2026 February Special Edition Newsletter
SEEKING ALIGNMENT: RELIGIOUS IMAGINARIES IN THE PAST AND FUTURE OF AI | "Happiness" Lecture |
Bill and Belle Levman Distinguished Doctoral Fellowship in Religion | Amir Hussain Profile | Catherine Maudsley Profile | Backpack to Briefcase 2026
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When and Where
Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 5:30-7:30 pm • Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto M5S 3K7
Speakers & Moderator
Suzanne van Geuns • John Modern • Sarah Sharma • Anna Su • Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed • Pamela Klassen (moderator)
Description
The Seeking Alignment panel brings together scholars working in the study of religion, computer science, media theory, and law to consider how the religious pasts of AI shape the foretelling of its future. From “spiritual bliss attractors” to worries about a “god-like” AI, the genesis and consequences of AI—how its history is told and its future is prophesied—are steeped in religious imaginaries that require scholarly analysis. In the mid-twentieth-century, cybernetic and neural network theories grew out of spiritual convictions about relations among humans, animals, and machines “of loving grace.” Today, some people worry that AI may come to have an omnipotent “galaxy brain,” while others want to make sure that AI is infused with a specifically Christian God, as in tech billionaires who seek to “align” AI tools to hasten the "second coming of Christ."
The panel will focus on the concept of “alignment,” or efforts to align Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with human values, as well as “misalignment,” when AGI and human values diverge. The panelists will ask what we can learn about AGI by considering a longer history of “religious” practices that train, prompt, or discipline human beings to live and think in alignment with higher powers and potent systems. What can past visions of religious alignment tell us about our visions for living in an AI future? And what might we learn from the people discarded and “corrected” in the pursuit of such success?
About the Panelists and Moderator
Suzanne van Geuns will join the University of Wisconsin, Madison as Assistant Professor of Religion and Technology in 2026. She is writing a history of online seduction advice for the University of Chicago Press’s Class 200 series. Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination traces how, why, and to what effect men seeking to improve their social intelligence turn to the language and logics of artificial intelligence. Her research interests are in American religion and computation, with a focus on public-facing scholarship. She was previously at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, where she built the “Does Not Compute” toolkit for historical research on the web.
John Modern is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities at Franklin & Marshall College. Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America, and The Bop Apocalypse, and Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain. He is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study and an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Modern currently co-edits Class 200: New Studies in Religion (with Kathryn Lofton) and is co-director of the Institute of the Mechanical Surround.
Sarah Sharma is acting Vice Dean, Research and Program Innovation at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. She is Professor of Media Theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information and Director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. In 2024 she was awarded a Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Duke UP, 2014) which was awarded a NCA Critical Cultural Book of the Year award in 2014. Her edited volume (with Rianka Singh) Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke UP 2022) highlights her time as director of the McLuhan Centre between 2017-2022. Sarah’s new book, Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech (Duke UP) will be out in April 2026.
Anna Su is an Associate Professor at the Jackman Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Her scholarship spans law and religion, comparative constitutionalism and the history of human rights. More recently, her research engages questions at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human dignity, and including how legal frameworks mediate agency, alignment, and responsibility in socio-technical systems. Her most recent work is A Right to Reality: Generative AI and Human Dignity, which looks at the challenges presented by generative AI through the lens of human dignity.
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the founding director of the ‘Third Space'' research group. His research interest is in the intersection between Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ahmed was named a “Future Leader” by the Computing Research Association in 2024.
Moderator Pamela Klassen is Chair & Graduate Chair of the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. Cross-appointed to Anthropology, Klassen teaches graduate and undergraduate students in the anthropology and history of Christianity and colonialism in North America and Turtle Island, religion and public memory, and religion, law, media, and gender.
Sponsors
- Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society
- Department for the Study of Religion
- Data Sciences Institute