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...

Driving while religious

On my way to pluralism and multiple religious belonging in "After Religion" today, we took a quick tour of the eponymous COEXIST bumper sticker. Students had watched a documentary about how a Polish poster designer's elegant monotheistic work became the rather more visually chaotic American phenomenon (not with his blessing) but it fell to me to introduce the world of COEXIST varieties, parodies and critiques. World religion logos repurposed as letters can spell TOLERANCE or CORNDOGS but also REPENT or even JESUS CHRIST.  

I settled for one from some cranky Evangelicals blaring CONTRADICT, conveniently posing the question that would lead us into exclusivism/ inclusivism/pluralism. But what was even more fun was thinking about these as bumper stickers, a quite specific form of (attenuated) communication. I remarked that, vague though it be, I'd rather share the road with someone sporting COEXIST than most bumper stickers - though one would need further research before predicting better road behavior. Seeing the US religious landscape as a highway was a bonus!

Unhappily relevant

It was a little disturbing to find materials I'd included in one of my lectures in "After Religion" quoted in a piece in the New York Times. This isn't because I don't wish in that class to be au courant, but because that was the lecture "The Elephant in the Room," about white Christian nationalism in America and its efforts to dial back the clock, and this was a piece about the unassuming new Speaker of the House of Representatives. The founding director of PRRI, some of whose recent studies I discussed with our class, is quoted saying:

while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.

Those last words name the dangerous lunacy of this theological persuasion more clearly than anything else I've seen. Even as, well, isn't that what lots of people de facto think "America" is about? Happily our students have been exposed to a richer and more complex history, and the need for "new stories" - stories in the plural.

Buddhist horizons

Oh, how I love teaching about Buddhism! Buddhism gets only a week in "After Religion," and the main object is to unsettle pat views of Buddhism (which I caricatured as Stop- Think- Stop Thinking- Done!), but it lets me explore another world of traditions and possibilities... Since this is a time when future courses are in the air - students are registering for Spring 2024 and faculty are assembling the 2024-25 (!) curricuum - I've half a mind to bring back one of my Buddhist studies courses. Or take a crack at orphaned "Buddhist Sutra Literature"?!

Grieving and gutted

By happenstance I had guest speakers lined up to speak in "After Religion" last week and this week. E, an alum studying for the rabbinate, was to help us puzzle through how Judaism "became a religion" in modern western societies. R, a colleague teaching Islamic studies, was to discuss the difficulty of studying "Islam and Muslims" in English and in the terms of religion, etc.

But this is the middle of October, 2023. Hamas' massacres in Israel happened five days before my first visitor. By today, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have also died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced by Israeli reprisals; many have been killed in the West Bank, too. The hostages taken by Hamas remain in captivity, even as all of Gaza is held hostage by the shutting off of its access to water, electricity and medicines.

And we had to have class! My visitors, both Americans but E Jewish and R Muslim, gave voice to the profound grief they and their communities are experiencing, not only because of the loss of life but because of the reactions of others to these losses and threats, ranging from indifference to bloodlust. These reactions, we learned, resonated with deep and defining histories of hurt. 

E spoke to us about anti-semitism in the west - cavils and conspiracies having little to do with Jewish life and "religion" (though rooted in Christian narratives) but depressingly, frighteningly persistent. If Hamas' attack was horrific - the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Shoah - the response among many non-Jews here was too, especially in the progressive circles where we move, where the victims were ignored, their killers excused or even celebrated. Are Jewish lives so expendable to them? Had they - had she - ever really been accepted as fellow human beings worthy of life? E spoke of being overcome by grief for "dead Palestinians and dead Israelis," a grief the articulation of whose breadth is seen as betrayal on both sides. 

R, speaking a week later, as the United States government has aligned itself with the Israeli state and members of both political parties have endorsed a near-genocidal siege of Gaza, shared the bitterness of Muslims who are forever having to beg to recognized as human in western contexts where the Muslim is persistently associated with the medieval, the barbarous, violence. I'd introduced "orientalism" in the class a few weeks ago but realized I'd only scratched the surface. The foundational premising of the west's very identity on its distinction from the 'oriental' makes our efforts to correct these issues, R said, seem merely "rhetorical." She and others in her generation are "gutted" at the return of the same islamophobia as during 9/11.

What a gift these were, painful but precious. I learned an enormous amount, and students surely did too. I have learned to recognize the dehumanizing cadences - sometimes implicitly and even explicitly genocidal - of many reactions to the situation. But I've also realized that I have no experience remotely analogous to the intergenerational traumas they described. I could only wanly observe (to myself) that the collision of these histories in Palestine/Israel allowed outsiders culpably to misunderstand what was going on, whether supposing there is an eternal enmity between Jews and Muslims (when in fact, R reminded us, there were 1400 years of coexistence) or thinking what's happening there is not deeply entangled with the ideas - religious, historical, "modern"- of the rest of us, especially those who think ourselves better than the histories of the "old world."

Google.doctor, heal thyself!

In my lecture course, "After Religion," I usually have students contribute to a google.doc each class. This is a holdover from when we were meeting online, a silent acknowledgment that many of them are online on their phones or laptops even during lecture - and a way to make the class visible to itself as a learning community. (It's also always fun to watch a google.doc growing; I add to the fun of it by providing starting points for contributors in a bunch of different colors.) Many more students are comfortable contributing in this written form than speaking up, and so we get a wider range of views, valuable for discussion - and for me, as I prepare the next class. 

So today I started with last week's google.doc, whose prompt was Is the United States a secular society? Why? The responses were overhwhelmingly in the negative, but I was able to pull out five often overlapping but distinct claims for discussion, and frame a new question for reflection. This appoach takes a bit of time (I'm silly about formatting powerpoint slides in aesthetically pleasing ways) but it keeps students engaged. They see their own and their classmates' words on the screen (I highlightsome but include all), feel seen and heard, appreciate that their thinking on the issue matters.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes the question is posed poorly, and sometimes students just don't want to play ball. Something like this happened last time I taught this course. In the secularism week I'd asked them Is God dead? If so, why do some people think not? If not, why do some people think so? This generated some interesting responses, but most rejected the question. None really engaged the Nietzschean claim, which is not so much a question about 'God' but about a master narrative. So the following week - corresponding to this week - I tried again, getting wordier still: Is there a direction/ purpose to human history? If so, are some places/times/nations especially important? If not, why would some people think so? This was an effort to get them to consider the religious framing of white nationalism, but, as I shared with you at the time, while lots of other thoughtful things came out, it flopped as a way to get them to say whether history has a larger shape. What would that even mean?

I dutifully wrote out representative responses for the next class (the same ones I'd earlier culled for this blog...), but congratulated the class on foiling me. Perhaps this was a bad question, the need for a meta-narrative something we've happily outgrown. Still, I was a little sorry we hadn't admitted that, no, there's no story, i.e., God is dead. Try again next year? So this year, in conversation with the TAs, I replaced the wordy "Is God dead?..." question with the question about secularism. And for this class, I went big and point-blank. The prompt baldly asked: Where are we going? 

The responses were gratifyingly serious. I wasn't asking them, as the the earlier iteration's had, to critique other people's views, but asking them their thoughts. (I prefaced it with a reminder that their private views were nobody's business unless they cared to share them, while enjoining them to define the "we" as broadly as they wished.) 

But now I find myself in a quandary. What do I do with all these thoughts? Worrying my way through it I've come up with two quite different ways of representing what I read. The one above shows the students' measured responses but it doesn't convey what it feels like to actually read them. For that I tried something less staid... 

It's the intensity of these responses, some hopeful but most fearful we're "going nowhere," soon to reap what we've sown in climatic doom, which leaves me in a quandary. I don't see how I can fold these responses nicely into the class as it's planned and continue merrily on my way. The next segment is on the "world religions" and their travails, but there's no expression of interest or hope in them here. The view of history I've elicited is disenchanted. If this is where we're going to, who cares about the world religions, however construed? Band-aids and pain-killers at best. The implicit promise of world religions discourse - that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any one philosophy - seems idle when the horizon is already closed.

What is my responsibility toward these students? (Too late for the assiduously academic religious studies scruples, which keep personal conviction safely parked outside the classroom; I guess I've really evolved beyond them...!) I'm struggling to find a way to articulate my dilemma. It's like I've planned a splendid vegetarian meal only to find out my guests are meat-eaters, or is it the opposite? I have to continue with the class as planned - a syllabus is a sort of contract, after all. But it can't be as though we this didn't happen. It's not that I didn't expect such views (I may share them...), but the google.doc setup makes public what is otherwise out of sight, grounding the community of our inquiry resolutely in us, here, now. 

Where are we going? What has religious studies to offer now? 

Back to school

Just in time for the new semester (we begin Monday), my syllabi!

None of the classes is new, having been last taught in Fall 2021, Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, respectively, but all have been more or less significantly updated. Theorizing is incorporating Universe of Terms (auditioned in After Religion last semester), bringing back a section on classic texts (Hume and Schleiermacher, welcome back!) and exploring the inaugural issue of the new journal Queer Trans Religion. After Religion brings in the religion of Earthseed, Islamic feminist environmentalism, Amazonian animism, and the story of the COEXIST bumper sticker. And Religion of Trees, which didn't have a chance to run its full course last time, is kitted out with more botany, two field trips, and "wild card" sessions exploring the gendering and racialization of trees - and how the history of religion has been (mis)represented by tree diagrams; under the guidance of an undergraduate academic fellow we're making a zine, too! 

I"ll keep you posted, not least to help myself keep them distinct.

Don't trust anything it says

Our provost's office has sent around suggestions for responsible integration of generative AI into classes, with some sample language for syllabi. I quite like these, from courses at the University of Pennsylvania:

You may use AI programs e.g. ChatGPT to help generate ideas and brainstorm. However, you should note that the material generated by these programs may be inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise problematic. Beware that use may also stifle your own independent thinking and creativity. You may not submit any work generated by an AI program as your own. If you include material generated by an AI program, it should be cited like any other reference material (with due consideration for the quality of the reference, which may be poor). Any plagiarism or other form of cheating will be dealt with severely under relevant Penn policies. 

That's from a class on bioethics and the law. An entrepreneurship class is even more gung-ho:

I expect you to use AI (ChatGPT and image generation tools, at a minimum), in this class. In fact, some assignments will require it. Learning to use AI is an emerging skill, and I provide tutorials in Canvas about how to use them. I am happy to meet and help with these tools during office hours or after class. Be aware of the limits of ChatGPT: 

• If you provide minimum effort prompts, you will get low quality results. You will need to refine your prompts in order to get good outcomes. This will take work. 

• Don’t trust anything it says. If it gives you a number or fact, assume it is wrong unless you either know the answer or can check in with another source. You will be responsible for any errors or omissions provided by the tool. It works best for topics you understand. 

• AI is a tool, but one that you need to acknowledge using. Please include a paragraph at the end of any assignment that uses AI explaining what you used the AI for and what prompts you used to get the results. Failure to do so is in violation of the academic honesty policies. 

Be thoughtful about when this tool is useful. Don’t use it if it isn’t appropriate for the case or circumstance.

I'm sure ChatGPT will come up in my classes, but the kind of work demanded in a seminar makes it less of a threat than for some other kinds of instruction. It came up when I was talking with the TAs for my upcoming lecture course "After Religion" today, too. Since the opening and closing assignments either ask them to reflect on personal experiences or work in a creative medium to articulate a personal vision, ChatGPT will be of limited use. The more bookish midterm essay prompts are specifically about very specific readings in juxtaposition, so ChatGPT may draw a blank there too. 

But there is one assignment where I though ChatGPT might sneak in, and maybe to the good: a 3-minute video on a contemporary movement or phenomenon of interest to the students, an assignment included as much for the benefit of the class - so they become aware of a variety of topics - as for the individual students. Though they'll still have to generate the content and narrate it, it's an obvious case where ChatGPT might promise to help.

I just confirmed it, asking "Write me a three-minute presentation on Vale do Amanhecer" (the example I offer in class for this assignment) and receiving an effective presentation in nine paragraphs, each with a title - just right for a ppt. Students in a hurry often have a hard time distinguishing minor details from major factors, and I've found student presentations consistently weak on providing enough framing context to help their audiences engage what they're talking about. ChatGPT's blandly competent format would be better for the class.

I'm not about to let students bypass research, though. Remember: 

• Don’t trust anything it says. If it gives you a number or fact, assume it is wrong unless you either know the answer or can check in with another source. You will be responsible for any errors or omissions provided by the tool. It works best for topics you understand. 

And presumably the topics they choose will be ones they have ideas or questions about, if not yet understanding. Could this perhaps motivate meaningful research and reflective work after all, as well as more user-friendly presentations?

Hey, I've just done something recommended in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Instead of ignoring it or trying to forbid it, try to find ways of using generative AI in your field or course in a meaningful way. As promised, seeing what it can and can't do in a setting I understand offers a new vista for assignments. 

Keep yarning

Another iteration of "After Religion" wrapped, though today's was the penultimate session: next week is devoted to a showcase of student work. I've ended lecture courses with student work showcases for years but for some reason I've been unusually insistent this time on the importance of my voice not being the last one heard. 

This built on evolving discussions about what story to tell about "after religion." When I asked them to tell such a story or stories, students resisted and refused. Everyone's experience is different, some said, and equally valid. History is narrated by the victors, said others. Linear stories are part of the colonial mindset, said yet others, unlike the cyclical time of indigenous traditions, not to mention stories older than humanity told by creator spirits. Still, I said, if you're going to use the word "after" some kind of story is implied, and better that you have a story and own it than defer or default to others'. Maybe your story is cyclical. Or polyvocal. Or perspectival. Or ancient.

What I was recommending was a spatial and relational approach to storytelling, which we'd encountered in Tyson Yunkaporta's practice of "yarning" in Sand Talk, as he engages various topics through reported conversations with others in particular times and places, part of a "structured cultural activity" grounded in “story, humour, gesture and mimicry for consensus-building, meaning making and innovation" with "protocols of active listening, mutual respect and building on what others have said" (131). The students' concerns about a master narrative are spot-on. But the way to decolonize it isn't to presume to be able to do without story, as if we could be but without being in any particular time or place or relationships.

All more easily said than done, especially in a college classroom in a settler colonial society, in which we routinely swoop from one time or place to another, as if rendered weightless in the purity of our intellectual inquiry. As in years past I brought together the title slides of the semester's lectures and said the intention wasn't linear, everything was still on the table, all the questions open, as if it's a map rather than a narrative. Keep yarning.

The video above was a bridge between last week's discussion of religious naturalism and this week's on technology, "boids" murmuring like starlings - incidentally also in Yunkaporta.

Unto the seventh paragraph

We're at the point in "After Religion" we we start pluralizing voices. One of the TAs gave a mini-lecture today so thought-provoking that we wound up spending most of the class discussing it. Which isn't to say that I agreed with all he said! Sort of the point, I guess!

Anyway, the topic was how traditions old and new are configured or configure themselves as religions, and his focus was an interview with Leora Batnitzky about how Judaism "became a religion." Appropriate in its way for the first night of Passover, his presentationit was framed by a story about memory.

When Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, saw that the Jewish people were threatened by tragedy, he would go to a particular place in the forest where he lit a fire, recited a particular prayer, and asked for a miracle to save the Jews from the threat. Because of the Holy Fire and faithfulness of the prayer, the miracle was accomplished, averting the tragedy. 

Later, when the Baal Shem Tov’s disciple, the Maggid of Mezrich, had to intervene with heaven for the same reason, he went to the same place in the forest where he told the Master of the Universe that while he did not know how to light the fire, he could still recite the prayer, and again, the miracle was accomplished. 

Later still, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov, in turn a disciple of the Maggid of Mezrich, went into the forest to save his people. “I do not know how to light the fire,” he pleaded with God, “and I do not know the prayer, but I can find the place and this must be sufficient.” Once again, the miracle was accomplished. 

When it was the turn of Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn, the great grandson of the Maggid of Mezrichwho, who was named after the Baal Shem Tov, to avert the threat, he sat in his armchair, holding his head in his hands, and said to God: “I am unable to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story. That must be enough.”

It's a great story for a course called "After Religion," not least because it allows of different interpretations. The TA presented the story as an allegory for how Judaism was "protestantized," becoming a religion of "inner feeling" rather than law (something he thought was a good thing). A student who identifies as a Polish Catholic said the story seemed to apply more generally, and made clear that what's most important in religion is intention. 

I asked if intention is the same thing as feeling, and if the story isn't really about something else again, namely storytelling. We talked a little about how well contructed this particular story was, how it seemed to be heading toward a tipping point yet finds there isn't one: intention's enough. Or is it? Not all the students had noticed that there was no miracle at the end of the fourth paragraph, and so the rabbi's last words are really a question. Was it really enough? 

[A brief internet search traces the story to the preface to Elie Wiesel's 1964 The Gates of the Forest, where it ends with the words "And It was sufficient. God made man because he loves stories." I asked my TA where he found this artfully truncated version, and he told me he'd been unable to locate the version he was seeking, in Giorgio Agamben's 2014 The Fire and the Story - which it happens is not truncated - and happened on this trimmed one instead.]

We contemplated what further paragraphs of the story might be, recounting experiences of further generations. They'll keep telling the story, one student said confidently. (ChatGPT when asked said the same.) Another, more attuned to the narrative momentum of the tale, said the story would be lost - but the intention would remain. All good, then? "By the seventh paragraph," another student declared darkly, "even the intention will be forgotten."

What a great discussion! And it let me push gently back at the TA's celebration of a lawless Judaism of individual feeling. What if part of the wisdom of Jewish tradition is knowing that things peter out this way if everything is left to intention and feeling - and stories? 

Perhaps I can start the next iteration of "After Religion" with this...

Religion in visual metaphor

In "After Religion" today we had visitors - the creators of a most unusual new book called A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor. Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme met at a liberal arts college, a professor writer and an undergraduate student designer, which seemed to me a perfect match with my class and context teaching a ULEC at the design-heavy New School. 

The story of the book is involved and serendip-itous. Perhaps the most important fact is that it grew out of an online project that most decidedly was not ever supposed to take book form, that was, indeed, conceived as outreach to digital native Gen Z college students more receptive to websites and Spotify playlists than to scholarly disquisitions. 

This website, also called A Universe of Terms, was a project of The Immanent Frame, a religion/ secularism themed site of the Social Sciences Research Council. Immanent Frame authors were polled for key terms in contemporary debates. 14 were selected and three brief accessible essays commissioned for each (to show multiple approaches), with yes, a Spotify playlist, too.

But the website also needed a visual identity, and for this the student designer devised a lexicon of images - Matisse cut-out-inspired stars, leaves, hands, dolls, circles, squares... I remember noticing them on the website and finding them deeply compelling. 

The story continued once the online Universe of Terms was released, over 2019-2020, and the world changed with covid and the murder of George Floyd. As classes were abruptly shifted online, Oraby and Flamme found themselves discussing what scholarship for this frightening new reality would look like, who were scholars, and whom scholars were accountable to. 

And somehow the idea emerged to design a book from the website, a book more like a graphic novel than an academic volume. Eight of the website's fourteen terms were chosen, and short resonant passages were chosen from the essays which had been written about them to inspire new illustrations. The sources of the quotations are given in endnotes.

The resulting book is gorgeous but also a little confounding. The images dance from page to page (another of Flamme's inspirations is Calder's mobiles), only occasionally making space for blocks or lines of text. A bookish colleague of mine found it upsetting. But designers I showed it to loved it. One, whom I hadn't told the backstory, wondered if the text was necessary at all!

I'm not sure what I think (the uniformity of the images seems in tension with the polyphonic aspirations of the original project, for instance), but I'm intrigued enough by it that I want to build the Universe of Terms - book and website - into "Theorizing Religion," which I teach again next semester. 

From today's class discussion I'm fascinated by the possibility of representing concepts in this visual way. Not just illustrating them, as though thought must always default to words! In some way this book of imagery is not just supported by all the scholarly work behind it but rises above it. Some things are lost, certainly (though it tells you how to find them); aren't others gained? 

I look forward, for instance, to working from these panels back to the essay from which the text is taken. The ideas, from Sylvia Wynter, are dense and difficult; do the images simplify, clarify, amplify?