[and the field the ground the ground]
Poetry by Rebecca Gayle Howell
Category: Autumn/Winter 2025
Reframing Religions as Platforms
In The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People, Paul Seabright draws on insights from economics to reframe religions as competing “platforms.” By Swayam Bagaria
Dancing with the Demiurge
Gregory Shaw’s Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus is a critique of the metaphysics of our age, which disempower the imagination and blind us to our own capacities for the divine. By Simon Cox
Being Happy for a Change
Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE reckons with what happiness might be, once we have come to terms with sadness. By Russell C. Powell
Descending Into the Underworld
A Q&A with Ahmad Greene-Hayes on his new book Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans. By Janan Graham-Russell
Sacred Sleep of the Wandering Fool
After the author starts treating sleep as worthy of attention and cultivation as any other soulful domain, she experiences shifting energies and curious moments of insight. by Sarabinh Levy-Brightman
AI Is Not Truly Innovative
Compassionate interrogation offers an intervention to interrupt the creation of often invisible systems of inequity and violence in AI design and profiling. By Jenn Louie
Suprahuman but Inhuman Gods?
It is vitally important that religious studies scholars and theologians critically assess what it means to sustain conversation with AI. By Daniel H. Weiss And Darren Frey
AI Harms Are Not Ethically Inevitable
It is essential to recognize AI’s active role in exacerbating social ills and injustices so ethical guardrails can be crafted. By Richard J. Geruson
The Fog of AI
The fog of AI captures both the uncertain informational provenance around concepts of human flourishing and the confounding effects a transformative technology like AI has on these same concepts. By Swayam Bagaria
Meaning Making, Bodies, and AI
We are quick to simplify not only the human mind and consciousness, but also the importance of embodied social realities that make us who we are. By David Lamberth
The Human Story Is ‘I Love’
How do we hold on to our humanity in the face of revolutionary technological change? By James Prashant Fonseka
To Dream, Perchance to Pilgrimage: What AI Can’t Do
The essays in this issue that are not focused on AI also serve as counterpoints, exemplifying the idiosyncratic, embodied, meaning-making work that makes us human and humane. By Wendy McDowell
