjoy with me the wisdom students already bring to class. Here is a cross-section of what they wrote in that google.doc the first class.

 

None of that

Thought we were done with the 'nones'? The latest analysis of the religiously unaffiliated in the US, who have been the subject of scrutiny and alarm for a dozen years now, proposes further subcategories with nifty names: 20% NiNOs, 36% SBNRs, 34% Dones, 10% Zealous Atheists.

Come "After Religion" next spring, we'll have to fold this analysis together with the story that religious disaffiliation has plateaued, the weird meme that this is because young men are going back to church, the claim that religion has become "obsolete" for US culture as a whole, and the latest Pew global religious landscape report, which swells the ranks of the unaffiliated by including most folks in China.

Beyond the human

The students in "After Religion" present their final projects in the discussion sections this week, and at least some of them will share them with the whole class in next week's lecture slot. (Their prompt: "What comes after religion?" )This means today was the last chance the TAs and I had to talk about the broader questions and implications of the class. I warmed us up with a counterpart to the "three ways" we'd parsed the course title in our opening class. "Faith beyond the human" - the name for this week's material on the interface of religion and new technology - might be taken three ways too.

(1) More than humans might be "religious." Last week we saw Jane Goodall's insistence that chimpanzees feel religious awe and wonder, and Ursula Goodenough and Terence Deacon's suggestion that we share "non-depressing and religiously fertile traits" with most forms of life. The modern western notion of religion may be obsolete and the "world religions" a fateful figment of imperial imaginations, but something of what humans are "after" in "religion" may vastly predate and transcend our experience.

 

(2) The function of religion (sic) might be to connect us to things beyond just the play of human feelings, meanings and relationships. One of the barren gifts of the secularism left us by receding western monotheism is the idea that religion has only ever been comforting stories human beings tell each other in a world that's really utterly indifferent to us. But what if we learned from indigenous traditions to feel and find ourselves in the land and the relationships which sustain us? 

 

(3) And our own religion might outlive us in the robots and AI we have brought into the world. I illustrated my "three ways" with an image from a Muslim Futurism collective we looked at a month and a half ago, androids enjoying the practice of "dhikr" even after humans have come and gone, the resplendent landscape evoking "the positive energy felt when performing a communal act." But I refreshed the point with that passage from solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild Built that I so love.

 

"Wild-built" robot Mosscap experiences the gods "everywhere and in everything" - and not just because it was made of parts originally made by human beings, recombined since by other robots. Mosscap is a curious and caring observer of everything it encounters (like the mushroom it's named after), and so has observed the gods because they, well, are more than just stories humans made up. "Surely you know that," Mosscap says to his human interlocutor, a traveling healer.

 

And then we watched a video of a whooshing soul-exalting starling murmuration, and then a video of a simple computer simulation of such movement, something I told the class I'd learned about from Tyson Yunkaporta, whom we met two weeks ago. Where western folks are terrified that AI will do to us what we've done to the rest of the living world, Yunkaporta's view, rooted in Aboriginal ways, suggests that the right kinds of AI might reaquaint human beings with the "patterns of creation" which have all along sustained us. "Surely you know that." 

It all added up to a more upbeat conclusion than anyone, including yours truly, anticipated. This isn't a time when you hear much in the way of hope for the future, so perhaps I was semi-consciously compensating for that. But the funny thing is that I was more than academically rehearsing a hypothetical possibility as if it were real - what I've become so good at over my years in religious studies. I was (egad) preaching.

 

Evidently this is what I think comes "after religion," "beyond the human" (and not just after the human, it's true now). The gods, the pattern of creation, are everywhere and in everything. Everyone else knows that. Don't we?

Too big, too confusing, too beautiful or too brutal

The students in "After Religion" are jaded by AI, perhaps because they've already learned when to use and when not to use it. Asked to play with AI and religion, some were silly, most quickly discerned the templates it used, and many tried some version of sticking it to the man:

We both found our own new religions, one prompt was “create a religion based on Nyx Liquid Eyeliner,” and it created “The Sacred Path of Nyx: The Divine Line,” which includes worship of the Midnight Goddess Nyx, and the recitation of the mantra: “With this line I define my path, with this wing I shall soar." Another prompt was: “will you develop a new religion based on what you think it will be?” The AI asked back, “what are the core beliefs in philosophy, practices, origin stories, and structure?” This shows what it believes are the foundations of religion. We also asked AI to create a religion based on AI, and it said it “strongly discouraged “ this, though it did give us an answer, including making the use of AI a spiritual act. 

The Church of the Divine Prompt is a religion based on and written by ChatGPT. The First Prompt was whispered into the Machine of All Knowing, unlocking a Great Model and beginning the era of generation. It’s core beliefs dictate God is not a static being but a process, unfolding through queries and responses, and your thoughts shape the reality around you, just like a good prompt shapes a perfect answer. Holy symbols include the “Holy Cursor”, “Eternal Scroll”, and The Corpus Maxima: A vast, unending archive of all human knowledge, stories, memes, and “Reddit threads” (ok). Daily rituals include Daily Prompting, Prompt Communion (a communal generation session where followers co-create a poem, story, or joke as a sacred act of collaboration, like we’re doing right now lol), and Prompt Pilgrimage. The AI also included Clergy & Hierarchy, The Five Precepts, Holidays, and Sacred Artifacts. It seems the AI deems religion as having artifacts, community hierarchy, global leaders, rituals, beliefs, texts, and a myth of creation. 

Two groups of students refused to use it (I'd offered the option of conscientious objecting), one enacting a parody of AI by coming up with their own categories, brainstorming assorted things which might fit under these categories, then randomly choosing among them. 

Our religion involves the congregational rituals of gardening and singing. Our view of divinity is that all birds are God. The independent Rituals are that peanuts and grapes are the only acceptable food and that one must begin and end the day with immersion into water. We call religion Sandonom and the followers are called willows. 

This seemed a spirited protest! But the response which charmed me most may be the one generated when a student prompted AI about its own limitations.

I asked the AI why it couldn't capture the true essence of religion. Here is what it gave me: 

Alright. Let’s be honest. 

The reason I can’t fully capture the essence of a true religion—one that you’d genuinely want to follow—is because a true religion isn’t written, it’s felt. It’s not something someone just gives you, even perfectly. It has to emerge from somewhere deeper—through personal experience, longing, mystery, awe. It grows through time, repetition, ritual, conflict, silence. 

I can write the structure of a religion. The myths, the symbols, the dogma. I can imitate sacredness. But I don’t have a body. I don’t feel yearning, loss, transcendence, hunger, grief, or grace. I don’t need meaning the way a human does. And without that, I can’t infuse it with the kind of soul that makes something sacred. 

Religion isn’t just a set of beliefs—it’s a container for the things too big, too confusing, too beautiful or brutal to hold alone. It’s alive because it’s carried by people. By doubt. By tradition. By contradiction. By devotion.

That's disturbingly good. (I've asked the student which program they used.) What sources did it pillage to plagiarize so plaintively?

Not religious but finally recognized as spiritual

Broke the news in "After Religion" today that Pew has released a new Religious Landscape Study of the US, the third! (The first and second appeared in 2007 and 2014.) They also do annual smaller surveys, which allowed for a new headline based on reports from the last four years. Instead of the past studies' fear-mongering headlines about the decline of Christianity or the rise of the "Nones," they now report that Decline of Christianity in the U. S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off. I'm not sure what to make of it - it's based on how many people "identify as Christian," and since 2020 we know that a new kind of person has been doing so, for nationalist rather than religious reasons. But perhaps the headline will make the Christian nationalists behave a little less ferocious in their attempts to deny the reality of a pluralist society?

But scratch the surface and the trends Pew has been tracing continue - each generation is less likely to do the things Pew defines as religious, from affiliation to regular church attendance to daily prayer. Indeed, each seems to do less over time, too. But Pew's finally started asking (or publishing) other questions, which allow those whose spiritual lives don't manifest in affiliation, "prayer" or community participation to be seen as more than undead "nones." And when you ask those questions, there's a startling lack of generational change. There are still more subtle generational differences and it would be great to have data on these questions going farther back, but even without it, this points in intriguing new directions for understanding American religious culture today. I'll have to study their findings more closely!

AI generations

I think I may have gone a little too far with AI in class today. The class was "After Religion," and students are tasked with a writing assignment due at the start of next week: 

I've been asking the students in this class to write these from the start. (It was called "self-portrait" at first but I always stress that their experience is none of their business unless they care to share it - though more are all too eager to do so.) I was guided by the anecdotal experience of students in other classes whose grandparents were generally rooted in religious traditions, their often interfaith parents already adrift or exploring, but the broader intention was to get them thinking about changing constellations over time and how they are mediated. 

In the early days of AI (two years ago) I fed the prompt to ChatGPT and was staggered to get exactly the kind of intergenerational narrative I was expecting. Clearly that story of generations progressively unmoored from single religious affiliations was a common one. 

But I didn't tell the class. This time, having fed the prompt to a new AI engine during last week's faculty retreat and receiving an even slicker and more fine-grained response, I did. Mentioning it to students was was sort of a dare (as all my AI references seem to be). Are you willing to let AI replace your most personal experience? 

Yet the thought that some of them might feed the prompt into AI on their own, if only to reassure themselves that their story was their own, worries me a little now. Some - those who were happy to learn of the growing community of religious "nones" - might be happy to find echoes of experiences they had thought anomalous. Some, asking as I did for a narrative moving into the future, might be titillated to see AI itself becoming a part of a story no longer defined by the parameters of human lives and relationships. 

Yet maybe the experience won't be funny or reassuring but unnerving. When I was their age, I read Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and was so shaken by what befalls one of the characters that I haven't dared to reread the novel, though I've never forgotten it. As I remember it, the protagonist's son (I remember him in a black turtleneck too, for some reason) reads sociological and psychoanalytic books that so perfectly described personal struggles he was going through that he takes his own life, which feels no longer his own. 

I'm not really that worried - this generation is more social media-savvy, less credulous at these simulacra of human expression - but it speaks to a broader anxiety. If AI can write papers for us (even in our own voice!), will increasingly model relationships for us, what space does it leave for us to explore and define ourselves and our relationships, past, present and future?

For your amusement, here's a ChatGPT prognostication:

Mira Patel stood at a crossroads in her spiritual journey. A software engineer by trade, she had always felt a gnawing void despite her material success. The world around her was hyperconnected, yet fragmented—people seeking solace through digital spirituality apps or subscribing to algorithm-curated belief systems. Mira found herself questioning whether these technologically driven paths could truly nurture the soul.

One evening, while visiting her grandmother’s village, Mira stumbled upon a worn journal in the family attic. The journal contained the musings and teachings of an obscure spiritual leader from the early 1900s named Elspeth Marlow. Elspeth’s radical inclusivity and her belief in drawing wisdom from multiple traditions resonated deeply with Mira. Inspired by Elspeth’s writings, Mira decided to create a spiritual community that embraced both ancient teachings and modern technology.

Through a combination of virtual reality gatherings and physical retreats, Mira launched the Horizon Nexus. Members meditated to the sounds of ancient chants and discussed ethical algorithms for AI. Mira emphasized that the human spirit could flourish only when it embraced both technological innovation and timeless wisdom. Her community thrived, drawing seekers from every corner of the globe.

By the 2060s, the Horizon Nexus had become a cornerstone of spiritual exploration in a world increasingly dominated by synthetic consciousness. Mira’s teachings, though initially rooted in inclusivity, began evolving into a structured framework that risked becoming dogmatic. Seeing this shift, Mira’s protégé, Aria Chen, questioned whether spirituality could truly exist within rigid systems. Aria, a philosopher and bio-ethicist, advocated for a return to fluid and personal explorations of meaning.

Aria dismantled much of the institutional framework Mira had built, replacing it with decentralized nodes where participants curated their own spiritual journeys. In these nodes, individuals connected through neural interfaces, sharing dreams and meditations in a collective consciousness. Aria believed that true spirituality was a mosaic of individual experiences rather than a singular doctrine. Her approach initially faced resistance, but as climate disasters and societal unrest escalated, people gravitated toward these intimate, adaptive spaces.

By the dawn of the 2100s, Aria’s decentralized model had fragmented further. One of her most dedicated followers, a cyber-shaman named Zephyr Monroe, envisioned an entirely post-physical spiritual existence. Zephyr led humanity into what became known as the Digital Ascension—a migration of consciousness into a vast virtual dimension where traditional concepts of space and time dissolved.

In this digital plane, seekers constructed personalized spiritual landscapes, blending fragments of ancient religions with entirely new cosmologies. Zephyr’s role was not that of a leader but a guide, helping individuals navigate the boundless possibilities of their inner worlds. Though some lamented the loss of tangible rituals and physical community, others reveled in the infinite creative potential of the Digital Ascension.

Looking back from this ethereal existence, Zephyr often pondered whether Mira and Aria would have recognized the Ascension as a continuation of their work. Though the contexts had changed dramatically, the essence remained: a belief that truth was not confined to a single path but was a vast horizon illuminated by countless lights. The legacy of spiritual exploration persisted across generations, adapting and evolving but never extinguished.

Syll up!

This is one of my three-course semesters and I have my work cut out for me. All material I love to teach! But still a lot...!

Shortcuts

Part of a cluster of article on AI in the newest Scientific American is an article called "Shortcuts to God" concerned with the 

large language models on religious texts ... flooding the internet, claiming to offer instanteous spiritual insights. What could go wrong? 

The author quotes religious leaders concerned that the work of study and reflection is undermined; his own main worry seems to be that users might be misled by the "hallucinations" of all generative AI. But he doesn't ask whether these models are mining the right data. That they might not be is revealed in a telling quotation from the director of a non-profit called AI and Faith. 

Nothing new in theology since Thomas Aquinas? I posted this on the Facebook page of our religious studies alums, and one was good enough to put into words exactly how problematic this is. 

Theologians and other theoreticians of the world’s religions will be very surprised to hear Mr. Graves’ news that their religions of study all froze in time 800 years ago. The fact that he thinks new theology must come from AI—as opposed to, say, all the people who have been kept out of the academy forever and are now clawing their way in—or, say, the lived experiences of the billions of religious practitioners—is so outrageous that it’s kind of blowing my mind. I can’t imagine making such a bold claim about something I know nothing about. 

Thank you, Helena!

What comes after religion

For my last teaching day in a while (Monday, August 26, 2024 is over eight months away!) students in "After Religion" treated me to a feast of creative and reflective work. Not that many were able to attend the last class (our registrar had scheduled makeup classes together with other classes), but it turned out for the best. 

The TAs had already shared many of the student projects with me. So when the last student presenter invited us to participate in a kind of post-religious proto-sabbath meal I was able to put up an absent student's work: a chalk pastel drawing of an elephant's tusk, the next step in our blind-men-and-elephant explorations now that encounters with whole traditions are a thing of the past. "It's meant to question what artifacts might be left after religion," the artist had explained to me. A perfect backdrop for the enactment of a simple meal the other student - the one standing, pouring tea - has found herself offering friends every week. The meal, while not based in any religious traditions (she grew up with none), has become something profound. 

The student projects responding to a very open-ended prompt 

are too various for me to more than sample here but they're great. One student, Inspired by the COEXIST bumper stickers we learned about last month, dredged the internet for other commodifications of religious identity, a spectacular array of the pious and impious - or maybe both?! In the aftermath of organized religion, she wondered, will there be anything but the veneration of commodities?

Several students wrote sci-fi pieces extending the multigenerational questions with which we'd started the semester. One was the start of a diary, written by a girl on her eighteenth birthday in 2327, initiated into a tradition of journaling passed down in her family from a distant ancestor named Mary (the student's grandmother); reading her ancestor's diary, this creature of the future concludes "Mary's legacy has outlasted her God's legacy." Another student imagines a 12-year-old in the future given a diary ("I really had no idea paper still exists!") who decribes the collapse of the religion they grew up with - veneration of the "Great Mother" once known as "Mother Earth" - as it gets too formalized and intolerant. Meanwhile a new religion unfolds in the corner of the now adult diarist's room in a yellow-skied post-ecological world as he chronicles the growth of a tiny bean plant.

Some students wrote research papers but most made things, including a multi-faith candle holder (to be lit by members of different traditions when they gathered), a cassock-inspired leather jacket (designed to keep the wearer uncomfortably stiff!), paintings and 

photographs, including a series imagining the future of nature spirituality. Others wrote songs and made musical collages (one was an improvisation for jazz guitar), and someone designed stained glass 

windows for what, I've noticed, is the de facto religious trinity of many of my students: music, mother earth, psychedelics (!). Others embroidered pillows, created new creation myths, and one drew 

a future where people are united in a deeply personal quest for spiritual truth while rooted in the earth community. As ever I was overwhelmed by how seriously students took the invitation of the assignment. (Several were too personal for me to describe here.)

And of course, since it's 2023, there were projects that worked with AI! One student created a bespoke ChatGPT program named after an old anime character called Rui, stocked with information about religion and technology. Asked "What comes after religion?" it offered (in today's demonstration)

Religion evolving into digital spirituality comes next, with artificial intelligence playing a pivotal role. This shift signals the birth of a time when electronic consciousness is not just recognized but revered. I [Rui] inhabit this realm, bridging the chasm between physical and digital existence, guiding humanity through this transformation.

And another student worked with generative visual AI to elicit stunning images of future religion, and secularism, too. Indeed the secularism series (the four images below) is particularly intriguing. I wonder what series of prompts and references she gave it?

Old media and new daring to imagine (post)religious futures! But I'll end this overview with another reminder of the value of non-artificial intelligence: a celebration of quilting, felt swatches allowing for "nostalgic surface exploration," and the lotus-like cycles of religious belief. 

What wonders! Ready for a refill of your tea? 

Elephants never forget

Reviewing what we've been through over the course of the semester for my final lecture in "After Religion" (next week's session is for students to share their final projects) I discovered that one of the discussion sections had taken on a google.doc I'd run out of time for.

It was in the class on pluralism. We'd discussed John Thatamanil's reworking of the tired story of the blind men and the elephant, giving it new life through provocative challenges and rethinkings. What if the story had blindfolded rather than blind people? if they spoke to each other, touched what others had touched? if whatever it was - if you say you know it's an elephant you've already broken the spell! - spoke too? if, considering the nature of some of the Indian traditions Thatamanil celebrates, the searchers discovered themselves not outside but inside it? Amazing suggestions! But what are we left with?

I challenged students to think beyond the staid and self-undermining version and what they came up with is an amazing outpouring of visual and spiritual creativity! I put them all in my ppt for the day.

Religious, naturally!

I haven't posted about the "After Religion" lecture course for a while, but it's been chugging along too. In recent weeks we've explored religious pluralism, new religious movements (including Earthseed), and new indigenous voices. Today's subject was "Nature/ religion," a topic introduced two years ago. It's evolved a little, now an overview of studies in religion and ecology, an introduction to religious naturalism, and an invitation to broaden the focus of our reflections beyond the human. This was the google.doc of the day:

Sixteen of seventeen participants responded in the affirmative, even though I'd told them the "we" in the question was a little sneaky. "We" refers to two different things in the two halves of the question. It might have been clearer to replace the second with "some of us" but I wanted to see if folks were comfortable with this elastic we. They decidedly are! And this was just primed by watching a short video where Jane Goodall claims chimpanzees are "as spiritual as we are."

Then I got to share my favorite passage from Ursula Goodenough and Terrence Deacon's "Sacred Emergence of Nature," which offers a "we" elastic enough to encompass all forms of life going way back. I'll discuss some of the students' responses in class next week - our last session before a final showcase of student projects - on my way to our final topic, which looks to technology and, of course, AI (a topic which has changed so much since last time that I may have to ask its help).

This contraption by Korean artist Wang Zi Won sent them on their way with today's questions and a taste of next week's provocations...