Speaking

Available for talks and lectures

I speak on AI and the theology of Silicon Valley, on AI and the future of higher education, and on secularization, political theology, and the persistence of religious frameworks in ostensibly secular thought. I'm available for university colloquia, faculty development days, board and administrative convenings, public lectures, and conference keynotes.

If you're interested in having me speak, the fastest route is email.

Topics available

What I speak on

The theology of Silicon Valley: Girard, Schmitt, Thiel, and the eschatological turn in tech

AI and higher education: what the crisis actually reveals, and what education is for

The vocabulary of rupture: how declaring an era over is a political act

Secularization and its discontents: how new frameworks inherit what they claim to have superseded

Temporal sovereignty: Silicon Valley's claim to the power to periodize history

Teaching in the aftermath: pedagogy in moments of political and institutional crisis

Proposed

Current talk

Proposed 2026–27 Ohio State University Visiting Scholar Program

The Singularity as Second Coming: AI Eschatology and its Metaphorical Slippages

Some of the most consequential debates in the history of religions center on the question of representation: is an image the thing itself, or a representation of the thing? This talk argues that contemporary AI discourse is structured by the same question — oscillating between the Singularity as metaphor for the Second Coming and the Singularity as the Second Coming itself — with the same two kinds of authority at stake: the authority to decide which register applies, and the authority that accrues to the claim if it is the thing itself rather than merely a representation of it.

Past lectures and presentations

Selected

2018 University of Chicago Divinity School

Australian Aborigines, the French Revolution, and the Niqab Ban

Durkheim's ambivalence about symbols and its legacy for theorizing religion in contemporary politics.

2015 Princeton University Religion Department Colloquium

A New Agenda for Methods and Theory in the Study of Religion

2015 Telos/Paul Piccone Institute Conference, New York

Secularization and Universal History

2014 Quest University, British Columbia

Three Senses of Secularization

2010 Cambridge University

As the Church is to God, so the National Assembly is to France

Malebranche, Sieyès, and the theory of representation in the French Revolution.

2009 Sacred Modernities Conference, Oxford University

Beyond Sovereignty: Political Theology and Enchanted 'Representation' in 17th–18th Century France

2009 Goethe Universität Frankfurt