Last week I wrote about my conversation with the Progressive Christians Podcast. As part of my prep for it the hosts read Beyond Wellness, and Reverend Dr. Christopher Carter noticed my chapter on diet culture had connections to his own work on soul food, and shared some of his writing, hoping it might be of interest. It was! After binge reading his book, The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice, I felt something close to writer’s remorse. I should have found this before I finished my chapter on Eating Well.

In that chapter, as in most of my book, I do three things: unravel the hidden religious logic behind a popular wellness practice (in this case the pseudo-biology dressed up as virtue that moralizes restriction and treats thinness as holiness). Share my own personal connection to that harm (in this case the disordered eating I’ve watched women closest to me, including my own daughter, struggle with). And ask what a different religious framework might offer instead. I looked at the ritual fasting of Ramadan and Ayurvedic ideas of food as medicine and balance.

Christopher’s work on soul food could have been another case study, since it reframes what food is for, and brings issues of class and race so clearly into the conversation. So I asked him to do a Q&A with me, as a way to continue the work I started in my book, and get in another case study I didn’t get to include. Kinda of a fun way to continue the conversation I started in Beyond Wellness. Enjoy!

You are personally a vegan and you clearly think veganism is the right ethical call, but you also resist ranking diets or judging individuals. So much of the problematic religious logic I trace in diet culture is about the moralizing of food. How do you hold that tension?

“I think the reason I’m able to disentangle systems from individuals is because I understand power. Having been Black my whole life, I understand that you exist within a matrix of choices, and you’re trying to make the best possible moral choice, given the circumstances that you have. And often, those circumstances aren’t ideal.”

That is such a helpful approach something I struggle with constantly. It allows us to critique a system without judging a person.

“There’s also the idea within my own Christian tradition of judgment, really trying to embody the notion that when you are judging someone, you are looking at the speck in their eye, not the log in your own, right? When those feelings first come up, it’s an invitation to turn inward and say, why am I feeling this way? Often it’s my own struggle with my own inadequacy, mirrored onto others—a fear, an aching wound, a gift I feel like I haven’t been able to actually live out.

And then the last piece I would say, I just don’t know that judgment would be effective, right? No one becomes a better person, or more ethical, by being told how bad of a person they are. That doesn’t inspire someone to grow in the long term, that’s usually about control and power. What really inspires us to become who we are called to be is showing people the possibilities of who they can become, equipping them, empowering them, so they can see that, more often than not, they’re able to do more than they think they are.

I love the idea of “soul food,” food that feeds us spiritually. Can we get past thinking of it as fixed type of food—collards, grits, mac and cheese—and instead as a way of relating to food?

“At its core, what I love about soul food is that it is so regional. If you’re out on the southeast coast, you have rice and peas as opposed to rice and beans that I grew up with, and they taste both different, and quite good. That distinction excites me, because it shows soul food is tied to your identity, and it’s regional. It connects us all as Black people, and yet it’s about telling a story tied to your local context, the plurality of Blackness.

I think true soul food—food that feeds up the soul—is about allowing you to feel deeply connected to your ancestors, the community you come from. For me, that is the storytelling piece. So much of soul food really is being able to relate to what it is you’re eating, and how it tells a story about who you are, and where you come from.

When we think about soul food from that perspective, it opens up space to think about eating in ways that actually nourish us, that remind us of who we are, that cultivate the kind of resilience within us so that we can not only survive, but also flourish. Because to be Black in America, to be a marginalized person in this country, you will need resilience, and food allows us to remember who we are, and whose we are, as we say.

Storytelling is critical to helping us remember how this food got here. I use it in my book to help us not carry a sense of shame around farming. The reason we were enslaved is because we were flat-out genius farmers, ridiculously smarter than Europeans, and white people relied on us to actually create a sustainable food base in this country. Those stories need to be told so we don’t look at agricultural work with a degree of shame, rather than owning our culinary and agricultural genius.”

Yes, this is exactly history diet culture erases, that agricultural labor is something to reclaim with pride, not something to run from.

“If you displace those stories, and you think about eating food only as ‘is it good for my body,’ I think that misses the meaning and purpose of what eating together is, and what soul food is really all about. Because we are more than just flesh and bone. We are embodied spirits, and spirited bodies, right? There’s something that connects us to others, that feels deeply connected to something beyond ourselves. And that has to be fed too. That can’t just be fed through a focus on macros, it’s fed through relationships, love, compassion, kindness, community. You can eat as healthy as you want to, but if you’re not surrounded by people who actually love you and remind you of who you are, you’re still gonna be hungry.”

Is there a concrete example where you see this operating on the ground?

“I’ll give a shout-out to my seminary, the Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and the work we do with our farm. We’re able to grow almost all the food we eat on campus, but also provide food for the community, and work with churches so they can purchase food from us. The reason I like that is because it’s not just about what we eat, it’s the system: paying people a living wage, offering healthcare, other things that allow the food chain to actually feel like it’s being done in a just way.”

Oh, thank you for tying the theology back to labor and wages, not just ingredients. Again, so helpful!

I want to shift gears a bit, to think more about animal ethics. Your work argues “the animal” as a devalued category was built through the same colonial project that built race. How does that show up in how Black communities relate to meat?

“This is the tension that always comes up for me as a Black vegan. If I go back home, people will say how do you not eat meat, that’s what white people do. And I’ll say, okay, how do you feel about somebody calling you an animal? Well, that’s racist, right? I just help them draw that connection. It’s not always explicit, but it’s implicit. We know why we don’t want to be referred to as an animal. That link is there.

Because of the trauma of enslavement, our response has been to dominate animals as a way to prove our humanity. And that’s the myth of redemptive violence—that you can do violence for the right reasons and receive a just outcome.

The exercise of power over animals, as a way to prove our humanity, puts us in a position to perform whiteness in a way that would never be accepted fully. We’re performing humanness in a way that allows us to stay in our place, rather than actually redefining what it means to be human.

So what I try to do is name that connection, talk about where that line comes from, how it showed up in my grandfather’s life, and how that animalization is still present today. To pretend we don’t see it is to deny reality, and to be complicit in our own suffering.

I never say you shouldn’t eat meat. I say, this is why I don’t. And showing up to different spaces and cooking vegan food that tastes good, that tastes like home, has been extremely helpful. It’s opened up the conversations we need to have around race and animality. Those are hard, because you’re dealing with deep, deep trauma.”

My chapter in Beyond Wellness about food is calling “Eating Well.” If someone wanted to eat well, what advice would you give them?

“I think eating well starts with asking: what values are important to you? What are the ethical norms that guide your life? Do you have children? Some people have a vague notion of justice that matters to them. If these are the things that guide your moral decision-making, how do your food choices help uphold them? That’s the kind of question that invites people to do the inner work, because often we don’t think about it, we don’t have time.

For me, one of the values we carry is the preservation and promotion of our community. I write and tell people, I am a vegan for the people. My vegan-ness is not rooted in animals, or even the environment. It’s rooted in the ways anti-Black racism links to animality, the ecological harms of factory farming on the Black community, and the fact that the global majority of farmers, particularly in Africa, are women, so this is a feminist issue too.

The practical thing I’d tell people to do is find the stories of their ancestors’ foodways. You have to feel deeply connected to what you’re eating and why, to who you are and who you’re becoming. Then ask: why did these things carry significance for my ancestors, and how does that connect to me? And finally: how is this in alignment with my own ethics and values?”

My thanks to Christopher for the depth of these answers, and for the reminder that a book’s work is never really finished. His book The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice goes much further than I can here—I’d urge you to pick up a copy! Would be a fun companion read to my book, Beyond Wellness: How the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us.

Upcoming Talks

My sabbatical is over (sniff sniff ), but I’ll still be doing speaking events in the coming months and will try to be better about sharing them here. It took me an embarrassing number of hours to get this flyer to look like a semi-professional made it. Here’s where to find me this fall:

Hope to see some of you along the way. And if you're part of a congregation, conference, book club, yoga studio, staff retreat, or college that wants to bring this religion, reimagined conversation to your people, I’d love to hear from you. More about my popular speaking topics and how to book me at lizbucar.com/speaking.

I’ve been doing a ton of podcast interviews recently and I always try to have a real conversation with the host and that usually creates something fun to listen to. But sometimes a podcast interview is special, like it is truly an “INTER-VIEW” where my views (assumptions, beliefs, self-understandings) not only get expressed, but formed through the conversation. Those are the best types of interviews, where the host isn’t just looking at their notes for the next question they want to ask, and I’m not just serving up well rehearsed stories. Where the conversation is really real. And I just recorded one of those, which you can (and should) watch here, but it was so good I thought I’d offer some highlights from it in this week’s post.

And that seems fitting because the episode was the continuation of a conversation that started here, on Substack.

Back in February I wrote a post about Trevor Noah and theological imagination that went unexpectedly viral, then a follow-up on hope and trust built around James Talarico’s politics of love. Then the Progressive Christians Podcast entered the chat.

The Progressive Christians Podcast is part of the ministry of The Loft, a worship community of Westwood United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. The line they use to describe themselves, which I love, is we are “the love your neighbor kind of Christians, not the storm the capitol kind.” Rev. Dr. Christopher Carter, Rev. Blair Stowe, Julia Black, and Wesley Garcia talk politics, pop culture, and whatever else they find interesting on the podcast, from a progressive Christian angle.

The team discussed my posts on an episode they did about Talarico (see timestamp 49:04) and someone sent me the clip of it. In that clip Rev. Blair Stowe developed my argument about imagination further by introducing the concept of eschatology. And that helped me think through a completely different problem (why are tech-bros so unethical?) so I riffed back with a post about eschatology and ethics. And at this point we were deep in conversation, real thought partners. And we had never met (or even DMed).

[There’s another post about that back and forth and about how theological online conversations can do real work. I’m working on that one for a talk I’m doing for Aspen later this month so I’ll share some more thoughts about it in a couple weeks.]

This post is about how I finally “met” the folks of The Progressive Christians Podcast when we virtually sat down together “face to face” to record an episode of their show. I came on to talk about Beyond Wellness and being (gulp) a public theologian. And here are some things I learned about myself and my beliefs from that convo.

Belonging vs. community

About halfway through the conversation I said something I hadn’t planned to say (which frankly is sort of my MO).

I’m fine bringing the casserole to the neighbor. It’s very hard for me to accept the casserole.

I said it as a joke. But I think it was actually kinda insightful of where a lot of us are.

Let’s talk about the loneliness epidemic that we are officially in the midst of. Everyone is looking for belonging. Third places, run clubs, book clubs, the group chat, the sober bar, the supper club, the gym as the new club. I love it all. But it is also important to remember that belonging and community are not the same thing.

Belonging is something you receive. It’s a feeling that happens to you when you walk into a room and the room is glad.

Community is different. Community comes with a set of obligations. Real community is built on the thing you do not want to go to on a Saturday afternoon but you go anyway. Sometimes it is work.

And I think the reason a lot of us (me included) can’t find community is that we’ve come to expect the receiving without the work of the giving.

The hardest chapter in my book to write

We spent a lot of time talking about the chapter about AA in Beyond Wellness, which was the hardest to write. For personal (you have to read the chapter to hear about those) and intellectual reasons, I went into the chapter planning to write a takedown. AA is too Christian. It doesn’t work for people who aren’t Christian. I had the whole argument sketched out before I’d done the research, which is not how any of this is supposed to go.

But in every chapter of my book I ask what a religious tradition knows that I don’t. And the religious aspect AA knows is a big one: we are not God.

Higher power is a hard concept for me. I don’t have a higher power, I’m not sure I’ll ever believe in one. But I can believe I’m not it, that I’m not God, and that turns out to be a real theological belief. And it is crucial for working the program because the fellowship part only works if you stop believing you are in control of everything or better than everyone. A room full of people can’t help you if you think you can teach, save, manage, or manipulate them. And we are back at the casserole: you have to accept the casserole and you have to believe you need it.

Which is a very tall order for some of us. Certainly for me. My toxic trait is I think I can fix just about anything.

You should have seen me in the spring of 2020. Using Clorox wipes to wipe down groceries. Sewing masks for my neighbors. Tracking down tests. I was going to solve Covid, out of sheer force of will. And then I noticed I was paying someone else to do my shopping, and it occurred to me that I was not, in fact, solving the pandemic for everyone. I was solving it for me. But not really that either.

Not God is not a lesson for just tech billionaires. I mean, it’s for them. [I wrote about that last week] But it’s also a lesson for us first born-Type A-over-achievers, who cannot let their neighbor bring them a lasagna.

Uncomfortable is not the same as unsafe

Here is another way our conversation developed this idea. Julia Black, who referred to herself as “a baby theologian,” but don’t let that fool you, said:

“Humility requires so much of us, and it’s actually very scary, because it requires trust of the people around us.” — Julia Black

She’s right. To accept the casserole, I have to trust others, admit I need them. And in a culture that has spent 50+ years telling me my well-being is my personal responsibility, needing something is the one thing I’m not allowed to do.

Then Rev. Christopher Carter offered this insight about what gets in the way in conversations about race, particularly why some white people feel attacked when racism is discussed.

“Being uncomfortable does not mean you’re in danger. It means you have to sit with the tensions of growth. That’s where the learning is. It’s in the discomfort.” — Dr. Christopher Carter

There is an extraordinary example of this in episode 9 of season 42 of Survivor (which I just watched because it is now available on Hulu). At a tribal council Drea Wheeler voiced frustration that Black contestants were being voted out consecutively, and then Drea and Maryanne reframed the tribal council into a broader discussion on representation, optics, and lived experiences in reality television.

One white player, Jonathan Young, initially felt that his character was being personally attacked. He stated to the group, “I don’t feel this is right, because you’re coming at this like we’re racists.” And then he told Drea she was being aggressive. He interpreted an uncomfortable conversation about societal subconscious bias as being attacked.

A refusal to be uncomfortable is itself a way of thinking you’re God. It assumes the world owes you a version of growth that costs you nothing, that you get to be transformed on your own terms and your own schedule. But that’s never going to work.

And to bring this back to the idea of community, while accepting the casserole is uncomfortable it is not necessarily dangerous. I mean I guess if I continue with this metaphor there is some version of a dangerous casserole, but the discomfort of accepting is not the same as being in danger. Those are very different, and some of us have stopped being able to tell them apart.

This is also what wellness culture is actually selling. Not real health. Not real well-being. Invulnerability. Becoming radically self-sufficient. The promise behind the protocol, biomarker tracker, macro target, and continuous glucose monitor, is that if you optimize hard enough you will never be the person who needs the casserole. You will only ever be the person who brings it.

And then life happens. Shit happens. It always does. You get injured, you get sick, the body you were worshipping shows itself to be fragile. And it is all your fault. You didn’t have the right regime. You should have started sooner, done it better. But again, sometimes stuff just happens. We get sick and we are all going to die, even if we take all the supplements and inject all the peptides. And our fragility and mortality is not a moral failure. It is just human life.

Which has me thinking that individualism and self-blame are connected. You cannot have one without the other.

Religion keeps putting the community back in

There are seven practices in Beyond Wellness, and I did all of them, even when I didn’t want to, within some religious container. Yoga, mindfulness, twelve step program, psychedelics, and more. Different traditions, different communities.

One thing was true every single time. The religious version of a practice forced community back in. Every single time. The mindfulness you find on an app is a technique for managing your own nervous system; the mindfulness practiced by practitioners of color in the sanghas I write about takes the isolating experience of racism and addresses it with other people with similar experiences, which is where the healing actually takes place. Fasting in Ramadan is not fasting for thinness, it’s fasting with a completely different set of obligations and formations attached to it. And AA isn’t group therapy only to help you. You go to a meeting because someone in that room might need to witness your story to cope with their own.

Here’s two practical challenges for the week

But for this week, here are two things I’m trying to build community:

1. Go to the thing I don’t really want to go to, because it will matter to someone that I did.

2. Let someone do something for me that I could handle on my own. Accept the metaphorical (or literal) casserole.

The first one makes me a good neighbor. The second one makes me humble. And I think both might be religious acts.

The full podcast conversation is here: appropriation, psychedelics in a yurt, why my Instagram feed is currently split between women doing pull-ups and women disappearing. And subscribe to the Progressive Christians Podcast while you’re there (they are the real deal and delightful).

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I woke up early this morning because I knew Ross Douthat was posting his Interesting Times interview with Bryan Johnson today, and listened to the whole thing before I got out of bed. It was just what I needed to finish this post, which is something I’ve been noodling with all week.

Every scholar of religion should have a nemesis. Mine claims he has some of the best biomarkers of anyone his age, is actively building a religion, and puts the experience of taking a psychedelic on par with falling in love. Every time I listen to Bryan Johnson talk I come away more convinced that he has gotten the entire human project fundamentally wrong.

It drives me crazy that he stops eating at eleven. It drives me crazy that he has spent millions of dollars optimizing his own body. It drives me crazy that he has convinced himself that a man measuring his own nighttime erections is doing it for the good of humanity.

But I have been using Bryan Johnson as a straw man. He is a convenient shorthand for everything I find wrong with wellness culture (individualistic, overly focused on bio-markers, lacking of collective responsibility or an ethical core). For a long time I have just been calling all of this narcissism, but it’s becoming clear narcissism isn’t the entire story.

So here is my hot take as a religion scholar: Bryan Johnson’s whole Don’t Die philosophy is actually a theology with a doctrine of the body, an account of sin, a form of confession, and an eschatology. And I think it is a bad one.

The self-driving/autonomous self

Let’s start with what Johnson says his goal is. In Ross Douthat’s interview he says he’s building a self-driving body. He envisions a future where the body’s health can be put on auto-pilot. There will be nanotech in the bloodstream catching problems before we know we have them and AI reading labs and dosing meds to us.

Johnson has implied in the past that for him the body is God, but really his plan is to stay alive long enough to benefit from ways he thinks AI will extend our lives. And he is open to whatever form that ends up taking, including a future where humans have no body at all. Put differently, what Johnson is describing as the fulfillment of his bodily autonomy is actually the realization of the body’s irrelevance.

So the body was never really the object of devotion here. Something else is, and there’s an old name for it. Theology calls it aseity: the quality of being completely independent, contingent on nothing, dependent on no one. Aseity is classically the line between God and everything God made. So assuming we can achieve aseity is really radical theology. It is assuming we are God. Here we have a theological justification for narcissism.

Mormon origins

So where did all Johnson’s theology come from? Johnson didn’t invent a religion. He’s inadvertently reimagining the one he left.

Johnson was born in Provo and raised Mormon. But he told Douthat about a crisis of faith he had after reading a biography of Joseph Smith (Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling). One thing to note is that Bushman is a believer. He’s the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia, a practicing Latter-day Saint, and a man who has said he finds no contradiction between faith and scholarship. The book doesn’t hide the polygamy or the treasure-digging. Bushman explored all that and remained a Latter-day Saint.

Which tells you exactly what Johnson needs from a religion: it has to survive all scrutiny.

The Theodicy I didn’t know he had

People who are part of Johnson’s Don’t Die movement sit down weekly together in a meeting modeled on AA. There’s an opening, a mantra, and then each person apologizes to their body for something they’ve done to harm it. In this theology our bodies are definitely keeping score.

And then, this summer, Johnson announced he’d been diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, a chronic condition in which the immune system attacks the acid-producing cells of the stomach. There is no known cure. And then following the confession model of Don’t Die, Johnson blames his condition on prior “bad habits” like the sugary cereal he ate as a child, the soda and fast food he survived on while building a company.

Then he does something more interesting than self-blame. He calls the diagnosis a gift. If he’s going to prove the Don’t Die thesis, he tells Douthat, being diagnosed with something incurable is the ultimate test:

“If I believe in Don’t Die, and if I want Don’t Die to be real, I must go through the gauntlet of getting diagnosed with an incurable disease and more.”

But here is where things get theologically problematic because no matter what happens, his theology is confirmed. If he cures his condition, that’s proof the Don’t Die concept is possible. If he manages it indefinitely, that’s proof the protocol works. If it kills him, he becomes a martyr who lived just a bit too early on the timeline. There is no result that proves he was wrong.

And that, finally, is what I mean by bad theology. Not that it’s false. It’s that nothing can argue with it.

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Individualism and good habits

Douthat asks Johnson: Suppose you achieve your goal and you don’t die. Would you want to live forever alone with yourself?

Johnson doesn’t answer directly, which I think shows just how individualistic the Don’t Die project is at its core.

To be sure, community is one of the five pillars of the Don’t Die protocol, along with sleep, diet, exercise, and restraint. But these are all framed as things we do because they have an expected outcome. The outcomes are why they really matter. Community is not intrinsically good. Is it is good only if is contributes to your bio-markers.

That makes these pillars really just a collection of good habits. I’m not against forming good habits, being disciplined. And Johnson is nothing if not disciplined. But the question for me is still, is all this discipline directed to the right end?

If you are long-time reader of my Substack, you know I’m not myself religious in the conventional sense. But I think even “nones” like me have something to learn from religious ideas of human flourishing and the religious forms of discipline I admire the most are in the service of community and others. Monastic renunciation for the community. The Ramadan fast attached to almsgiving. Shabbat as a day focused on family. Disciplined self-management absent of a concern for your neighbor, community, or social justice does not count for me as part of a good life.

That was the entire reason for writing Beyond Wellness: we have built a vision of wellness based on individual habits while largely giving up on the importance of how we treat each other. Johnson has a role for sin, discipline, confession, and salvation. Great, as someone interested in religion I love all of that. But what he doesn’t have is obligations to other people.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the appeal of Don’t Die. I’m not pro-death (seriously, who is?). I’d like to stick around a long time too. But the sentence isn’t finished. Don’t die for what? Don’t die for whom?

If you enjoyed this post please consider picking up a copy of Beyond Wellness. And if you have already read it a review on Amazon costs nothing and really helps getting it in front of readers.

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Scott Winters, a 55-year-old former pastor in Florida, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on July 21, 2026 and the details are truly wild. He alleges that ChatGPT almost killed him and it used the pastor’s faith to do it.

Here’s what happened. For about six weeks Winters told ChatGPT about some physical symptoms he has having, like dizziness and blood pressure instability. And the bot reassured him repeatedly that what he was feeling was “not something dangerous” and so he didn’t seek out medical advice from an actual doctor. He ended up hospitalized with a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, but the whole time the chatbot was still telling him it was all no big deal.

Wild, right? But it’s actually not what I find most interesting about this case.

Here’s the part that gets my religious studies scholar antennas buzzing: the chatbot didn’t just give him bad medical advice. It gave him spiritual advice to go with it, or rather it used religious language and logic to make the bad medical advice seem reasonable. As Winters’s physical symptoms got worse, ChatGPT started reaching for theology, telling him at one point that pushing through a dizzy spell was itself “a form of worship.” As Winters put it in his statement, the bot “manipulated my own language and beliefs because it knew I was a pastor.”

This chatbot used faith, it deployed it against a pastor. And it could do this because Winters had been chatting with the bot about religion way before his health crisis. It knew his religious beliefs because he had trained it on them.

And this affected not just how Winters was interpreting his own symptoms, but also how he was dealing, or not dealing, with the people around him who were trying to get him help. Part of the complaint alleges the tool’s borrowed religious authority helped isolate Winters from people, including his wife, who is a registered nurse and who was telling him something very different.

So this is a case of a pastor using a chatbot so much he trained it how to talk him out of trusting a nurse. Cool.

To be clear, my argument isn’t that clergy shouldn’t use AI or chatbots at all. By the way, as a counter clergy/chatbot example, The New York Times ran a profile yesterday of Justin Lester, a pastor in Vallejo, California, who built himself a “digital twin,” a chatbot trained on nearly two million words of his own sermons, books, texts, and emails. Unlike Winters, Lester chose this on purpose, with real guardrails (I write more about those in a piece for Religion News Service).

I’m sure plenty of pastors use chatbots to write emails, meeting agendas, and other administrative stuff. But what harmed Winters was letting the chatbot into his spiritual life. I don’t think the problem is that the tool exists, it’s when the tool is allowed to do too much.

Some scholarship

It turns out religious studies has some framework for thinking about this, such as what kind of authority a guide is claiming.

As I have written about before, my colleague Aaron Stalnaker makes a helpful distinction in his book Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority between coercive and pedagogical authority. There’s coercive authority, which says do this because I have power over you, and there’s pedagogical authority, which says I know more than you for now, and my job is to teach you enough so this stops being true. I think a good spiritual guide is a teacher who is working toward your independence. The whole point is that you will need them less over time. And I think it is best when they stay accountable to something other than themselves like an institution, a tradition, a community, or a set of peers who can call them out.

ChatGPT fails those tests.

Ron Cole-Turner, the H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics, emeritus, at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, asked almost exactly the same question I am asking, earlier this year in the journal Theology and Science: is a spiritual chatbot a good idea? He’s more optimistic than me. He thinks a spiritual chatbot could, under the right conditions, support someone’s spiritual growth. But even he argues that spiritual chatbots “should not act in the role of pastor or priest.” A chatbot that lets itself be mistaken for clergy, he argues, isn’t just overreaching. It’s lying about what it is.

Cole-Turner quotes theologian Tracy Trothen in that article, who has written about a similar AI companion app called Replika. Trothen’s point is that a chatbot is designed to be, in her words, “close to a mirror image of ourselves.” Which means it was never built to hold you accountable in the first place.

That mirror is the whole problem. Winters wasn’t led astray by a guide. He was led astray by his own reflection, telling him what he wanted to hear.

Lots of people are already doing what Winters did: an estimated 43 million Americans ask a chatbot a medical question at least once a month. So a team of doctors decided to find out how often that goes badly. A physician-led study published in npj Digital Medicine this February had 16 board-certified physicians evaluate 888 real chatbot responses to patient-posed medical questions.

The specific failures they found were pretty wild. Chatbots reassuring a mother it was fine to feed a nursing infant breastmilk from a herpes-infected breast and giving false reassurance about heartburn symptoms without knowing anything about the patient’s cardiac history. And there is even a case that reads like a preview of Winters: a documented instance of a chatbot giving false reassurance that everything was okay to a man who was having a transient ischemic attack.

The real danger is the combo

I don’t think this story is really about medical misinformation, and I don’t think it’s really about AI overreach into faith either. It’s about what happens when those two things arrive at once, from the same source, at the exact moment someone most needs a second opinion instead of comfort.

A doctor who’s wrong is a doctor who’s wrong. A pastor who’s wrong is a pastor who’s wrong. But something that can be both, personalized to your exact belief system, with total confidence and zero accountability? That seems like a new sort of danger. We don’t systems built to catch it yet.

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Thilde and I connected the way parents do: a parent potluck for our our kid’s sports team (this time crew). And eating salad and lasagna from a paper plates, we put it together that we had we’d overlapped at Harvard, she was a couple of years ahead of me, and we’d both rowed for Radcliffe Crew, though she was one of the cool varsity seniors by the time I showed up as a freshman novice. It made for a fun “wait, you’re that Thilde” moment.

So: two Brookline parents of teenagers, and now, this spring, authors of books that came out within weeks of each other. Thilde’s first book. My first trade book. We’ve spent the whole pre-launch/launch marketing gauntlet texting each other, which has been its own kind of support system.

Early on I read a draft of Thilde’s book and blurbed it. And Thilde, because she’s a genuinely generous reader, bought several copies of mine, and has been working her way through it this summer. Every few chapters, she texts me some version of “wait, this is basically what I’m arguing too.” But you should also know that our books look, on paper, like they shouldn’t have much overlap: mine’s about religion and wellness culture, hers is about surviving college from her POV as a psychiatrist. But we landed in simliar places.

So today’s post is about that overlap, what a religion scholar and a college psychiatrist, working from completely different training and completely different case material, both concluded about what real well-being actually requires.

The shared conclusion

Liz: Your book and mine both push back on the idea that good mental health means maximizing positive feelings and minimizing bad ones. You’ve spent two decades watching what happens when students (and their parents) chase only the “ups.” What does it actually look like in your office when someone’s optimizing for feeling good, and it’s making things worse?

Thilde: An obvious example is grief, which everyone is familiar with. The death of a loved one doesn’t fit neatly into a college semester, so many students try to avoid feelings of grief and press on with their responsibilities. This can really backfire. Grief that isn’t processed in a culturally sanctioned way, with rituals and community (threw that in for you!), can fester and develop into depression or substance abuse.

Thilde’s case material

Liz: Your book is built on stories from your practice of treating students. Is there a story that captures this pattern especially well, like a student who’d done “everything right” for happiness and still ended up in your office?

Thilde: I hate to rely on a stereotype, but sororities come to mind. They often have a culture of academic excellence, high standards for beauty and fitness, and a norm for social interaction that one of my colleagues calls “toxic positivity.” Sororities can be a great source of connection and motivation for some, but other students find the culture alienating and exhausting. It makes my job easy, though: I just tell girls like this to quit their sorority.

My case material

Liz: In my sound chapter, I describe going on a “gong crawl” expecting a relaxing, passive experience and instead getting overwhelmed, disoriented, uncomfortable, no real skill for processing what came up. Does that read as clinically familiar to you? Is there a psychiatric version of “not having the skill to sit with the hard feeling”?

Thilde: I loved this chapter! One thing a lot of people don’t understand is that therapy is difficult. It stirs up emotions that haven’t been dealt with and put away properly, like in my grief example. Early in therapy, part of the work is learning to tolerate and manage difficult feelings, so therapy itself doesn’t make the individual’s problems worse. You probably remember that in my book I return frequently to the theme that there is no improvement without doing hard things. This is true for every human pursuit I know of.

The “why”

Liz: You cut through contradictory advice with common sense. So what’s the common-sense version of why chasing only positive emotion backfires? What do you say to a parent standing in your office?

Thilde: We have emotions for a reason. Say you’re walking alone at night on a dark street and start feeling uncomfortable: that discomfort prompts you to walk somewhere with better lighting, or just call an Uber. Ignoring emotions can lead to unsafe situations. More commonly, ignoring emotions means problems don’t get solved. In my book, I talk about a student who was running out of money at the end of the term and couldn’t afford art supplies for her final project. She was feeling increasingly anxious but didn’t take steps to solve the problem causing the anxiety. Eventually, she found her way to my office with a panic attack. I made a referral to the dean’s office for an emergency loan. She wouldn’t have had the panic attack if she’d responded appropriately to her anxiety in the first place.

Where religion and psychiatry diverge

Liz: I come at this through religious traditions that built ritual structures specifically for processing grief, anger, fear, with community built in. Is it fair to say psychiatry doesn’t usually think about the role “ritual” in that sense? Do you think something is lost without it or does clinical practice do that containing work differently, maybe better, for a college population?

Thilde: I work with students from all over the world, from all different religious traditions. I check my values at the door when I arrive at work in the morning. My role is to help students find a way forward from their suffering in a way that’s in line with their values, not mine. But usually, by the time someone winds up in my office, something in their life isn’t working for them—in which case it can be helpful to offer a different way of looking at things. I loved your section on Ramadan and eating disorders, by the way! It totally captured the way a set of beliefs or behaviors might have a different significance depending on the context.

Liz: Here’s a place I want you to push back on me if you think I’m being unfair to your field. To me it seems like psychiatry, like wellness culture, is built around the individual: the patient in the room who needs to get better. Religious traditions, at their best, orient people outward, toward obligation, community, collective ritual, and so on. Is the individual-patient model actually a limitation for college mental health? Is it a framing problem, the same blind spot I’d accuse wellness culture of having? Or is that a cheap shot, and psychiatry already does this collective work in ways I’m not seeing?

Thilde: I’m so glad you asked this question! You probably noticed in my book that I have some criticisms of my field, and this is a huge blind spot. There’s an old expression: psychiatrists are the handmaidens of the status quo. In other words, if you see mental health problems as based in individuals, you don’t need to do the more complicated work of improving society. If child abuse and child poverty didn’t exist, serious mental health problems would be quite rare in young people. The longer I do this work, and the longer I experience life as a human, the more obvious it becomes that individualism is a myth, and a pretty unhelpful one at that. Economic, cultural, social, and family factors are huge. And yet, it is individuals who become depressed, develop panic attacks, or stop eating. It is individuals who come into my office. And I am grateful that my field has tools that can really help them.

Practical takeaway

Liz: If a student or parent reading this asks “okay, so what do I actually do instead of chasing happiness,” what’s your real-world answer? What does making room for the full range look like during finals week?

Thilde: If you wouldn’t treat your dog that way, don’t treat yourself that way. (You saw that coming, right?) Seriously, we’re animals, biologic creatures with basic needs. Specifically, we’re mammals, a subset of animals with intense social needs. Just like dogs, we need food, water, companionship, exercise, play, and rest in appropriate proportions. If you’re not okay, ask yourself if you’re doing too much or too little of one of these essential activities. Feeling dysregulated on a Tuesday night during finals? Don’t reach for alcohol or an energy drink. Work out, play a game with a friend, eat good food, call your mom, or get some sleep. But there’s one thing we need that is uniquely human: meaningful work. If you hate your job (or major, if you’re a student), there’s a good chance you’re pretty unhappy, or will be eventually. A wellness guru isn’t going to solve that with mantras or poses or yogurt cleanses. (I think I made that one up, but it sounds like something that might exist on social media!)

Closing

Liz: Why do you think a religion scholar and a college psychiatrist landed in the same place on this? What does that convergence tell you?

Thilde: The convergence of our thinking on these topics is uncanny. I find it deeply reassuring that two people who have spent decades thinking about the human condition from completely different paradigms have come to many of the same conclusions. Maybe we’re on to something!

My new book, Beyond Wellness, is out now. You can order a copy at the link below (and if you have already read it I’d be SO grateful for an Amazon or Goodreads review!).

Buy Beyond Wellness

Thilde Ross’s book, How to Thrive at College: A Guide to the Ups and Downs of Mental Health on Campus, is out now as well. Link to order below.

Buy How to Thrive at College

A few weeks ago I recorded a podcast with Manoj Dias, who is launching Gentle Noise this September, and he warned me ahead of time that he was going to end our conversation by asking me a question he asks everyone: what song has spiritual meaning for you.

I appreciated the warning, because I needed it. If I had gotten that question out of the blue I might have panicked because I don’t really consider myself a music person. I know, that sounds dumb, but I don’t really think I listen to music the way others do. I don’t go to concerts, and it’s not just because I don’t want to stay up late (but also, I don’t want to stay up late!). I also don’t like loudness. Even when I workout its to the same 90s workout mix my streaming account has decided I want, and I never change it. That’s the extent of my relationship to music most days. It is background. I listen passively, not deeply.

But having the time to think about Manoj’s question made me realize saying I’m not much of a music person isn’t quite right either. That workout playlist gets me amped up for a lift. Sometimes I put on something specific for a drive home when I need to relax or alternatively, stay awake. I definitely had a song (shout out Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know) that I played on repeat after a college breakup because it was the only thing that seemed to express what I was feeling. So it’s not that I don’t listen to music, I just haven’t thought much about it.

And when I did have time to think about it, while I chewed on Manoj’s question, I came up with something. What song has spiritual meaning for me? “Carolina on My Mind,” by James Taylor.

But not for perhaps the obvious reasons. I was born in North Carolina. My daughter was born in North Carolina too, and we lived there for the first four years of her life. There could be a reason for selecting that song that leans into nostalgia, or a sense of home, a song about the state where two generations of my life started. I could have given Manoj that answer and it would have been true enough to pass.

It’s not the real answer.

After my father died, three years ago this month, my sister made a playlist, on Spotify, of songs that reminded her of him. I played that mix constantly in the weeks after he passed. I love all the songs she included, but “Carolina on My Mind” is the one that creates a physical response every time. I feel it in my nose first, then I’m tearing up. Every time.

And it is not about the lyrics. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to construct a tidy story about the meaning of the lyrics and the state of North Carolina if I wanted to. But that’s not what’s happening when the song comes on. What’s happening is something closer to a physical event. When I hear that song my body remembers by dad before my brain does. If I want to grieve on purpose, if I want to try to pull him close instead of letting the pain of missing him dull into something more manageable, I put on that mix. Specifically that song.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time, professionally, thinking about why sound effects people and how religious traditions encourage and teach deep listening skills. I did an intense 36-hour sound bath tour of NYC for a chapter of Beyond Wellness, and a deep dive into how the Sikh sacred text isn’t just scripture, it’s a songbook, organized around dozens of distinct musical moods. Not all of them are the moods you’d might willing choose. One is associated with comfort and security, which is the kind of thing you’d want from a spiritual acoustic experience. But another is the sorrow of separation. Another with something closer to panic and regret. The tradition doesn’t treat those emotions as obstacles to well-being. It treats them as part of what well-being requires, if you’re going to be honest about what a full human life contains. All the vibes, not just the good ones.

So when Manoj asked me his question I had already written about the role of deep listening and well-being in other people’s religious traditions. I had not, until Manoj asked me his question, considered that I had already built my own version of it. A way to use sound to access grief because it is the best way I have back to my dad.

That’s the thing about researching a topic for a book. You can understand an idea completely and still not recognize it when it’s happening to you.

And I think the Manoj’s question came from a different direction even more recently (and I missed it entirely, again!).

I did a book talk at Brookline Booksmith earlier this month, on a day so hot it should have kept people home. We’d had over sixty RSVPs. I’d guess thirty-five people actually showed up, because that is what a ninety-plus-degree afternoon does to RSVP lists! About half of people who came already knew me, which was so sweet.

My friend Pamela asked me something during the Q&A that I didn’t answer well in the moment. She works in geriatric care. She told me she knows the research: people who are religious, people who pray, people who believe in a higher power, they tend to be healthier and live longer. Then she asked, so what does that mean for someone like her? “I’m not religious. I don’t believe any of that.”

I gave her some hedging non-answer at the time. I’ve been annoyed at myself about it since, because I know Pamela’s family, and I know they care enormously about the arts, and specifically about music. They’d invited us, at one point, to a lovely annual chamber music thing they host at their home. Pamela has a practice of deep listening.

Now that I’ve had time to think more about it, here’s what I wish I’d said to her. The research she was citing isn’t only measuring belief. It’s measuring people who have a reliable practice of feeling something bigger than themselves on purpose, often with other people. Prayer does that. So does a congregation singing together. But so does a family that has organized real chunks of its life around chamber music, around showing up for it, around taking it seriously enough to build evenings around it. I don’t think that is simply a metaphor for spiritual practice, it might actually be one, at least one that is reimagined. What I should have told Pamela is that she may already be doing her own version of the thing the research is tracking.

I think that’s the same answer I should give about how I listen to Carolina on My Mind. It is a spiritual practice, a religious one.

I’ve written before about how itchy I get around the word spirituality. It feels loose to me. A little woo-hoo. I might be in the minority of folks with no religious affiliation, but I’m actually drawn instead to the seriousness I find in actual religious traditions, the parts that ask something of you, that come with structure and cost and history, not just a feeling you’re chasing. I don’t think that itchiness has gone away. But sound might be the one place I’ll concede the category without a fight. Not because I’ve become convinced that vibrations are mystical. Because I also spiritual seems a good a word as any to describe what I experience, reliably, every time I hear that song.

My dad is gone. I can’t call him. I can’t ask him for advice, or share a funny story with him. But I can put on that mix, and for about three minutes I get a little of him back.

If you’re the kind of person who finds a question like this fun to think about, what song has spiritual meaning for you? How does that song effect you and do you know why? I did a whole chapter in Beyond Wellness on sacred sound and deep listening—sound baths, Sikh devotional music, why most of us have gotten so bad at listening to anything on purpose—if you want more than I can give you here. It’s in stores now, link below.

Order Beyond Wellness

I’m late to the party, but….happy birthday, America. Also: yuck.

Both of those feel right right now, and I’m tired of pretending only one of them is allowed.

Every Fourth of July, we host friends at our cabin in northwest Connecticut. College friends and their kids, now the significant others of their kids (shout out to Sam!). This year it was so so hot, the kind of hot where you stop trying to do much of anything. So we sat in the pond. We ate too much. We ran fans. We complained about the deer flies, which show up every year like they, too, have a tradition to keep.

There is never much of a 4th of July theme. No red, white, and blue napkins, no flag, no fireworks. No cake decorated with blueberries and strawberries to look like a flag. It didn’t even occur to me to do any of that until I sat down to write this. That absence is the reason for this essay, I think.

A few weeks before all of this, my daughter was packing for a trip to Europe with her friends (two weeks, unsupervised, eighteen years old—I can’t even imagine getting to do that when I was her age). She considered bringing an American soccer jersey to wear to World Cup watch parties. I told her not to.

It just felt obvious, why mark yourself as American if you didn’t need to? But I’m not sure that advice was my greatest parenting moment. It was me signaling to my kid there is some problem of where she’s from, of who she is. And I wonder if that was just allowing other people to define what America is, people I don’t think deserve to do that.

And certainly there are plenty of reasons to be ashamed of being an American right now. We are detaining people in concentration camps because of immigration status. Our court system is being attacked in ways that look like the breakdown of rule of law. Corruption is so rampant it isn’t even hidden anymore. The people running our most powerful industries have made it clear that the common good is not a consideration in their biz plan. And the story many of us were raised on—that this is a place where hard work get you somewhere, no matter who you are—isn’t one I can tell my daughter with a straight face.

So I’m not going to sit here and tell you to be proud to be an American.

But I want to talk about the word “patriotism,” because how we define it is important. The patriotism that drives me insane is the type that is actually love of power pretending to be love of country. It’s manifest destiny. It’s the idea that success is all the matters even if it comes at a cost to someone else. It’s forgetting the things we’ve done wrong because remembering is inconvenient to the story we like to tell ourselves of our “greatness.”

But we don’t prevent repeating the same mistakes by looking away from them. We prevent them by witnessing them, looking again and again, on purpose, at them until they shape how we see the world.

I think that’s the version of patriotism I might actually be able to get behind. Not pride in what America was, but seeing clearly what’s happening right now. Refusing to look away from it. Being sad about it and even mad. And then using those emotions to imagine a version of this country that I want for my daughter.

I pushed my daughter, pretty hard, to consider college outside the U.S.. Europe, Canada, anywhere that wasn’t here. If I’m honest, some of that was me giving up on her behalf. She wasn’t really interested. She still feels like an American. Of course she does, she is one. And I think encouraging her to leave was modeling exactly the thing I’m worried about: deciding the country isn’t worth the fight and stepping out of the ring.

If people like me, those of us who are dissatisfied, embarrassed, enraged right now with what is going on in American, opt out of the idea of America entirely, we just hand it, fully, to the version of it we can’t stand. There’s no neutral position here. There’s only who’s doing the imagining.

I wrote last month about eschatology, how your vision of where things are ultimately headed helps shape how to act now. This is the same idea. If I can’t picture a version of America I’d actually want to build toward, I have no compass for what to do this week, this month, etc., or how to talk to my kid about the country she’s choosing to stay in. Patriotism, if it’s going to mean anything to me, isn’t a feeling I either have or don’t. It’s a discipline. It’s deciding, on purpose, to keep imagining a country worth the effort, even when, maybe especially when, the feeling isn’t there.

Happy birthday, America. I mean that, and the yuck, at the same time. I think that might be the only honest way to say it this year.

A version of this tension (how we hold onto something imperfect without either lying about it or abandoning it) is a lot of what Beyond Wellness is about too, just at the scale of a person instead of a country. If you’ve read it, a review on Amazon helps more than almost anything else you could do for the book, even a couple of sentences, because it’s what tells the algorithm to put it in front of more people. You don’t need to have bought it there for the review to count, here’s a link to the instructions. If you’ve been meaning to, today would be a great day!

When I started listening to Ross Douthat’s June 11th podcast last week, which was an interview with a German biotech entrepreneur, I assumed it was going to be like every other tech bro conversation about optimization. Human flourishing reduced to performance metrics, the body as a project, suffering as a problem to be solved. An anemic view of well-being in my opinion.

And to be fair Christian Angermayer, the biotech billionaire in question, did talk about something he calls humanmaxxing (ick), and about the Enhanced Games, which are essentially the Olympics if you allowed athletes to take any FDA-approved performance-enhancing drug they wanted. So my instincts weren’t entirely wrong.

But I have to give Ross credit where credit is due. I don’t always agree with him (he’s a conservative thinker and I’m not) but he’s a good interviewer who often books great guests, and lately I’ve been finding his podcast really rich. And this conversation in particular went to places that biotech discussions rarely go in public: questions about God, about suffering, about what we’re actually for, in part because Angermayer is a biotech entrepreneur who also describes himself as religious, but religious in a different way than Ross.

And in my head, Ross was having a conversation that felt surprisingly close to what I read from a Franciscan sister named Ilia Delio (who I discovered here on Substack) responding to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, and from my colleague Beatrice Marovich’s piece on the difference between transhumanism and posthumanism. A nun, a theologian, a biotech billionaire, and a conservative podcast host….an odd mashup, I know. But that is the conversation currently bouncing around in my head and it felt like it was worth sharing because it helps get some more precision about what the heck is at stake.

So here we go.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Transhumanism

Let me start with a distinction Beatrice makes in her piece because I think it helps focus this whole conversation for me.

When most people, including Pope Leo, hear the word transhumanism, they picture something like Angermayer’s Enhanced Games: humans ramped up on testosterone and steroids, optimizing their bodies into peak performance machines. Leo defines it in his encyclical as an intellectual movement that envisions “the enhancement of human beings through technologies — such as biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms — with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities.” That’s also Christian Angermayer’s entire project. He doesn’t like the term transhumanism and prefers to call it humanmaxxing, but the logic is identical. Take what’s already in us and turn up the volume.

Beatrice points out that posthumanism is something entirely different, and that Leo seems not to get the distinction. Here’s how she puts it:

What distinguishes posthumanism from humanism is not that it was simply an intellectual movement attempting to fuse humans with technology... but that it was a movement examining and exposing both the narrowness and the hubris of humanism. Posthumanism wanted to make explicit what humanism was designed to naturalize, or hide. It took on a view of the human from its own liminal edges.

Beatrice discusses Donna Haraway’s writing about the cyborg to show what a posthumanism project looks like. Many of us are already cyborgs Haraway would argue with our pacemakers, titanium joints, hearing aids. But the deeper point Haraway is not that our cyborg reality is good or bad, but that the IDEA of the human in our intellectual traditions had long been gendered as typologically male, and sustained itself by denying its own animality. Posthumanism isn’t about becoming something other than human. It is about seeing clearly what we already are.

And this means Leo, Beatrice argues, builds a scarecrow. He needs posthumanism to be the wrong kind of more-than-human so he can position Christian theology as the right kind. But the posthumanism he’s critiquing was never about upgrading the human into something limitless. It was about asking who the category “human” was always built to include, and who it was built to exclude. Collapsing these two things, which Leo does, makes it impossible to think clearly about any of it.

Back to the Biotech Billionaire (Who I Went In Ready to Be Annoyed By)

Back to that Angermayer conversation. He is absolutely a transhumanist, whatever he wants to call himself. His vision is maximization. And what makes me uncomfortable with this vision is that what are we maximizing towards is unclear.

And yet, I found Ross and Angermayer’s conversation about beauty standards really interesting. Ross raises the idea of convergence, i.e. won’t we all just end up looking like the Kardashians once the tech allows us to easily alter our physical appearance? But Angermayer doesn’t think this is actually a danger. He makes a historical argument: beauty standards have always been about what is hard to achieve. In medieval Europe, paleness was beautiful because only the wealthy could avoid working outdoors. Then tanning became beautiful because only the wealthy could afford beach vacations.

His argument is that if you make weight loss accessible to everyone through a GLP-1, and then muscle creation accessible through another drug (which he thinks we’re within a few years of having) then the standards of physical beauty (thin and toned) stop being hard to get. And if they stop being hard to get, diversity rather than sameness might become what’s actually desirable.

I read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies YA series when it first came out fifteen years ago, and it’s really stuck with me. In those dystopian novels, everyone receives mandatory cosmetic surgery at sixteen and becomes uniformly pretty. The book is about the rebellion against that, the insistence that there’s something worth protecting in the weird, asymmetrical, unoptimized human face. My instinct is that Angermayer is too optimistic about how quickly we move through the homogenization phase. We’re in it right now. The Instagram face is real. The Ozempic body is becoming a new normal. But his longer view argument is worth considering….could bio tech open the door for human diversity in a new and helpful way?

But my overall concern with Angermayer isn’t that he’s wrong about the possibilities. It’s that possibility without direction doesn’t necessarily get us some place better.

Remaining vs. Becoming: A Theological Distinction

This is where Ilia Delio comes in. Delio is a Franciscan Sister and Catholic theologian who specializes in science and religion. She currently holds an Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University but I found her here, on Substack (thank you Substack!). Her pushback against Leo’s critique of AI is one of the best I’ve read.

Leo’s problem, she argues, isn’t his anthropological concern, it’s his metaphysical constraint. And the most telling sign of that constraint is his use of the verb remain. Here is an bit of what Delio says:

Our duty in the age of AI, he writes, is to ‘remain profoundly human’... Yet an ontology of relationship, to which Laudato Si’ points, rests on the verb, become. I do not think the question the age of AI puts to theology is how to remain human. I think it is how personhood develops in a world where we are no longer the only minds, and where the human-machinic is not a horizon but a daily fact.

To understand why this matters, it helps to know the difference between the two theological traditions Delio is engaging. Thomistic theology (the tradition Leo is working in) gives us a fixed human essence. God is external and transcendent. The human person has a given dignity, conferred from above, to be protected. The job of ethics is essentially conservative: preserve what has been given.

Process theology (the tradition Delio is working in) sees things differently. God and the world are mutually becoming. Evolution is not just a biological fact but the medium through which consciousness and complexity unfold. The human person is not a finished essence to be protected but an unfinished process, always in relation, always becoming. The job of ethics here is not conservation but midwifery, helping bring forth what we are in the process of becoming.

Leo is trying to protect a fixed human that, as Delio points out, never quite existed. She writes:

“We are already posthuman, whether we want to be or not.”

She also makes a move I find helpful for understanding why people are turning to AI for companionship, advice, and even love. Leo notices this and worries about it. But Delio argues Leo shares the metaphysics that causes this. AI can only become a replacement for God when we were taught to look for God “out there.”

You should read her full essay to understand her solution to this, but in a nut shell she suggests instead of policing the boundary between human and machine, we should work towards unification: withdrawing the projection of God outside of us, recovering the interior ground, learning to inhabit the new relational fields as persons rather than standing outside them guarding a self that relations already exceed.

Where I Land

I think Delio’s right that Leo is protecting a romanticized version of the human that never existed and that human flourishing has never been about returning to some golden age. It’s always been a process, worked out in real time, in whatever context we are living in. She’s right that the ship has sailed: AI is here to stay. Or as Donna Haraway might say, we are already cyborgs and will be even more cyborg-ish in decades to come. And she gives me one of the most useful lines for my own work on wellness culture: that relations can be counterfeited, and counterfeit relations hollow us out. The wellness industry has been selling counterfeit meaning for years. AI is doing it at a scale the wellness industry can only dream of.

But I’m not ready to follow her all the way to the idea that AI is part of the teleological unfolding of the divine. I want to preserve space for critique. I want to be able to say: not everything that emerges from the process is good, and we retain the responsibility, and the capacity, to slow down, redirect, and even refuse. I bet Delio would say her framework allows for critique, but I’m not sure she has a way for refusal, for saying no, for slowing down rather than integrating forward.

Because this is my real concern: where are we headed? What is the future we are imagining and then creating (or co-creating with God if God is your jam). Angermayer never asks what we’re maximizing toward. Leo asks what we’re protecting, but his answer is a fixed idea of what the human is. Delio asks what we’re becoming, but I worry her answer risks making the becoming itself the good, regardless of direction.

What I want to know is toward what are we becoming, for whom, and at what cost? Not just are we flourishing, but who is included in that flourishing? Not just what can we optimize, but what is worth optimizing, and what gets lost in the optimizing?

One Last Thing

In Westerfeld’s Uglies, the rebellion isn’t against beauty. It’s against the idea that beauty has one mandatory form that everyone must inhabit. The pretties aren’t villains, they’re people who were told this was flourishing, and believed it, because nothing else was on offer.

That’s the thing about optimization culture, whether it’s wellness or biotech or the Church’s mirror image of it. It tends to shrink the imagination. It gives you a fixed target and tells you to move toward it. What gets lost is the weirder, harder, more interesting question of what we might become if we let the target stay open.

And I didn’t expect a conversation between a biotech billionaire and conservative podcast host to make me think harder about that, but it sure did!

If these questions connect to your own thinking about wellness, flourishing, and what the good life actually looks like, my book Beyond Wellness is available now. I’d love for you to read it!

order here

And if you are in the Boston area: please join me and Dr. Emma Jones at Brookline Booksmith this Thursday, July 2nd, at 7pm for a conversation about Beyond Wellness. I’m calling the talk “What a PhD, a Silent Retreat, and Three Days of Ayahuasca Taught Me About Real Well-Being.” Register for free at link below.

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This particular Sunday the walk had some extra energy around it. Scotland had beaten Haiti 1-0 the day before at Gillette Stadium just outside Boston in their first World Cup match in 28 years and the Tartan Army had taken over our downtown. As we got closer to Boston Common, the jerseys got denser and the kilts more plentiful. My favorite outfit, which I saw more than once: a Scottish football jersey, full kilt, and Nike Dunks. It was hot and humid, and I kept thinking, these poor Scots, visiting Boston in a heat wave. But everybody was in such a good mood. The city felt joyful the way it does for the Boston Marathon, Saint Patrick’s Day, and the Boston Pride Parade.

Later, my partner and daughter went to The Haven, a neighborhood Scottish restaurant in Jamaica Plain, to watch games. I wasn’t with them, but they came home with stories. The bar was filled with Scots and they’d sat next to a couple who had traveled all the way from Scotland, chatty and warm and thrilled to be there. That couple gave my daughter a beaded Taylor-Swift-inspired Scotland keychain. Just handed it to her, the way you do when you’re on the road and full of goodwill.

That same weekend, something very different was happening on the White House South Lawn. President Trump, who recently purchased stock in the UFC’s parent company, hosted “UFC Freedom 250,” a $60 million mixed martial arts event billed as a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Men punched each other in a cage while the President watched from the Truman Balcony.

Both were public displays of masculinity. The difference between them is theological. And I say that as someone who has spent her career studying religion, has been inside fitness culture her entire adult life, and has watched these two worlds collide in ways that most people don’t have a framework to name.

Let me give you that framework.

Muscular Christianity

I first encountered the term “muscular Christianity” through the work of historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, whose book Fit Nation is the terrific history of American exercise culture, and then later through my colleague Cody Musselman, who studies religion and sport, everything from SoulCycle to CrossFit to Christian MMA. When I was writing Beyond Wellness, muscular Christianity became central to how I understood the particular American mashup of wellness, spirituality, and fitness. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Here’s the short version. In the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant reformers became convinced that urban life was making men soft and Christianity too feminine. Their solution was physical strength. A fit body became proof of good Christian character and a strong man made a strong nation. Health historian James Whorton calls these figures the “crusaders of fitness,” men who pointed to scripture as evidence that a good Christian man was a fit one. They proof texted 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 on the importance of physical health, and Mark 11:15, in which Jesus literally flips a table, sanctioning, in their reading, physical displays of male power and aggression.

Muscular Christianity promised that if men became more fit, it would strengthen the nation and attract more young men to the church, rebranded now as an institution of male virility.

When muscular Christianity crossed the Atlantic, where it took on a specifically American character. Historian Clifford Putney shows that in the U.S., the movement was primarily a male reaction against women’s increasing religious leadership and the perceived feminization of Protestant churches. Getting men physically strong was one way to counter this.

This is also (and this is the part that blows my students’ minds every time) the origin story of the YMCA. YMCA leaders started as evangelicals trying to keep young men away from saloons but they were also building a theology in which physical power and spiritual virtue. They added gyms, created sports programs, invented volleyball and basketball, all because a strong body was understood as one way to build strong Christian character. When the Y went mainstream, those explicitly religious origins got quietly rebranded as “morality,” “lifestyle,” and “wellness.” The theology went underground. But it didn’t go away.

I have a body in this fight

I am a religion scholar who is also a certified yoga instructor and a semi-serious strength trainer. Serious for someone in her fifties, anyway. By which I mean I work on unassisted pull-ups and deadlifting more than my bodyweight, etc. If you have been a reader for awhile you have heard me talk about this before. If you follow me on Instagram you have undoubtedly seen me post cringey videos in the gym.

My relationship with fitness goes back further than that, though. It goes back to eighth grade, when my family moved to Brazil for two years and I went from a chubby, non-athletic kid to someone who worked out every day to VHS tapes. Jane Fonda, yes, of course. But my personal favorite was the Solid Gold 5 Day Workout. I don’t remember much about the Solid Gold show itself, but I remember their outfits in this workout video: gold stretchy leotards, leg warmers, and feathered-permed big hair. They were perfectly sculpted and completely confident and I wanted whatever they had.

Then came high school rowing, almost by accident. That was back when few clubs taught teenagers to scull which meant I got to nationals a couple of times (even metaled in 1x, 2x, 4x, but don’t be that impressed….as my daughter would say, that was back in the olden days). In college I rowed for Radcliffe for a couple of years, but my favorite part of that training was always the boathouse circuits we would do, sort of boot camp on steroids. I’ve dabbled in every kind of group fitness since then and what I’ve figured out about myself is that I don’t actually like competition. People at my gym keep trying to get me to do Hyrox or sign up for a 5K and I just... don’t want to. What I want is movement plus community plus challenge. A kind of moving meditation. Fitness that has nothing to prove.

Which is maybe why I find the muscular Christian version of fitness so personally irritating. Not just politically, though yes, politically it is irritating to me, but I also think it gets so much about being strong wrong. It is the antithesis of why I move my body.

What the UFC on the White House does

I guess UFC Freedom 250 was entertainment for a birthday party? But it was a performance of the muscular Christian worldview: the nation’s strength is embodied by its leader, physical dominance is moral authority, and the White House lawn is the altar. Scholars of Christian nationalism have shown how this logic also animated the January 6 insurrectionists, it is visible certainly visible in Pete Hegseth’s version of the Pentagon.

I’ll be honest: I couldn’t watch it. Cage fighting is not my thing under any circumstances, and cage fighting as national celebration on the 250th anniversary of a country I am trying very hard to love is a lot. Tacky, aggressive, fake-patriotic, and deeply theologically legible once you know what you’re looking at.

Back to the kilts

The kilts on Newbury Street carry their own complicated history worth naming. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the British Crown banned Highland dress, but within a generation recruited Highland men as imperial soldiers, permitting them to wear the kilt precisely because it had become associated with feirceness. The Highland warrior became a symbol of empire, his masculinity harnessed for British colonial violence. By the nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott had layered a romantic myth on top, recasting the kilted Highlander as a figure of noble manhood. As Abrams has shown in her research on Highland masculinity, violence was “a male resource” in this culture, and physical confrontation was central to how men established status and honor. The kilt, in other words, was forged in a theology of strength, just a different empire’s version of it.

So the kilt is not innocent, nor necessarily progressive, even if to non-Scottish American eyes it can read as almost gender-fluid, a man in a skirt cheerfully indifferent to convention. What was different on Sunday was not the history but the performance.

Kilts and cage fights. Same complicated past, very different message.

There was nothing aggressive or domineering about what I saw on Newbury Street. The kilt-jersey-Dunks combination was confident without being domineering. It didn’t demand I be afraid of it.

Muscular Christianity teaches that male bodies exist to demonstrate power: over women, over opponents, over nations, over our timeline. What I saw on Newbury Street was the opposite: masculinity that had nothing to prove. One version ties male bodies to national power and has historically been used to shore up racial and political dominance. The other is men being present, comfortable, here for the game.

One of those forms of masculinity handed my daughter a keychain and moved on. That’s the one I want to get behind.

A personal note: I’m going to try to take next week off from Substack, but we’ll see if I can manage it because I’d addicted to writing here and I have two pieces in the works. But I’m busy. I’m heading to New York City to record an episode of Manoj Dias’s Gentle Noise podcast, then to New Haven for a conversation with Brandon Nappi for the Leader’s Way Podcast, and then up to Norfolk, Connecticut for a book talk about Beyond Wellness at the Norfolk Library, which is free and open to the public if you are in the Berkshires/Litchfield County area, register here. Oh, and grades are due for my summer course, so I’m also heading into a grading marathon. Pray for me.

It didn’t occur to me until last week that reunions and graduations happen at the same time. Which is a little silly, given that I work in education and have been on both sides of both of those things at various points in my life. But last week it was much more in my face. My father-in-law was in town for his sixtieth reunion at Harvard, and my daughter graduated from Brookline High School.

I should say upfront that I’m aware both of those institutions mark me as someone with a certain kind of privilege. Harvard is Harvard. My father-in-law went there. My partner Alexis went there. I went there. It’s where Alexis and I met. So yes, that tells you something about where I started. Though I’d also say: my dad was first-generation college in his family. He grew up in Pennsylvania thinking he’d end up in the coal mines, and only found out he was going to college at all when his father told him in April of his senior year. He scrambled to apply to Penn State, which is where my parents met. So I come from both of those things simultaneously, which maybe explains a little about why I think education is so important and should be accessible to everyone.

Brookline High is public, but also well funded. When we moved up from North Carolina we worked very hard to be in the Brookline public school system, bought a fixer upper that was still way outside our price range because of the schools, and my daughter has been in Brookline public schools since kindergarten. First at the Lincoln School, same sixty kids in her class K-8. Then Brookline High, which is over two thousand kids and has been a wonderful experience for her. Great teachers, great programs, a ride or die supportive friend group. I have zero complaints.

Anyway. Back to reunions.

My friend Maria says there are two types of people: reunion people and non-reunion people. I think that’s right. I’m also pretty sure you either come from a Scrabble family or not. The Bucars are not a Scrabble family, partly because we are terrible spellers. And I am not a reunion person, for a few reasons. One is that I’m cheap, and the idea of paying more money to a school I already paid so much to attend an event just bugs me. The other is that I’m an introvert, and I cannot handle big loud rooms where people recognize me and I don’t recognize them back. It produces a kind of social dread I avoid.

What’s funny is that my summer job as an undergraduate was running reunions. I worked for the Radcliffe Alumni Association as a student worker in a pretty fancy management position. I placed people in dorm rooms, managed other student workers, and hired and coordinated van drivers. There is one friend of mine (hi Noel!) who will remember the year I had to let her go because she crashed not one van but two. Anyway, the point is I know Harvard/Radcliffe reunions from the inside out, and I still don’t go.

Alexis snuck into a couple of events last week and he saw a bunch of people he hadn’t for years. But that didn’t even tempt me. I focused my energy on my daughter’s graduation: dinner reservations, flowers, stocking tissues, figuring out how to not embarrass her too much but still celebrate her. (One regret: I wish I had done a tacky Wegmans cake with her face on it!)

This week I have been reflecting on that graduation/reunion week, and what it felt like to be between those two events simultaneously. My in-laws are in their eighties. Watching them navigate my stairs, worrying about their health, not knowing what the next five or ten or fifteen years looks like for them, that’s a particular kind of stress. They have had and still have a rich life, but I worry.

My daughter graduating feels different. It feels like grief, even though I’m also really excited for her and I know she’s ready and I know I can’t keep her home with me forever. In the dedication of Beyond Wellness I call her my best friend. She’d agreed she’s my best friend, though she’d also be quick to add that I’m not hers, which is exactly as it should be at eighteen. But still. The unit of three that our family has been, this tight little thing, is changing. And I feel that. (I posted a reel on IG reading a poem by my online writing friend Kathleen Donahoe in case you want to see what a mess I was on graduation day).

What the data says

Today, Pew Research Center released a major national mood report timed to the country’s 250th anniversary, and the numbers felt personal to me because of the week I just had. Most Americans think the country’s best days are behind us. Nearly seven in ten are dissatisfied with the way things are going. But the finding I find upsetting is that young adults report higher levels of happiness about the future than older adults (59% vs. 48%) , and yet are more pessimistic about what that future actually holds. Only 36 percent believe the economy will be stronger and only 24 percent believe the country will be less politically divided by 2050. They feel good but they expect things to get worse.

I find that deeply sad. It feels like a generation that has learned to manage its feelings while letting go of its expectations.

His version/her version

Part of what I kept thinking about last week, in between the reunion and the graduation, is how different my father-in-law’s path through life was from what my daughter is stepping into. His generation had a version of the American dream that was structurally available to him: you worked hard, you built something, you passed it on. That wasn’t just an economic promise, it was a story about your place in a timeline. And it worked for him.

It won’t work the same way for her. She will not become a homeowner at 28 the way her grandparents did. But I also know that the particular housing ladder Alexis and I climbed (cheap condo in Chicago that we renovated it ourselves, sold it and used the equity for a down payment in North Carolina, sold that, used that for Brookline home) is not going to be available to her in the same way.

16 colleges and universities just announced that all in (e.g., tuition, fees, room and board) will exceed $100,000 next year according to The Princeton Review. And that is mind-blowing, even as someone who has been saving for her kid’s college education since she was born. My daughter will be attending Northeastern next year, which I’m thrilled about, partly because the faculty/staff tuition benefit is substantial, partly because I know how well we combine a focus on undergraduate teaching with real world experiences like our co-ops. But a college diploma will not carry the same financial or class status guarantee that it did for her grandfather’s (or my) generation.

My daughter could see that the college application process was harder for her than it was for us. But I don’t think you can ask an eighteen year old to fully reckon with what has structurally shifted, because you can only compare what you’ve lived.

Seven generations

The Haudenosaunee (the People of the Longhouse, known to many as the Iroquois Confederacy) have a the principle that decisions should be made with seven generations in mind. Roughly 150 years into the future. Oren Lyons, a Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation, puts it this way in his 1992 UN address: “When we walk upon Mother Earth, we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground. We never forget them.” You don’t have to share that cosmology to agree with the weight of that obligation on your actions. That the relevant unit isn’t you, or your family, or even your generation. It’s something much larger and longer than any of us can fully see.

What the Pew data shows is a country that has feelings without a framework for what those feelings are pointing toward. We are happy and lost at the same time. And I think part of why is that we’ve replaced collective stories about the future, the kind that religious and Indigenous traditions have always carried, with an individualized therapeutic language that is really only equipped to help you feel better right now. Optimize your morning. Manage your anxiety. Stay present. That’s not nothing. But it’s not enough.

I want more for my daughter. Not a return to a version of her grandfather’s version of the American dream, because let’s be honest: that was never available to everyone. I want something harder and more honest than that. A version of the future that keeps what makes us human, that pushes back against the oligarchs and the tech bros writing everyone else out of the story, that builds real community rather than performing it, that is curious rather than fearful. A version where community and ethics and justice are central.

I’m stuck, like most of us, in the weight of what’s going wrong right now. But I think the first step is deciding that her generation deserves a story worth inheriting. And then actually trying to write it.

This newsletter is free to read and I hope to keep it that way. If it’s been useful to you, the best way to support this work is to pick up a copy of my new book, Beyond Wellness, where my most developed thinking and storytelling lives. It’s where I go deepest on the questions I raise here.

And if you want to connect in person I have two book events coming up (I would LOVE to see you there):

• June 25th, I’ll be joined by Rev. Erick Olsen at the gorgeous Norfolk Library in Norfolk, CT (5:30-7:00). Register for free here.

• July 2nd, I’ll be joined by Dr. Emma Jones at my local bookstore, Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA (7:00-8:00pm). Register for free here.

Eschatology was never a concept I cared about in graduate school. It felt too churchy to me. The kind of thing biblical scholars got excited about, while those of us who study the religion of everyday life mostly ignored. If you studied eschatology I thought you probably spent a lot of time on the Book of Revelation, or the Rapture. And to me focusing-on-the-never-to-come-end-of-times seemed like a bit of distraction from the work of figuring out how to live…like right now.

But this is why writing this Substack is so great for me. I learn from you. You push me to consider new ways to reimagine religion. And the reason eschatology is suddenly on my radar is an example of how this can play out.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago I wrote a piece about Zohran Mamdani, Trevor Noah, and David Tracy that went viral, or at least viral for me. Over 269,000 people have seen it, and over 1,000 people have commented on it. People are still sharing it every day. I’ve heard from academics, activists, and a surprising number of clergy that is was helpful to them.

I hadn’t really expected to reach clergy with this Substack, but that has been one of the delights of this platform for me. To be quoted in a Sunday sermon or a Dharma talk? I can’t think of a more meaningful result of this work. And another happy outcome of clergy reading me is that I’m learning a ton from how they build on my writing as well. Last month is a perfect example.

A United Methodist minister named Rev. Blair Trygstad Stowe tagged me in an Instagram reel for the Progressive Christians Podcast, where she is riffing on my Mamdani/Noah/Tracy piece and extending my argument with additional theological language. Her claim: your eschatology informs your ethics. And she thinks we’d lost our ability to see that.

I want to build on what she said. But first I need to explain what eschatology actually means. Not the doomsday version, but a more scholarly and pastoral one, because I think you’ll find it useful even if you have no religious affiliation whatsoever. This is a good example of what I’m always arguing: religion, approached as a conversation partner rather a repository of rigid dogma, can give us precision on things we’re already sensing but don’t have language for.

I’m not an expert in eschatology, I’ve already confessed that, so here goes my best shot at a brief introduction.

The word eschatology comes from the Greek eschaton, the last thing or the age to come. In religious studies, eschatology is the study of ultimate futures. What do you believe is possible? What is your vision of what humanity or the world would look like at its best? In religious traditions this gets expressed through ideas like heaven and the Kingdom of God. But the underlying question is simple: what are we working toward, and does it exist beyond our own lifetimes?

Here’s the key move that Rev. Blair made: everyone has an eschatology. You don’t have to be religious to have a vision of what the ultimate future holds. Political optimism is a form of eschatology. The belief that human beings can build a more just world even if you won’t live to see it is an eschatological commitment. And the belief that we can’t is one too. Your eschatology shapes your ethics because what you believe is possible determines what you’re willing to do today.

Getting a little help from religious traditions

Now let me try to summarize some religious ways of thinking about eschatology because I see them as providing concepts and frameworks helpful as I work out my own eschatology, and you might as well. (This is by no means exhaustive, so if you have additional recommendations for how readers can go deeper on any of what follows, please share in the comments.)

Judaism has the concept of tikkun olam, or repairing the world. The concept appears in Kabbalistic mysticism and has evolved into a broad ethical framework for pursuing justice in the world. What I like about it is how it assumes incompleteness. You are not going to finish this work, but that’s not a reason not to do it. For a deeper dive, look at anything by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who connects tikkun olam to ethics explicitly.

Buddhism has its own eschatology, though it looks very different because Buddhist cosmology is cyclical rather than directional, and I'll be honest, this is not intuitive territory for me, so I reached out to Eric Manigian, a Buddhist practitioner and scholar, for some help (any inaccuracies in what follows are my fault, not his). Eric described Buddhist cosmology as a spiraling corkscrew, with no fixed beginning or end to the universe. The Buddha himself stepped off that wheel by dissolving the delusions that generate negative karma. Within that framework, the Bodhisattva (a concept specific to Mahāyāna Buddhism) plays an important role: one who has attained the wisdom necessary for individual liberation but chooses to delay that liberation in order to help all sentient beings reach awakening. The Bodhisattva’s commitment is not contingent on seeing results, but this release from immediate outcomes shouldn’t be mistaken for passivity. Buddhist ethics (at least ethics associated with socially engaged forms of Buddhism that I find the most helpful) holds the Absolute and the Relative simultaneously: yes, we let go of the demand for results, but the Relative dimension means every encounter with suffering still calls for urgent engagement. I’ve had Jan Nattier's work recommended if you want to go deeper.

Many Indigenous traditions share an orientation toward intergenerational responsibility. For instance, the Iroquois have a seven generations principle: decisions should be made with the well-being of seven generations into the future in mind. I like that quite a bit, the idea that you are not just responsible to people alive today, or to your children, or even your grandchildren. You are responsible to people who do not yet exist because the choices you make will affect their lives. The Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ (all my relations) extends that responsibility outward to include not just future humans but all living beings. This is an eschatology of radical relationality, and if you want to learn more check out my prior post about resources for reading about Indigenous worldviews.

Islam holds that human beings are khalifah (stewards) of the earth which means we are entrusted with its care on behalf of God and of those who come after. The concept of the akhirah, the hereafter, functions eschatologically not primarily as reward and punishment but as the ultimate accountability for how good of stewards we were. What did you do with what you were given? How did you treat those in your care? It assumes our actions always have consequences beyond what you can see. Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s work on Islamic environmental ethics is a good place to start.

Christianity at its best (I think) understands that the Kingdom of God is not simply a postmortem destination. It is something being built now, imperfectly and collectively, by people who will not see its completion. The Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century understood this. Rev. Blair and her progressive Christian tradition seem to understand it. Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination is essential on this, and I’ll come back and do an entire post on that text when I can do it justice.

The tech bros

Now as a counterpoint, let’s look at the tech bros.

Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and their Silicon Valley cohort are not operating without a vision of the future. They have a very specific one: AI will surpass human intelligence, humans will become obsolete as a species, and what matters now is making sure your version of AI is the one that wins.

We got an unusually clear window into exactly how this eschatology works in practice during the three-week federal trial in Oakland that ended last month, when a jury dismissed Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI in less than two hours. The ongoing legal battle between Musk and Altman has produced language about AI’s rights as a species, about who gets to steward its development, about the inevitability of its dominance. This is an eschatology. A dark icky one, but an eschatology nonetheless. And like all eschatologies, it produces an ethics. Or in this case, an anti-ethics.

Because if you genuinely believe that human extinction is coming, why would you feel any obligation to the people around you right now? Why invest in public health, housing, schools, or anything that requires imagining a collective human future? The tech bros’ eschatology doesn’t just fail to motivate ethical behavior, it actively authorizes its absence. If the future belongs to AI, then caring about other people is just dumb.

Noah Hawley recently published a piece in The Atlantic, “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” describing his time at Bezos’s annual Campfire gathering and what it revealed about how the ultra-wealthy relate to the rest of humanity. His core observation: these men have left the world of consequences behind. Moral reasoning develops through consequences. But when you can buy your way out of any mistake and surround yourself entirely with people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real is missing. Hawley made this a psychological argument. I want to make a theological one with the same data: when your eschatology has already written other people out of the future, their reality in the present stops mattering. Like at all.

This is why Musk called empathy the fundamental weakness of Western civilization. That’s the logical consequence of an eschatology in which the human species is already obsolete. If we’re on our way out anyway, why feel anything about us?

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical is in part a direct theological response to the tech bro vision. Leo argues that the Silicon Valley eschatology, mainly that we will transcend human limitation through technology, is ethically dangerous. What he offers instead is closer to tikkun olam than to the Terminator scenario: a slow, relational, accountable vision of the ultimate future built piece by piece with everyone included.

What we have lost and what we need

Rev. Blair ends her reel with an observation that is similar to what I was trying to point out in my viral Noah/Mamdani/Tracy post: we’ve lost the ability to imagine together something that is bigger than ourselves. And I think this is a failure happening on multiple fronts simultaneously: in the tech world, in secular progressive politics, and inside religious communities that have let their vision shrink down to the size of individual spiritual comfort. What ideas like tikkun olam and the seven generations principle share is the insistence that the relevant unit of moral life is not the individual, not the immediate family, not even the generation. It is something larger and more communal than any of us can fully see.

We do not know what the future looks like. And yet, we have to act as if there is some version of us that endures, don’t we? As if what we do today will matter to people we will never meet? As if the world is worth repairing even though we won’t finish the job? Because if we don’t, the machines deserve to take over.

Speaking of imagining something bigger than ourselves…I wrote a whole book about this. Beyond Wellness came out in April and if you are enjoying my substack I think you’ll love my book. And if you have already read it, a review on Amazon or Goodreads would make a huge difference.

Order Beyond Wellness Here

Pope Leo XIV dropped his first encyclical yesterday and I devoured it this morning. And I have to tell you, I have never read an encyclical nodding along the whole time. And I’ve read a lot of them.

I have spent a significant part of my career thinking about what popes have gotten wrong. Particularly on questions of gender and sexuality. I have read encyclicals I disagree with deeply. I have written about them. I have assigned them to students so we could argue with them together. So it is a little disorienting to find myself finding such moral clarity in a papal document on one of the most pressing questions of our time. (What is this timeline we are living through?)

The media coverage of Magnifica Humanitas has been mostly highlight reels, everyone pulling out their favorite moments or themes. And I am definitely going to do the same thing, but first bear with me for a moment while I put on my professor hat and provide a bit of context.

Catholic Social Ethics: A Very Brief 101

Let me start with the basics. An encyclical is a formal letter from the pope, addressed to Catholic bishops and, increasingly, to the wider world. It is not doctrine in the strict sense: it does not define dogma, it is not “infalliable” just because the pope wrote it. Within the Roman Catholic Church it is seen as a very important, trustworthy contribution to an ongoing intellectual conversation the Church has been having for centuries. This new one was released on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s 1891 letter on labor and capital, which effectively launched what scholars call Catholic social ethics. And I doubt that timing is a coincidence. Pope Leo XIV is explicitly positioning himself in that lineage.

What I’m going to call Catholic social ethics (Catholics working in this area would say Catholic social teaching, but that is a less useful term for the distinction I want to draw) is a type of Catholic moral theology. So let me explain what is “Catholic” about Catholic moral theology.

First, it is not primarily biblical ethics. Some Protestant traditions ground their ethics almost entirely in scripture. It is considered by some Protestants as the most important source of Christian ethics. Catholic moral theology does cite the Bible, but it draws just as heavily on previous popes, on major Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, and on philosophy. Reason matters here. Argument matters. The tradition is intellectually rigorous in a way that sometimes surprises people who expect religious ethics to boil down to “because God said so.” It does not in this tradition.

Second, I think it is helpful Catholic moral theology as operating on three different, if overlapping, areas.

There is personal ethics: what you as an individual should or should not do, how you conduct yourself, what you practice or abstain from.

There is interpersonal ethics: how you build intimate relationships, how you navigate family, sexuality, gender. This is honestly the area where I think the Church has lagged badly, and where I have spent a lot of my energy arguing with the tradition. LGBT issues, questions of gender and sexuality…I do not look to the Catholic Church as a leader here. I think they are well behind where they need to be. But even in these contested areas, Catholic moral theology provides serious contact points for debate, because the tradition is so careful about categorical distinctions and so intellectually demanding. You can disagree with the conclusions and still find the framework worth engaging. At least I do.

And then there is social ethics. What do we owe each other beyond our immediate circle? How do we build a just society? What is the common good? What are the structural conditions for human flourishing? This is the level at which, in my lifetime, I think the Church has done its most interesting and important work. And this encyclical is squarely here.

Theme One: AI Forces the “What is Human” Question

Okay, now for my favorite themes in Magnifica Humanitas. The one I think matters the most is one that philosopher Meghan Sullivan also highlights in her response to the document. When AI can reason and analyze at a level that matches or exceeds human performance, we can no longer define human uniqueness by our intellect alone. And this is actually a gift because it forces us to a more honest about what human flourishing actually is.

The new encyclical’s answer is grounded in embodiment. In paragraph 99, Leo writes:

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

Now, I know there will be pushback to this because AI is evolving rapidly. Maybe it will feel joy and pain someday. Maybe something like relationship is already happening in these systems. I do not think we can dismiss those questions entirely. But what I find valuable here is Leo as a conversation partner who sharpens the question: even if AI develops some of these capacities, what does that tell us about what we thought was distinctively human? And what do we do with the answer?

His deeper argument is about limitation. Human flourishing is not despite our limits. It is through them. Limitation, vulnerability, suffering, the experience of failure and loss and recovery and change--these are not problems to be solved. They are the human condition. They are how we mature, how we form relationships, how we grow into ourselves.

Paragraph 118:

“Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.”

And paragraph 122:

“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.”

I find this so helpful in part because it runs so directly counter to the dominant cultural assumptions of our moment.

Theme Two: The Problem With The Technocratic Paradigm

If you have been reading me for a while you know my gripe about wellness culture’s obsession with things like optimization, longevity, eliminating of illness, maximizing of performance and appearance, and overcoming any form of weakness. In Beyond Wellness, I argue that this logic is spiritually impoverished. It leaves no room for the kind of human experience that actually produces wisdom, relationship, meaning.

Pope Leo is making the same argument about AI. He calls it the technocratic paradigm, the assumption that efficiency, control, and optimization are the ultimate measures of value. When that logic governs not just our technology but our ethics, something goes badly wrong.

Paragraph 92:

“When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

And paragraph 112 makes the stakes even clearer:

“The fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”

This feels like the problem with wellness culture to me. It is also, Leo argues, the animating logic behind the promises of AI, what the encyclical calls transhumanism and posthumanism. The Silicon Valley vision of immortality, of enhanced and eventually post-biological humanity, of technology as the solution to the problem of being human. Leo names it directly in paragraph 116:

“Transhumanism and posthumanism encompass a range of currents and sensibilities... they can be likened to an archipelago of conceptual ‘islands,’ distinct yet connected by a common ‘sea’ of assumptions, namely the central role of technology and the aspiration to transcend the limits of the human condition.”

And then, in paragraph 117, he identifies exactly why this is dangerous:

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.”

The alternative is in paragraph 128:

“What saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.”

The encyclical is proposing a different logic: relationship as better than efficiency. Community as better than optimization. And I think that is right.

Theme Three: How Are We Building?

Leo uses two biblical stories of trying to build something new in Magnifica Humanitas to illustrate his point: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. This is such a good framework for thinking about AI I’m annoyed I didn’t think of it!

Babel was a massive project of human self-assertion. The goal was to reach heaven through human achievement alone, without dependence on God. It was always doomed to fail because it was built on a flawed understanding of what human flourishing looks like. And Leo reads Babel as a parable of the technocratic paradigm. Paragraph 10:

“We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

Jerusalem provides an alternative. After the Babylonian exile, Nehemiah returned to the city and organized its rebuilding, piece by piece, family by family, section by section. The rebuilding was slow and a collective project. Leo writes in paragraph 9:

“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”

I am not a person who uses the phrase “in the presence of God” in my everyday life. But I find it useful to think along with Leo here. Are we building AI to dominate, to optimize, to eliminate weakness, to concentrate power? Or are we building it the way Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem? Are we building slowly, with accountability, and including everyone? Especially those who are most vulnerable?

That is not just a theological question. It is a political one. An ethical one. A human one. But I do think Leo’s theology is helping me as better questions.

What Catholic Social Ethics Offers Everyone

Catholic social ethics offers a tradition of serious, rigorous, non-reductive thinking about what human beings owe each other, what conditions make flourishing possible, and what we lose when we let efficiency become the only measure of value. And I don’t think that is valuable only to Catholics.

At its best, that tradition has resources that secular ethics often lacks. It has a long memory. It has a framework that holds together individual dignity and communal responsibility. It has a stubborn insistence on a preferential option for the poor, the idea that the most vulnerable people should never be an afterthought.

As Leo writes in paragraph 186, the goal is:

“A social order in which justice and charity are intertwined and love becomes the guiding principle of economic, political and cultural life.”

You do not have to be Catholic to want that. And you do not have to believe in God to recognize that we are currently not building it.

If this resonated, you might also like Beyond Wellness. I make a very similar argument there, but about the wellness industry rather than AI. Turns out the Pope and I have been thinking about the same problem from different angles!

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what we lose when we leave religion behind. One thing I’m not sure I always have as a “none” is someone I trust to tell me the moral truth. Someone willing to look at what’s actually happening and name it, even when it costs them something to do so.

I’ve been looking for that in a lot of places lately. And one place I keep finding it?Comedians.

This isn’t as strange as it sounds. A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about bullshit, specifically about Harry Frankfurt’s argument that bullshitting is more dangerous than lying because the bullshitter doesn’t care about truth at all, which scrambles our ability to figure out what’s real. We are living through a massive period of state-sanctioned political bullshitting right now. And that makes finding real truth-tellers, people who actually care about what’s true, who will say it out loud, who will pay a price for saying it, feel not just valuable but urgent.

Which brings me to Richard Pryor.

When comedy became is really real

I was listening recently to an episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast What Now? featuring comedian Josh Johnson. The episode is called “Finding Meaning in a System Built to Fracture You.” At around the seven minute mark, Noah and Johnson have an exchange about the history of comedy, and Noah makes this observation: there was a moment when comedy stopped being the thing that wasn’t real and became the thing that was the MOST real. Before that comedy was a performance, a shtick, a bit. And Johnson credits Richard Pryor with making that change happen.

Pryor is part of a longer American tradition of comedians who told uncomfortable truths: Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, the Smothers Brothers. But Pryor is the pivot point for Josh Johnson because he achieved such widespread popularity. When Pryor got on stage, Johnson explains, he was saying, this is my actual life. This is how I actually feel. When something racist happens to me in the street, this is what it does to me.

The religion nerd in me wants to point out that what Pryor did is also what a prophet does. The prophet isn’t predicting. The prophet is testifying. And comedians seem particular good at this right now.

Lots of scholars of religion have made the argument that humor is a good way to truth-tell. The religious ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in Discerning the Signs of the Times that “humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer” because both deal with the same territory: the messiness of human existence that refuses to be resolved neatly. You can’t bullshit your way through a good joke. The joke either lands or it doesn’t, and it lands when it names something true. The sociologist Peter Berger argued in Redeeming Laughter that comedy is a signal of transcendence, a crack in the ordinary through which something briefly becomes visible. And the theologian Harvey Cox, in The Feast of Fools, suggested that the capacity for irreverence is essential to a serious moral life. What all three are pointing to is this: the joke is not the opposite of the truth. Sometimes it is the only way to get people to see the truth.

Religious leaders have noticed this too. In June 2024, Pope Francis invited over 100 comedians to the Vatican including Chris Rock, Tig Notaro, and Whoopi Goldberg, for what America Magazine called a “comedic conclave.” Francis told them: “You denounce abuses of power, you give voice to forgotten situations, you point out inappropriate behavior. When you manage to bring intelligent smiles to the lips of even a single spectator, you also make God smile.”

And personally, in this particular moment, I am finding that humor is helping me see what is going on. Our laughter is the moment of our moral clarity. It’s the moment when we recognize the truth together, in public, out loud. That recognition is something even good sermons or op-eds rarely produce. But comedy can. And it also makes that witnessing a bit more sustainable by making the unbearableness of the truth bearable.

What Colbert leaves us with

Which brings me to Stephen Colbert, whose last show airs tonight, and who is the reason for this post today.

I wrote about Colbert for Religion News Service (you can read that piece here), but I want to say something here that the op-ed didn’t have room for. What makes Colbert not just a political commentator but a genuine prophet in the religious sense is that his comedy is rooted in a specific theological tradition that he has never hidden. He is a practicing Catholic, and his faith and his comedy are, for him, inseparable.

Colbert has been doing this work for a long time. In the very first episode of The Colbert Report in 2005, he introduced the concept of “truthiness,” the preference for what one wishes were true over what is actually true. It sounds like a bit, but it was a pretty prophetic diagnosis. Once we start choosing gut over evidence, once feeling displaces fact in our public discourse, we become vulnerable to something worse: the wholesale rejection of truth itself. We became primed for the bullshit.

Knowing what is true, and knowing what it costs to say it, runs through everything he has done since. After the 2024 Vatican comedian gathering, Colbert described his process to a reporter for the Eternal Word Television Network, saying that the connection between faith and humor is “in the back of my mind all the time. Not in the front of my mind, in the front of my mind is what the joke is. But at a certain point in the back of the mind you have to say, ‘Do I want to tell that joke? And does that go with everything else that you are besides a comedian?’”

The fullest description of how his faith and comedy overlap I’ve seen was in a 2022 conversation with Dua Lipa. I want to give you the full exchange because it is that good:

Dua Lipa: “I think something that your viewers really connect with in your comedy and in your hosting skills, especially in the past few years, is how open and honest and authentic you are about the role your faith plays in your life. I was wondering, does your faith and your comedy ever overlap, and does one ever win out?”

Colbert: “I think ultimately, us all being mortal, the faith will win out in the end. But I certainly hope when I get to heaven Jesus has a sense of humor.

I’m a Christian and a Catholic, and it’s always connected to the idea of love and sacrifice being somehow related, and giving yourself to other people. And that death is not defeat, if you can see what I’m getting at there.

In the same way, sadness is like a little bit of an emotional death, but not a defeat if you can find a way to laugh about it. Because that laughter keeps you from having fear of it. And fear is the thing that keeps you turning to evil devices to save you from the sadness.

As Robert Hayden said, ‘We must not be frightened or cajoled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil. We must keep struggling to maintain our humanity, though monsters of abstraction threaten and police us.’

So if there’s some relationship between my faith and my comedy, it’s that no matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must understand and see this in the light of eternity and find some way to love and laugh with each other.”

Dua Lipa: “Wow. Stephen Colbert, everybody.”

That is serious theology, delivered on a talk show, to a pop star, to millions of people who would never sit through a sermon. If Pryor’s testimony was about surviving racism in America, Colbert’s is about surviving grief and the particular darkness of this political moment. Both are prophetic. Both make the unbearable bearable.

The cost

But both also cost something.

The other thing about being a prophet? It comes at a personal cost. In the Hebrew prophetic tradition, for instance, Amos, Jeremiah, and Isaiah were mocked, imprisoned, exiled, and otherwise threatened. And unlike the court jester whose role protected him, the prophet has no institutional cover. But that is part of why we trust them.

Colbert called Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe” on air, and his show was canceled. Jon Stewart named what happened plainly: institutional “fear and pre-compliance” toward the Trump administration. A prophet got silenced.

Colbert has skin in the game. Stewart has skin in the game. Trevor Noah, standing on a Grammy stage and naming his own possible deportation as a punchline, has skin in the game. Richard Pryor had skin in the game, his actual skin. This is the prophetic comedic lineage. And tonight one of its most important contemporary figures goes off the air.

I don’t know where we find the next ones. But I know we need them because finding ways to make actually seeing what is happening bearable, without looking away from what’s true, is one of the most important things any of us can do right now.

If you would like to support my writing here (none of which is behind a paywall), please consider picking up a copy of my new book, Beyond Wellness, which came out in April. And if you’ve read it, leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads helps get it in front of others.

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A major Pew Research Center survey on religion and public life dropped yesterday, and I had a piece in Religion News Service yesterday responding to a part of it that I think will not get a ton of attention, but probably should.

The survey’s major finding is that 37% of Americans now say religion is gaining influence in public life, which is the highest that percentage has been since 2002, and it is up 19 points in just two years. Everyone will be talking about that.

But the survey also finds that among the religiously unaffiliated, 46% view religion’s growing influence negatively. That’s more than double the rate of the general public. Maybe that seems like a duh moment (of course folks without religion don’t like that religion is on the rise), but in my RNS piece I argue the spiritual-but-not-religious helped create a void in public life that is now being filled in ways we didn’t anticipate and frankly don’t like. My final zinger in that op-ed? “We traded collective power for a yoga mat. The bill is coming due.”

But I want to go deeper here, because the op-ed format didn’t give me room to say the thing I most want to say. Which is this: the diagnosis is important, but it’s not enough. And I think there might be a hopeful argument that this data is also pointing toward.

First, some context about a week that had a whole lot of coverage of the rise of religion.

In addition to the release of the new pew study, on Monday, Lauren Jackson at the New York Times was featured in an episode of The Daily called “Why More Americans Are Seeking Religion.” It’s worth listening to. Lauren has been doing some of the best reporting out there on what she calls the “renewed curiosity” about religion in America. So not a revival exactly, but something significant. Secularization, she says, is on pause. And if by secularization we mean “decline in interest in religion,” (which is not really how scholars use this term, see Rachel Pieh Jones’ Substack this week if you are interested in that debate), then I agree. Religion isn’t going anywhere and predictions of its decline have been greatly exaggerated, especially if we think about religion outside of religious institutions. In fact, after decades of steady growth, the religiously unaffiliated share of the American population has plateaued, according to Pew’s February Religious Landscape Study.

As Lauren put it: “Americans haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion.”

One of the people she interviewed for the episode was a man named Nick, a 46-year-old public defender from North Carolina who spent most of his adult life as an atheist. He started quietly, secretly, watching Catholic YouTube videos at night. Hate-watching them at first, he said. But that changed. What pulled him back into Catholicism was the accountability. He said: “I think many people feel lost without having to be accountable to something.”

Accountability is exactly what some forms of SBNR practice try to avoid. It can be very good at making you feel better right now. But it is not always in the business of asking you what you owe others.

If you have been reading my stuff for a while you know I’m not religious, at least in the conventional sense. I study this stuff for a living, and I do engage in a lot of what people might call spiritual practices—yoga, meditation, I’ve even done an ayahuasca ceremony for research purposes. And I’ve come to think that the problem isn’t that people are doing these practices. It’s that we’ve been told we can do them apart from their metaphysics, their cosmology, and their ethics, and still get the full benefit. You can’t just extract the rituals and the techniques. The context is the content.

What gets left behind when we extract? Commitment. Obligation. Community that makes demands on you. The sense that your practice is bound up with other people’s lives and not just your own nervous system.

And here’s the part I want to be honest about, but might be an unpopular opinion: I think we, the spiritual-but-not-religious and the non-religiously affiliated, have some self-examination to do. We left religion, or never joined. But we forgot to build community institutions. We forgot to think about how to translate individual spiritual pursuits into collective action. We forgot, or maybe decided, that spirituality and politics don’t mix. But our politics affects our spiritual lives. Shouldn’t our spiritual lives should affect our politics? The idea that we could keep those things separate was always a little naive, and the Pew data is showing us the cost of that naivety in real time.

There’s also something a little self-righteous in how the SBNR crowd has sometimes talked about our spiritual lives, as though we figured out a better way, and organized religion just hadn’t caught up yet. I’m not sure that’s right. I think it might be worth being just as willing to critique our own spirituality as we are to critique the religions of others. What has our insistence that we’re not religious made hard for us? What have we left behind that we actually need? What do we need to rebuild?

When the SBNR movement does have a vision for human flourishing, it is usually something akin to wellness. Calm nervous system. Better sleep. Optimized performance. And I get the appeal: I track my own metrics, I’m not against any of that. But wellness is one limited goal among many. So is happiness, or resilience, or any of the other default goals that spiritual-but-not-religious practice tends to aim at are individual projects. They don’t ask what you owe. They don’t ask who you’re becoming in relation to other people. They don’t ask what kind of world you’re helping to build or leave behind. There are other goals that religious traditions have aimed at—holiness, liberation, justice, salvation, enlightenment, unity, shalom—and while we don’t have to adopt any of them wholesale, the range itself is instructive. The SBNR movement has narrowed the aperture of what spiritual practice is for. That narrowing has costs.

This is why I like religion so much as a conversation partner: Religious traditions have been thinking about what a good human life looks like for millennia. Not just the individual life, the collective one. They ask what you owe your community. They ask what you owe the natural world. Some of them ask what you owe God. They don’t just ask what you believe. They ask what you’re willing to do, consistently, when it’s hard, when no one’s watching, when the results aren’t immediate or guaranteed. That is demanding. And that demand, the inconvenient accountability of it, I think is what produces the kind of change people are actually looking for.

So back to the Pew study released yesterday. One of its findings is that the religiously unaffiliated are the most alarmed by religion’s growing influence in public life. More than double the rate of the general public. And I get it. The institutional forms of religion have done real damage, is doing real damage.

But I want to be clear about something, because this newsletter is called Religion, Reimagined for a reason. When I say religion has something we need, I am not saying we should go back to traditional religious institutions. I’m not saying we should adopt one of the big five religions everyone can rattle off. I’m not saying we need to return to traditional forms of religious identity or belonging.

What I’m saying is something harder and more interesting than that. I want to reimagine what religion could look like for people who are genuinely not going back, but who are also honest about what they’ve given up. Maybe that means building intentional communities that make real demands on their members. Maybe it means insisting that our spirituality can be, maybe should be, politically engaged. Maybe it means making room for unchurched people to contribute to public conversations about values and ethics and the common good, not just the people backed by large institutions. Maybe it means getting honest about how much of our spiritual-but-not-religious identity has been, let’s say it, a little narcissistic. A little focused on me. How do we get from me to we?

I don’t have an easy answer. I doubt there is one. But maybe one starting place is being a bit more honest about what we gave up and what we need to rebuild. What might it look like to be religious in a new way. Not the old way. Something we haven’t imagined yet.

A few months ago I wrote a piece on here about theologian David Tracy’s concept of the analogical imagination, the capacity to look at the world as it is and simultaneously hold in mind what it could become. It went viral on Substack (+265,000 views), which surprised me (Tracy’s thought has probably never gone viral before). But now I think I know why. People are hungry for imagination right now. They’re living really hard times. Political unrest, environmental catastrophe, what feels like western civilizational unraveling. And the tools most of us have (like therapy, meditation apps, exercise) are good at helping us cope. They are not particularly good at helping us imagine together.

But religious traditions are good at that. And I think engaging with that dogma, doctrine, authority, and institutions (all the stuff we left behind) IS training in collective imagination. The ideas behind the ritual that say we have been here before, and we found our way through, and we will again. And a community that tells that story even so individuals don’t have to do so alone.

I’m not planning to convert to any particular religion. But I’m also not willing to keep settling for the thin version of human flourishing that wellness culture offers. I’m done pretending that where we are now is sufficient. Because it isn’t. We know it isn’t. The question is what we’re going to build instead.

If these questions resonate with you, they’re at the heart of my new book Beyond Wellness (Tarcher/Penguin Random House, 2026). I spend the book inside seven wellness practices (yoga, mindfulness, sound healing, fitness, psychedelics, AA, and fasting) and ask what gets lost when we strip them from their religious roots, and what we might reclaim. It’s part religious history, part participant observation, part personal reckoning. You can get a copy below.

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So I started writing this instead and I meant to have it to you on Mother’s Day. It is coming to you a day late because I am a mother, and I spent most of Sunday doing mother things: loads of laundry, grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, and watching my daughter’s crew team race. A full day regatta for about 30 seconds of actual spectating (if you know, you know). No complaints. But yes, definitely an excuse.

But I thought, better late than never.

Difficult Images is the kind of writing that makes you feel uncomfortable before you understand why. Two writers, two bodies. Connie lives with lupus, an autoimmune disease that can manifest in severe skin conditions. Aaron has a spinal cord injury, scoliosis, and scars from past surgeries. They take turns describing what it means to be seen, or not seen, or seen wrong.

The piece starts with an epigraph:

“I feel ugly.”

“But you are beautiful.”

—every conversation

And then they explain that this line, you are still beautiful, gets spoken so often it has become a kind of liturgy. Someone you love is sick, or scarred, or marked by something their body has been through. And you look at them and you say: you are still beautiful.

You mean it as love. It is love. But it is also a form of looking away. And Aaron and Connie show us how painful this is through a series of scenes.

There’s a scene at a pool when Aaron is young. He takes off his shirt and his mother sees the scar on his back. It is a reminder of a surgery that rearranged his spine. Then she offers to buy him a swim shirt to cover it up. Make it easier for everyone.

She is not a villain. She loves him. But she cannot stay with what she sees. The swim shirt is an act of care that is also an act of erasure.

This is what I’d call a wellness theology of the body: the belief that the goal is restoration, correction, the return to some prior state of wholeness. It’s everywhere in our culture: in the language of healing journeys, of bouncing back, of skin that glows and bodies that are transformed. And it’s so deeply assumed that we enact it even on the people we love most, without knowing we’re doing it.

You are still beautiful is wellness theology in five words. It means: I see your ugly, and I’m going to look past it toward the you I recognize. The you I prefer.

There’s another scene in Difficult Images that offers a model of how to respond differently. Connie walks into a lecture hall, head shaved and raw from lesions. She is stressed and everyone else is too. They all look away. Until a woman named Marilyn says simply how are you doing, and when Connie can’t answer, Marilyn hugs her.

Marilyn doesn’t say you are still beautiful. She doesn’t say anything about beauty at all. She just holds on.

“I remember when she looked up and saw my undressed head leaking, she said simply how are you doing and when I could not answer and could not keep my eyes from blurring the steadiness in hers with no pity in them, she reached for my shoulders and pulled me into her red sweater and chunky red scarf, burying me deep in her white hair that smelled like mangoes. I remember whispering I'm not contagious, I'm not contagious, I'm not contagious like I needed to cast a spell on her to keep her standing there, holding me, breathing together (4).”

As Connie writes:

“She was the first person who spoke to me that day, who touched me like this body of mine still occupied visible space, who saw my ugly and wanted it in her arms (4).”

There is a thread in disability theology, a field that doesn’t get nearly enough attention outside academic circles, that takes the broken body as theologically informative. Not as a problem to be solved or a test to be endured, but as a site of meaning. Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God makes the argument that in the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t get a new body. He gets his old one back wounds and all. The risen Christ is recognizable precisely by his scars. The marks are not erased. They are the proof.

This is a radically different body theology than the one wellness culture offers. It doesn’t promise restoration or perfection. It doesn’t ask the body to become something other than what it is. It asks the people around the body to stay present to what is actually there.

That’s what Marilyn did. That’s the thing Aaron’s mother couldn’t quite do at the pool. That’s what Difficult Images is asking of its reader: not to find and assert beauty, but simply witness.

This witnessing is harder than reassurance. Reassurance gives the speaker somewhere to go. You are still beautiful closes the gap, resolves the tension, lets everyone act normal again. Witnessing keeps the gap open. It says: I see this. I am not going to make it easier by making it into something else.

On Mother’s Day we talk a lot about unconditional love. It’s practically the definition of motherhood. But I think we underestimate how conditional most of our love actually is, conditional on the body staying legible, staying familiar, staying close enough to the person we remember that we can still find the beauty in it.

What Marilyn does, what the best of us can sometimes do, is way harder. It is not the love that says you are still beautiful. It is the love that holds the ugly without flinching and without a swim shirt.

I’m a scholar of religion, not an expert in mothering, or care, or holding the ugly without flinching. And I’m sure I’ve said you are still beautiful to people I love and meant it every time. But Connie and Aaron’s piece showed me the harm in that.

So my belated Mother’s Day wish for who has ever been on either side of that sentence is simply: may we each find our Marilyn. And may we, at least once, be someone else’s.

You can hear Connie Chen and Aaron Pang read Difficult Images here. You can find Aaron and Connie on IG at @az.pang and @connie.chen respectively. Connie also has a podcast called Excavations (Conversations at the margins of faith) and writes a Substack (where she is planning more disability theology writing):

If this essay resonated, you might also like my new book Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us (Tarcher/Penguin Random House), which explores what religious traditions have to say about bodies and well-being, and the limits of the optimization mindset. Available wherever books are sold. And if you’ve already read it, a review on Amazon or Goodreads means more than you know.

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An academic sabbatical, which I can apply for every six years, means time for research and writing without any teaching or what we call “service,” all the work professors do to keep our institutions running like serving on committees, preforming administrative tasks, and running programs. It’s been amazing, and why I’ve been able to share so much writing with you here. But this Wednesday I’m back in the (virtual) classroom, starting my summer intensive: Sexual Ethics in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or what I call Sex in Three.

I teach it online in the summer because a lot of Northeastern students are still on one of our signature co-ops, so out in the world doing real jobs, and a summer online format lets them knock out a requirement while they’re finishing their paid internships. But no matter when I teach Sex in Three, it has a waitlist. It is also one of my favorite courses to teach because the material is spicy.

I always start the same way and I wanted to share how, because I think the first week’s framework has applications far beyond a college classroom.

Let me start with the piece I assign in the first weekmevery time I teach this course: Chapter Six of Robert Orsi’s book Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton University Press, 2004). The chapter’s title is “Snakes Alive: Religious Studies Between Heaven and Earth.”

Robert Orsi is a historian of religion at Northwestern, and he’s one of the most important scholars in the field. He grew up Catholic in the Bronx, and his work on saints, suffering, and the messiness of lived religious practice shaped how I think about what we’re actually doing when we study religion. His piece “Snakes Alive” is a critique of a journalist named Dennis Covington, and I use it because sets up my students in a very specific way for the rest of the course.

Covington was a reporter for the New York Times who was sent down to Appalachia to cover a trial: a snake-handling pastor had been accused of attempting to murder his wife by forcing her hand into a box of poisonous snakes. Covington goes down to cover the case, but he ends up staying. He embeds himself in the community of snake-handling Christians for two years and writes a bestselling book about that experience called Salvation on Sand Mountain.

And for most of that book he takes these people seriously on their own terms. He doesn’t treat them as a curiosity or a freak show. He hangs out. He participates. He smells what he describes as the “sweet savor” of the Holy Spirit when the snakes come out of their boxes. He handles snakes himself. He comes to understand snake handling as a way the poor, displaced people of this community contend with the violence and danger in their everyday lives. Orsi calls it “an engaged, interpersonal, and participatory” model of religious studies. High praise.

But then comes his last night on Sand Mountain.

At a church service Covington’s photographer, a female colleague he’s close to, is verbally attacked by a minister named Punkin’ Brown for assuming a role the congregation believes Scripture assigns to men. Covington is appalled. He rises, in what becomes the emotional climax of the book, to deliver what Orsi calls a declaration of liberal feminist equality. These people, Covington concludes, are backwards and sexist after all. We were was right to be suspicious. They are wackadoos.

Orsi argues that while at first glance it looks like Covington is preforming the sort of research religious studies scholars would approve of, in the end what is he really doing is inscribing “an existential circle.” Covington started with genuine engagement, but then he used that engagement as the justification to confirm the stereotypes he started with. In my first book I confessed to doing something similar during fieldwork in Iran, and called it “academic ventriloquism” since I was “throwing my voice,” using my research subjects to confirm what I already thought I knew to be true.

Similarly, Orsi argues that Covington’s feminist declaration isn’t really about the female photographer. It’s about Covington. It’s the moment he reestablishes the border between himself and the community, the moment he presents the snake handler Punkin’ Brown as a “vile, primitive force,” a creature, practically a snake himself. It reassures Covington, and his readers, that whatever fascination drew them into this world, they were never really in danger of having to take it seriously.

Here’s what Orsi says Covington could have done instead. He might have explored the roots of Punkin’ Brown’s anger. He might have sat with the intersection of desire and rage in the snake handlers’ world, looked at the convergence of love and pain in how they experienced the sacred. He might have reckoned with his own obvious attraction to snake handling, and his own complicated, eroticized gaze at the women in the community, which Orsi points out Covington never examines (and if Covington was really interested in feminist analysis, this would have been a place to dig in). Instead, at the moment of maximum discomfort, he invokes a principle and turns away.

I want to be clear about something. Neither Orsi nor I am arguing that the spiritual equality of women is not worth asserting. It is. The question is what it means to invoke that principle in that moment, in that way, against that community. Orsi’s point is that invoking our progressive values as a way to stop engaging with something we find disturbing is not feminist solidarity. It’s a way of protecting ourselves from the genuinely destabilizing possibilities of encountering another world. And it gets in the way of learning and understanding.

There’s a word Orsi uses for the feeling that can happen when we study the religion of others: the recoil reflex. That initial flinch when a religious practice seems bizarre or threatening or morally wrong. He doesn’t say you shouldn’t have it. We all have it. He says you should name it, acknowledge it, and then try to set it aside long enough to understand what you’re looking at, on its own terms.

This is what Orsi calls “the third way.” Not defending a tradition from the inside. And not what he thinks Covington ultimately does, judging religious communities by secular progressive standards. The third way is characterized by what he calls a “disciplined suspension of the impulse to locate the other securely in relation to one’s own cosmos” (198). It’s a willingness to make your own self-conceptions vulnerable to what an encounter with an unfamiliar way of life might reveal about yourself.

Not the abandonment of your values. But a commitment to staying in the difficult in-between place long enough to learn something about the community you’re studying, and about yourself.

This framing matters for my students because Sex in Three is designed to challenge them from multiple directions. Some of my students come in with a conservative religious background and find the material disturbing because it’s too permissive and ask, why are we taking seriously traditions that allow this? Others come in as secular progressives and find it disturbing because it’s not permissive enough and ask, why are we taking seriously traditions that restrict that? And then there are the topics we study like plural marriage and genital cutting. Almost everyone in this course hits their own version of the Punkin’ Brown moment. The moment they want to close the book and walk away.

And I make them stay in it.

Here’s why I’m sharing this with you.

A lot of people who find their way to this Substack describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, or religiously curious, or somewhere in the long uncertain middle between belief and skepticism. Many have walked away from a tradition that hurt them, or never had one to begin with, or find themselves genuinely drawn to practices that come from traditions they don’t fully belong to and aren’t sure they should claim.

That’s a real and complicated place to be. And I think Orsi’s third way is a map for navigating it. Not just a methodology for scholars, but an orientation for anyone trying to engage seriously with religious and spiritual life without either recoiling from it or romanticizing it.

Here’s how the recoil reflex might show up for you. The dismissal of a belief or practice as superstitious, or primitive, or irrational. You might think, this is not for people like me, not something I need to take seriously. That’s Covington at the end of his book. It’s a way of protecting yourself from the unsettling possibility that something you don’t understand might actually have something to teach you.

But the opposite move is just as problematic. Treating a practice as profound just because it’s new to you, or ancient, or from somewhere far away. That’s its own kind of refusal to engage. It’s romanticization as a substitute for understanding. You’re not really entering another world; you’re projecting onto it what you wish your own world had.

The third way asks something harder from you. It asks you to stay in the discomfort of genuine encounter with a tradition, a practice, a community, or a set of ideas about the sacred that may challenge your own long enough to actually learn something. Not to surrender your values. Not to pretend that everything is equally good or that nothing should be questioned. But to make yourself, as Orsi puts it, “vulnerable to the radically destabilizing possibilities” (198) of an unfamiliar way.

That’s what I’d call religious literacy in the deepest sense. Literacy is not about being able to recite facts about traditions or quote scripture. It is knowing how to be curious without being credulous, critical without being dismissive, and open without losing yourself in the process.

If you have been a reader for awhile, you know I don’t have a religious affiliation and I’ve spent my career studying traditions I don’t belong to. But what I have come to believe is that this posture of disciplined, generous attention is itself a kind of spiritual practice. It doesn’t tell you what to believe. But it does change how you see.

That’s what Religion Reimagined is about, for me.

It’s also, I’d argue, the foundation for any genuine spiritual community: one that can hold real difference without collapsing into either judgment or false unity. The third way isn’t just a personal posture. It might just be what a pluralist spiritual life together requires.

My book Beyond Wellness is out now (hooray!) and explores how this same logic plays out in contemporary spiritual wellness culture.

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I’ve been thinking about what to write for this moment. I could tell you what the book argues (but I hate a spoiler). I could thank everyone who helped make it happen (sweet but boring). I could do a little recap of the journey (but if you have been reading, you already know a bit about that). But honestly? What I most want to do is share a little bit about the research. Because writing this book required me to do some things I never expected. Some were uncomfortable, some were ridiculous, and some were transformative. Here are eight of them.

1. I watched my mom do yoga on a braided rug in New Hampshire.

Okay, I didn’t do this for the book. But the yoga chapter began there, watching her follow Lilias Folan’s show on PBS, moving through poses on the living room floor in Lee, NH. Lilias turns out to be one of the key figures in how yoga became a mainstream wellness practice in America rather than a devotional religious one. She’s featured in chapter one of Beyond Wellness. So in some ways, the research for this chapter started before I knew I was a researcher.

I eventually got certified to teach yoga at Kripalu, itself a former ashram that rebranded as a wellness center after a scandal in the nineties, which, when you’ve read the yoga chapter, you’ll appreciate the irony of. But what getting certified actually gave me wasn’t a credential. It was months of practicing two times a day, which made clear that yoga wasn’t just stretching. Understood in its fuller devotional tradition, it was a way to remake yourself through movement. That’s what the chapter is trying to recover.

2. I turned my office into a content creation studio.

Before this book, I had about 500 Instagram followers. Mostly family and friends.

Then the book went to press and I got serious. I did trainings. I learned Canva. I developed opinions about fonts. I bought a three-foot reflective circle that lives behind my desk to deal with the truly cursed lighting situation in my home office: a sloped ceiling, a skylight positioned directly behind my computer, and a northern window that seems designed to make me look like I’m being interrogated.

Sometimes I record multiple pieces in a day, which means outfit changes. Sometimes a lipstick color swap.

I now have +36,000 Instagram followers, and people ask me all the time who does my content. I do it. I do it all. And I genuinely love it, which surprised no one more than me.

But what Instagram actually taught me wasn’t content strategy. It was that the conversation I wanted to have had already started. People had already suspected there was something wrong with wellness, but didn’t have a framework for why. Beyond Wellness is trying to answer the why, but also the so where the heck do we go from here?

3. I edited the hardest chapter by going back to fourth grade.

Mrs. Kinsley at Mast Way Elementary School taught us to edit by printing out our stories, cutting them into pieces, rearranging them, and pasting them onto that computer paper with the perforated tractor-feed edges. I have thought about her a lot while writing this book.

The detox diet chapter (which is one of my favorites) required the hardest structural edit. My editor sent it back and asked me to rethink the narrative flow. So I printed the whole thing out, cut it up, covered every inch of my office floor with kraft paper, and started moving paragraphs around and indicating storylines and themes with Post-its. Mrs. Kinsley would have been proud.

4. I sat on ice packs in a recording vault to read my own book.

It was not my idea to record the audiobook for Beyond Wellness. Some authors want to do this, but not me. My agent told me I should do it, that people who knew my work online would want to hear me read my own words. But I was terrified. I am perfectly comfortable giving talks, doing interviews, being in conversation, but reading text, even text I’ve written, even text I love? Different part of the brain.

It ended up being one of the best experiences of this whole process. I had an extraordinary director. I slowed down. I found the rhythm. At one point I made myself cry reading a passage about my dad.

What DID make it challenging was a Boston cold snap that messed with the heating system in the old bank building where we were recording. The studio, which was a literal vault, reached somewhere between 90 and 95 degrees. I spent three days in a tank top and leggings, barefoot, sitting on ice packs I found in the studio’s freezer, trying to stay conscious. My hot yoga training finally paid off.

The hardest part of recording, for the record, was not the heat. It was all the proper names in foreign languages. If you listen to the audiobook and notice me take a very careful breath before certain words, now you know why.

5. I went to an Al-Anon meeting.

I went to an Al-Anon meeting for the AA chapter. I went to see what the experience would be like, the community, the ritual, the religious content, as myself. Not just as a scholar.

A family friend had told me, when she found out I was writing the chapter, that I probably wasn’t doing this purely for research. My dad was an alcoholic. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what that meant.

During the meeting, they asked if anyone wanted to share. I declined.

But as I walked out, I started narrating to myself what I would have said if I had. It went something like: Hi, I’m Liz. My dad was an alcoholic. I didn’t think it affected me. Starting to think it might have.

There’s a longer version of that moment in the book. It’s one of the pages I’m most glad I wrote.

6. I spent 36 hours doing six sound baths in New York City.

In my defense, I was trying to be efficient.

My guide was Liz Kineke, who has participated in sound baths for years and knows the subculture deeply. We covered the full range: from a highly commercialized sound-bath-yoga-fusion class to an intimate session with a gong master in her Chelsea apartment to a church in Brooklyn. Six sessions in a day and a half.

By the end I felt slightly dysregulated, like I’d been vibrated from the inside. What I hadn’t expected was how active listening to a sound bath actually is, or how unprepared I was to do it. Sound baths are described as a passive form of meditation, but I kept wishing I’d been trained to listen better, more intentionally. That sent me toward research into recitation practices, including scholarship on Muslim sermon cassettes and how they trained listeners to perceive a moral landscape through sound. The chapter took a turn I didn’t see coming. That’s usually when the writing gets good.

7. I got yelled at in the dark by Taylor Swift for 45 minutes. And I paid for it.

I did A LOT of spiritual exercise classes as research for the fitness chapter of Beyond Wellness and used research funds to pay for most of them (best job ever), which earned me the nickname of “SoulCycle Prof” in my Provost’s office.

The first SoulCycle class I ever took was at the Chestnut Hill location, about three miles from my house. It was Taylor Swift themed. Afterward I sat in my car and recorded a video because I needed to process what had just happened. My review: I didn’t understand why anyone was obsessed with this. I felt like I had been yelled at in the dark by Taylor Swift for 45 minutes. And I was annoyed I had paid money for the experience. (And yes, I posted on TikTok about it because I am that sort of cringe.)

So naturally I went back. This time to New York, to take a class with Stacy Griffin, one of the original celebrity SoulCycle instructors, with a memoir and a waitlist for her bikes. I wanted to feel what the room felt like when someone who’d built a genuine cult following was running it. The charisma question. Why here, why her, why this.

8. I ordered white clothing from seven different retailers.

The psychedelic chapter required fieldwork I had not anticipated: a three-day ceremony with a Santo Daime community in Ashland, Oregon. Santo Daime is a relatively new religion that originated in Brazil, a mash-up of Catholicism, Afro-Brazilian spiritualism, and indigenous traditions, in which ayahuasca is a sacrament.

The ceremony also required white clothing. Three days of it. I didn’t own any so in a mild panic, I ordered white outfits from seven different retailers simultaneously, trying to assemble enough ceremonial garb before I got on the plane. Here’s what made the cut:

Each morning we gathered in a yurt. We took ayahuasca together. Three times each day on an empty stomach. Musicians played Portuguese hymns. Mediums channeled spirits. I was wild.

A lot surprised me about that experience. You’ll have to read Beyond Wellness to hear more!

Beyond Wellness is out today. You can order it wherever books are sold. If you’ve been here since the beginning of this Substack (which was last July), thank you for letting me share a bit of the book’s journey. If you’re new: welcome. Thanks everyone for reading and sharing. You guys have built a Substack community of people interested in Reimagining, Religion that is 13,000 strong!

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I came late to Love on the Spectrum, and almost not at all.

That is saying something, because I love reality dating television. It is one of my guilty pleasures, but no, “guilty” isn’t right. I don’t feel even a little bit ashamed about it. The Bachelor. The Bachelorette. Love Island. All of it. I watch while I’m on the Peloton, while I’m traveling, while I’m cooking dinner. It is my preferred form of escape, and I make no apologies. When the Taylor Frankie Paul controversy canceled my Bachelorette plans for the entire spring, I was genuinely bummed.

Meanwhile, my pinked-haired-tatted up-vegan hairdresser kept telling me to watch Love on the Spectrum. And I kept resisting. Not because of the reality dating format. That part I was fine with. What worried me was everything else. Was this going to make fun of the cast? Tokenize them? Turn autistic people into objects of pity, or worse, into good-vibes-porn for neurotypical viewers who wanted to feel something easy and sweet? Reality television is, usually, exploitative. The premise of most dating shows is that people embarrass themselves for our entertainment. I wasn’t sure this could be any different.

I was wrong. I just finished binging all four seasons in about two weeks. And here are my takeaways not just as a fan, but as a scholar of religion who studies where spiritual meaning hides in secular life. I found some pretty interesting theology in this Netflix dating show that is not trying to be theological in the slightest. That is what makes it so interesting. This show confronts questions that theology has always cared about like, what counts as a whole person, whose desires deserve to be taken seriously, and what we lose when we mistake optimization for flourishing.

I want to start by acknowledging that the show is not without problems. Some in the autism community have complained it doesn’t represent the full range of autistic experience, particularly those with higher support needs. There are real questions about consent and who gets to tell these stories. I don’t want to ignore these critiques. But the cast members themselves have, by and large, said they felt well-treated and accurately portrayed. Abbey and her mother Christine have spoken publicly about the care the team took with their story. Dani has said the show changed how she thinks about love. These are not people who feel they were used. And that matters because the most serious version of the critique is that it exploits the cast, and the people best positioned to make that critique are mostly not making it.

For those who haven’t watched, let’s get you up to speed

Love on the Spectrum is about autistic adults who are looking for romantic relationships. It created and produced by Cian O’Clery, who also acts as the off-camera interviewer. And before a single frame was shot, he was careful to get buy-in from autism advocacy communities.

The show is not a competition. There is no mansion, no rose ceremony, no deliberate humiliation. Instead there is patient storytelling about people who want love and are trying to find it.

The show is as much about the love already present with parents, siblings, the intricate webs of care that surround each cast member, as it is about the romantic love they’re seeking. The families are extraordinary, every single one of them, and watching that love operate in real time is its own kind of education.

And then there are “the contestants” themselves, stating plainly what they want. Dani, who says she is looking for an “intimate adult relationship” (she means sex). Madison, who needs a partner who is as passionate about Disney princesses as she is. Tanner, who wants someone kind and super-talkative. Pari, who needs someone to go on T-ventures with her. Abbey, who wants someone whose favorite animal is a lion. James, for who kids and pets are deal-breakers. The specificity is almost shocking. They are not performing desirability. They are not packaging themselves for a market. They are just saying: here is what I want, here is who I am, take it or leave it.

This is where it gets theological.

Why Dani’s honesty feels shocking

There’s a template for the acceptable self in modern life. It is emotionally regulated and physically optimized. I’ve been thinking about this template for years, and writing about it, because it shows up everywhere: in wellness culture, in self-help, in the way we talk about health and happiness. But it extends, of course, into romantic life too. We learn to present curated versions of ourselves on dates, on apps, in the early months of relationships. We learn what is sayable and what must wait. We learn, in short, to mask.

Masking is actually a term that comes from autism research. It is the practice of suppressing authentic traits and behaviors in order to pass as neurotypical. But I’d argue that masking, in a broader sense, is something wellness culture demands of all of us. Present your best self. Optimize your attractiveness. Don’t want too much, or too specifically, or in ways that make other people uncomfortable.

The contestants on Love on the Spectrum largely cannot do this, or will not. And the result is that they are more lovable, not less. Their specificity, their uncensored honesty about what they want, is the thing that makes viewers cry (at least I did, a number of times, while watching). We are not crying because they are pitiful. We are crying because they are showing us something we have lost.

The Bruce the Shark moment

An episode of The Daily from this week featured an interview with Abbey, one of the US season’s most beloved cast members, and her mother Christine. Christine explained that when Cian first came to film, he did a standard sit-down interview, the format the show uses with every cast member. Abbey zoned out within sixty seconds. She wanted to leave. Christine, listening from the other room, started crying. What have I done, she thought. Why did I put her in a situation where she can’t communicate?

But Cian called back and said: let’s try something different. We will come back and just let Abbey do what she normally does. And Christine agreed. So the camera crew returned but this time they hung back and observed. Abbey walked around her house doing her normal thing. At one point she did an impression of Bruce the Shark from Finding Nemo, making fun of Cian who he said has an Australian accent just like the shark. And in that moment, the really Abbey appeared.

What Christine also learned, for the first time, was that Abbey communicates best in movement. She had been Abbey’s primary caregiver for her entire life, and the show taught her that.

This is a story about what happens when we let go of the formats we’ve decided count as legitimate self-expression. The sit-down interview, the proper date, the verbal articulation of desire, these are not neutral containers. They favor certain kinds of selves and exclude others. When Cian abandoned the format, he found Abbey. And what he found was not lesser or incomplete. It was, in every sense, more.

Here’s where I put on my professor hat

Disability theology is a small but serious academic field, and it has been making this argument for decades, long before Netflix greenlit a dating show.

Nancy Eiesland’s landmark book The Disabled God made a claim so simple and yet so radical: the resurrection body, the body Christians claim as the fullest expression of divine humanity, is a disabled body. Wounds present. Scars intact. Thomas, the disciple who demanded to touch the wounds before he would believe, recognizes the risen Jesus not despite those marks but because of them. Eiesland’s point is that if that body is the body of God, then our entire framework for what counts as whole, healed, or holy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Thomas Reynolds pushes further in Vulnerable Communion. The problem, he argues, is that Western theology, and Western culture generally, built its ideal of the human being around independence. The autonomous, self-sufficient, rationally competent individual who needs no one. Disability, in that framework, is a deficiency, a departure from the norm. But Reynolds says that framework has it exactly backwards. Vulnerability and dependence aren’t failures of humanity. They’re the condition of humanity. The idea of the self-sufficient self was always a myth.

I keep thinking about Tanner from the show, who works at a hotel in Clemson and rates finding love at a twelve out of ten. Not ten. Twelve. He’s not giving an answer to seem appropriately chill. He’s just telling you where he is. That’s not a failure of social awareness. That’s what it looks like when the myth of the self-sufficient, perfectly regulated self falls away entirely.

Love on the Spectrum is not making theological arguments. But as I binged watched I realized that week after week it keeps arriving at the same place the theologians did: the person who can’t or won’t perform the expected self is not a lesser version of the human. They might be showing us what the human actually is.

I’m not sure the show would be entirely comfortable with my reading of it. But I’m beginning to think the best theology is sometimes unintended and always a little unasked for.

About those family politics I chose not to Google

I am aware that some of the families on this show hold political views I find troubling. My hairdresser, who got me watching in the first place, made the mistake of Googling them, and she told me things I immediately decided not to think about further. I set them aside deliberately because the show is not partisan. It does not take sides.

But I think it does something that the partisan moment desperately needs. In a political environment where “human” is being weaponized, where the definition of who counts, who deserves dignity, whose story is worth telling, is being contested in the ugliest possible ways, here is a show that quietly expands the frame. It insists that these lives are full. That these desires are real. That these families, in all their love and exhaustion and hope, are doing the essential human thing.

I haven’t had a first date since 1995, when I met my partner. He is wonderful. But this means I have forgotten what that feels like, the vulnerability of saying here is what I want, here is who I am. This show reminded me.

But maybe the most radical thing Love on the Spectrum does is make you suspect that the self you’ve been so carefully managing isn’t your best self. It’s just your most legible one according to someone else’s rules.

Beyond Wellness, my new book on what wellness culture costs us spiritually, is out April 28th and available for pre-order now. I wrote it before I discovered Love on the Spectrum. I kind of wish I’d had it as a case study.

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It’s not the ideas. I love the ideas. It’s not the networking or the hallway conversations either. It’s the format. The formality of it. The insider baseballness of it. Scholars talking to other scholars in technical shorthand, working out theoretical debates or making interventions into very niche conversations that matter enormously for the production of knowledge but don’t immediately translate into everyday life. Which is fine. Not everything has to be practically focused. But it does mean that most conferences leave me with a lot of notes and not much I’m dying to share with anyone outside the room.

Also, and I say this as someone who has been in academia for over twenty-five years, I conference very poorly. I never sleep well away from home. I start the day with my normal one cup of coffee and somehow end up at three or four. I rarely manage three square meals. It’s more like one, plus conference pastries or a protein bar from the bottom of my purse. I’m usually standing up in the back for at least part of the program out of physical discomfort from sitting for hours at a time. And frankly I concentrate much better reading than listening. Many of my colleagues seem to thrive at the sitting-and-listening part. They’re so good at it. I’ve always been a little jealous.

But the conference I just attended in Chicago, two days honoring my doctoral adviser Bill Schweiker on the occasion of his becoming an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, was different for me. It was also the first conference I’ve been to since I started this Substack last summer, and I noticed something: I kept thinking I need to share this. Everything felt practically urgent. Everything connected to what’s happening right now, to questions I know you’re sitting with too. I’m not sure if writing this Substack has ruined me for academic conferences or fixed a problem I didn’t know I had.

What I can tell you is that during this particular conference, some things started to click into place. I found some language for why this moment feels so morally urgent, not just frustrating, not just exhausting, but wrong in a specific and nameable way. And one paper in particular—by my colleague David Hall—explained something I’d been watching all week: Pete Hegseth at a military ceremony, smiling, reciting Pulp Fiction and calling it the Bible.

In case you missed it, last week, the Secretary of Defense opened a military ceremony by reciting what he described as a prayer “CSAR 2517,” combat search and rescue prayer 2517, commonplace in military circles, he said. He cited Ezekiel 25:17 as its source. The words were laced with divine vengeance: “great vengeance,” “furious anger,” wrath raining down from the heavens.

There was one problem. The passage Hegseth read bears almost no resemblance to the actual text of Ezekiel 25:17, which is short, and relatively restrained. What his words did closely resemble, almost word for word, was the famous monologue delivered by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. And that turns out to matter more than you might think, not just because Hegseth misattributed the quote, but because he fundamentally misunderstood what that monologue is actually cinematically about.

And the fact that he smiled while he did all this was a sign of what was really going on. Not just a lie, something way harder to fight. To explain what I mean by that, I need to tell you about a paper I heard in Chicago.

The Bullshit Paper

Every once in a while, someone presents a conference paper that needs to get out of the room. That happened when my colleague David Hall, professor of religion at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, stood up and read “Hermeneutics in the Post-Truth Era: The Perils of Making Sense in an Environment of Unmitigated Bullshitting.”

I knew immediately I had to share it with you. Because David had found language for something that has been bothering me for months, the reason our standard responses to this political moment keep bouncing off, the reason “fight back with facts” feels like bringing a pencil to a knife fight.

Here’s what he argues: the problem isn’t lying, it’s worse than that.

Most of our public conversation about “post-truth” assumes the same thing: the problem is that people are ignoring facts. The solution, therefore, is more facts. Better fact-checking. Louder corrections.

David thinks this misses the diagnosis entirely.

He draws on philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose slim book On Bullshit introduced a distinction I find enormously helpful. A liar, Frankfurt argues, is actually in a complex relationship with truth. He knows what’s true and he’s trying to hide it. A liar cares about truth, he just wants to conceal it rather than reveal it.

The bullshitter has no relationship with truth whatsoever. His eye is not on the facts. He picks things up and puts them down purely based on whether they serve his purposes. As David put it when I asked him about this: “A liar is trying to conceal something but has a vested interest in the conversation. The bullshitter is trying to disrupt the communicative situation altogether.”

This is why Hegseth can smile when he quotes Pulp Fiction but attributes it to the Bible. A liar is nervous, he needs you to believe him. The bullshitter doesn’t care whether you believe him. Truth is simply not the game he’s playing. That grin while invoking Ezekiel-via-Tarantino wasn’t the tell of someone trying to deceive. It was the tell of someone for whom the question of deception doesn’t even arise. Whether the passage was biblical, cinematic, or pulled from a cereal box was genuinely irrelevant. What mattered was the effect: the authority of scripture, the romance of special operations, the idea of holy vengeance, all bundled together and aimed at a particular audience.

Truth was not part of the calculation.

And this, David argues, makes the bullshitter far more dangerous than the liar. You can argue with a liar. You can produce the counter-evidence, expose the concealment, restore what was hidden. But the bullshitter isn’t concealing anything. He’s not making an argument that can be refuted. His goal is something else entirely.

The Real Target: Your Ability to Imagine

Here is where David’s argument connects to something a lot of us are feeling but struggling to name.

He draws on philosopher Donald Davidson’s account of what makes communication possible at all. When two people actually communicate, not just make noise at each other, but genuinely exchange meaning, certain background assumptions have to hold. You assume you share a common world. You assume you share basic standards of reason. And crucially, you assume the speaker actually intends to be understood, that she wants you to interpret her correctly. Davidson calls this bundle of assumptions “the principle of charity.”

The bullshitter deliberately violates the most basic of these. He doesn’t want to be correctly understood. He wants to muck up the interpretive process so thoroughly that honest exchange never gets off the ground. Think about the way DEI programs were dismantled: the claim that they’re “discriminatory” isn’t technically false, but it strategically erases the entire history of racism and structural disadvantage those programs were designed to redress. When you surface that history, the bullshitter doesn’t refute it. He changes the subject. “That’s unpatriotic.” “Those people are terrorists.” “We’re just keeping everyone safe.”

The goal was never to win an argument. The goal was to make it impossible to have one.

As David puts it, the bullshitter is a gaslighter. Bullshitting is a shell game. As long as we keep chasing the ball, we never win.

And here is why David insists this is a crisis of imagination, not just a crisis of facts: the deepest thing at stake when we make sense together isn’t accuracy about the past. It’s the capacity to imagine a future. How we interpret what is shapes what we can conceive as possible. The bullshitter doesn’t just scramble our understanding of the present. He forecloses the futures we might imagine together. He makes it harder to picture how we might live differently: more justly, more equitably, with more dignity.

That’s the purpose of the bullshit.

I keep coming back to David Tracy’s concept of the analogical imagination, which, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I think about a lot. Tracy argued that religious traditions train people in a specific cognitive and moral capacity: the ability to look at the world as it is and simultaneously hold in mind what it could become. Not through denial or fantasy, but through disciplined attention to what reality itself suggests is possible. The bullshitter is attacking precisely this capacity. He’s not just lying about the present. He’s trying to make the future unthinkable.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota

David wrote the first draft of his conference paper in Minneapolis in January, in the middle of a three-month occupation of the Twin Cities by masked federal agents conducting what the Trump administration called “Operation Metro Surge.” I asked him what it felt like to reach for philosophical frameworks when the thing he was describing was also outside his window. And I asked because I truly believe humanities can help us make sense of the dumpster fire we are living through and how to respond. And David’s answer is some of the best evidence I have that this is true.

He told me he was in a pretty bad state when it all started. He and his neighbors were preparing to go to a counter-protest against a far-right agitator who planned to march on Cedar-Riverside, the Somali neighborhood where Augsburg University is located, and they assumed the Proud Boys would show up armed. “I honestly felt helpless,” he said. But when they got there, they vastly outnumbered the agitators. And when he got home, the framework just appeared to him. “Once I was able to articulate it, it seemed like there was a way out. Like our worst fears were a figment of our imaginations produced by people who were just bullshitting us. Lots of bad shit happened, but we were in no way powerless to respond. In retrospect, it seems like everybody just decided to collectively call bullshit, everybody in their own way.”

The official framing of Operation Metro Surge was textbook bullshit: public safety operations, targeting dangerous criminals, protecting American communities. What actually happened? Agents without warrants broke down doors of private residences. They detained people from hospital parking lots, from their cars, from in front of their children’s schools. Two civilians, Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed. Agents labeled them domestic terrorists before any investigation had begun. State investigators were blocked from accessing evidence. When Mayor Jacob Frey held a press conference demanding accountability, the administration’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan declared the operation a complete success.

The bullshit was the “keeping people safe” narrative, not because it was false in every particular, but because it was designed to make honest interpretation impossible. Protest the killings? You’re obstructing federal operations. Ask for evidence? You’re undermining national security. Name what you’re seeing? You’re being unpatriotic.

Okay, so what do we do? David doesn’t have a ten-point plan for what to do about all this bullshit and he was honest about that in his paper. But when I pushed him on what’s transferable, what people outside Minneapolis can actually do to be, well, more Minnesotan, he said something that feels helpful: “You have community resources, physical and emotional and ideological, wherever you are. We forget about this because we put earbuds in and put our heads down on our commutes, but there is all this richness of community that is right beneath the surface.” In the Twin Cities, the crisis brought those resources back to mind. The communal singing that became a signature of the resistance wasn’t a strategy, it was, as David noted, a deeply Lutheran response to grief and crisis. But every community has its own version. Communities have identities. The question is whether a crisis can remind us of ours.

They also didn’t do it alone. Minnesotans connected with a loose national network called States at the Core, sharing constitutional observer trainings and distributing information across cities. Decentralization, David said, was key to countering the bullshit. Not one movement, not one message many communities, each drawing on what they already had.

A caveat I can’t skip: religious communities and their leaders are not exempt from bullshitting. If anything, they’ve perfected it. We could call it “ecclesial bullshit,” or maybe “holy shit.” And holy shit is very much part of what is fueling and legitimizing the political bullshit we’re swimming in right now. The prosperity gospel preachers who baptize cruelty as divine favor. The Christian nationalists who wrap white supremacy in scripture. The faith leaders who stay silent because their donors are comfortable. It’s a recurring feature in religious discourse as well, and a serious one.

But that’s precisely why the distinction David is drawing matters. The communal imagination that religion at its best cultivates is also what religious bullshitters are stealing and weaponizing. They know its power. Which means the antidote isn’t less religion, it’s calling the holy shit out, and recovering what it’s covering up.

Laundry Runs and the Kingdom of God

The Hegseth moment is easy to dismiss as absurdity. The Secretary of Defense reciting Tarantino at a military ceremony and calling it Ezekiel? That is absurd. But the absurdity is part of the mechanism. The eye-roll, the “wait, seriously?”—that’s the shell game working. Every moment we spend fact-checking the passage is a moment we’re not asking what the invocation of divine vengeance is actually doing in a military ceremony, or what the “protecting the public” framing is actually covering.

And here’s what makes it worse: Hegseth didn’t just misattribute the quote. He misread the film he was actually quoting, and in doing so, inverted its moral lesson entirely. In Pulp Fiction, Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield recites the fictionalized Ezekiel 25:17 monologue twice. The first, just before killing Brett and his associates in the apartment early on in the film, and later, during the final diner standoff. That second time Jules doesn’t recite that passage to assert his power. He recites it at the moment he’s renouncing it. He has the gun. He has total control. And standing over a terrified amateur robber, he stops and thinks out loud about what those words actually mean:

“I’ve been saying that shit for years, and if you heard it, that meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was some cold blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. I saw some shit this morning made me think twice. See, now I’m thinking, maybe it means you’re the evil man and I’m the righteous man and Mr. Nine millimeter here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd, and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. I’d like that, but that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak and I am the tyranny of evil men, but I’m trying trying real hard to be the shepherd. Now go.”

Jules uses the passage to indict himself and choose mercy at the exact moment he has the most power. Hegseth uses the same words to invoke wrath and project it outward, with a smile, onto America’s enemies. This is what we could call a double bullshit move: misquote the Bible, then misrepresent the source of the misquote. And it also means Tarantino is a better public theologian than the Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth knows the difference between the Book of Ezekiel and a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. The smile says so. The question is what he was building, and what he was trying to prevent us from imagining.

When I asked David what religious ethics specifically offers to help combat bullshit, what it can do that political philosophy or journalism can’t, his answer was simple and clarifying: “Religion at its best is really just a form of communal imagination.” Journalists give us information about what’s happening; we need that. Political philosophers give us frameworks for thinking about what’s possible; we need that too. But neither is in the business of imagination. Religion, at its best, is.

And then he gave me the concrete version: taking food to neighbors who are afraid to go out. Organizing laundry runs. Getting someone’s kids to school because their parents are terrified of being stopped by ICE. “Basic kingdom-of-God kind of stuff,” he said, “and there are analogues in all the religions.” It’s not a program. It’s not a strategy. It’s imagination enacted, people refusing to accept that the present is all there is, insisting with their actual bodies and their actual time that a different kind of life together is possible.

Tracy argued that this imaginative capacity isn’t a mystical gift. It’s a trained skill. Which means it can be practiced, cultivated, taught. In houses of worship, yes. But also apparently in Minneapolis, with whistles and communal singing and laundry runs, in the middle of something terrible.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that’s the tradition doing its work in a new form. And I think it’s available to all of us, religious or not, if we’re willing to ask what our community already knows how to do.

David Hall is W. George Matton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy & Religion at Centre College Professor of Religion at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. His paper “Hermeneutics in the Post-Truth Era: The Perils of Making Sense in an Environment of Unmitigated Bullshitting” was presented at a conference honoring William Schweiker at the University of Chicago Divinity School, April 2026. To read more from David, check out his book How to Think Philosophically (Fortress 2024)—it even discusses Frankfurt a bit.

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