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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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)
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?
