This session consists of a myriad of themes and methodologies in the field of Christian spirituality. Introducing for the first time in the unit is a paper on Artificial Intelligence, a prelude to the November full session on the same topic. A second paper explores how spirituality mediates mobility and structural immigration policies and processes. A third paper critically analyzes corporate spirituality: an advanced look at how spirituality emerges in the workplace.
Using a collaboration between an artist and scholar of religious studies as a case study, the ongoing “Noo Icons” media arts project explores how AI image-making tools are well suited to explore the visual history of the religious transcendent. Building on the scholarship of Hito Steyerl and Eryk Salvaggio, AI art’s usage as a diagnostic tool for deciphering internet biases is compared to the scholar of religious studies' theoretical method of redaction criticism. This article explores ways in which the training set data of AI image-making programs can be refined to produce more accurate composite images, as well as the power for these tools to be used as visual aids in the creation of “imagined realities:” images for which we have credible eyewitness testimony, but which we do not have photographic evidence for. The ethics of AI image-making is primary to the methodology advanced in this interdisciplinary mode.
With the explosive growth of “spiritual consultants,” “ancient technologists,” “sacred entrepreneurs,” and “directors of possibility,” any conversation regarding the ways religion materializes in the workplace demands a critical engagement with such an explicit effort to manage workspace by introducing corporate spirituality. This essay suggests that Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s work on the “professional-managerial class,” or PMC, can offer a useful foothold for understanding spiritual consultation and its role in the reproduction and maintenance of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. The direct and targeted involvement of the PMC spiritualist is looking to expertly style the spiritual formation of work spaces in such a way as to not only maintain the capitalist order but to increase profits as well. This essay hopes to take seriously the theological and religious work of these “spiritual entrepreneurs” by outlining the basic dimensions of PMC spirituality.
The paper considers colonized bodies on the move from the Global South as it explores how religion mediates mobility and structural immigration policies and processes. I argue that imperial processes for colonized bodies on the move engender what I call rites of mobility—a performance of contestation of dominant structures, negotiation of imposed dominant labels, and re-construction of placemaking and belonging.
Based on fieldwork research in a Ghanaian neo-Pentecostal church known as the Power Chapel Worldwide in Kumasi, popular for its innovative travel ritual praxis, I explore the phenomenon and suggest that imperial constructs of migration processes, especially for marginalized groups are contested and (re)negotiated in local religious spaces. The questions the paper seeks to answer are how do Ghanaian Pentecostal ritual agents negotiate, contest, and redefine impeding structures of migration, and when are the practices performed?