Short Abstract

This panel examines how technologies AI, robots and digital media intersect with religion, acting as spiritual agents, mediating metahuman presence and authority, and reshaping practice and belief.

Long Abstract

Artificial intelligence, robots, and immersive digital media are increasingly integrated into religious life and imagination, raising critical questions about human and metahuman agency and authority, the mediation and constitution of presence, as well as ethical and devotional formation. These developments intersect with broader societal and scholarly concerns about the impact of emerging technologies and the trajectories of the near future.

Machines and algorithms heralded as “autonomous agents” are being treated as religious teachers, manifestations of metahuman beings, and sources of revelation and magic. Even feats of engineering without a predefined religious purpose are at times endowed with more-than-human purpose and agency or even envisioned as god-like entities. In response to AI, robots, and the new forms of ICT, long-established practices and objects that bridge the material and spiritual domains are being reimagined and redesigned. While these innovations have radically new features and capabilities, they continue a long history of religious devices, from devotional objects to sacred automatons and legacy media. They also provoke hopes and fears characteristic of apocalyptic narratives and past anxieties about the advancement of technology.

Do these developments make mediated metahuman beings feel more relatable and tangible or, on the contrary, induce a sense of distance and otherness? What is the role of the sensory affordances and interactive capacities of the new devices? Does the use of machines and algorithms change the efficacy and meaning of religious teachings, worship and authority?

We particularly welcome papers grounded in ethnographic case studies.

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