Historian of religions — writing on AI & higher education
New frameworks congratulate themselves on decisive breaks with the past. They rarely make them.
My scholarly training is in a specific phenomenon: the way new systems of thought declare themselves free of what came before while remaining structurally indebted to what they claim to have left behind. The phenomenon is sedimentation layered with disavowal. Secular modernity is the canonical example; AI discourse is a more urgent one.
I'm a historian of religions working at the intersection of AI, culture, and the future of higher education.
AI & Religion
The vocabulary of AI discourse — alignment, the Singularity, existential risk — is not original. It is borrowed from eschatology, and the borrowing is doing specific work: it transforms questions about infrastructure and power into questions about salvation and redemption.
Book project & essays →AI & Higher Education
Universities spent forty years justifying themselves in the language of job preparation and economic productivity. AI is now calling that bluff. The right response is not panic or capitulation — it is clarity about what education was always actually for, and what AI can and cannot do.
The argument →The political stakes
The vocabulary of rupture is not neutral.
Framing AI as a rupture with the past transforms a set of political questions into foregone conclusions.
The political questions we are accustomed to posing are these: Who owns the AI infrastructure? Whose interests does it serve? Who bears the cost of displacement?
In their place stands not a new question but a verdict: history has moved on. The political questions don't disappear — they are eclipsed.
The rupture narrative does more than defer accountability; it also declares existing institutions to have been transcended. In AI discourse, institutions written off as relics of a previous era that need not be engaged include the university, democratic governance, journalism and "traditional media," and indeed, even the world order defined by agreements between nation-states. Those who stand to profit from the delegitimization of these institutions have every reason to deploy the rhetoric of rupture. The rupture narrative is self-sealing: the frameworks best equipped to contest it are the ones it has already declared obsolete.
AI discourse declares traditions and institutions obsolete using the very authority it has borrowed from them.
The force of the rupture claim is borrowed from the very theological tradition it purports to supersede. Disavowal of the inherited framework is precisely how that framework's authority gets captured and redirected.
The irony is that if the abundance AI promises ever arrives, the question of what we do with that freedom becomes not less urgent but more — which is precisely the question that education, properly understood, exists to answer.