CR: The New Centennial Review Special Issue CFP 

“Spirituality, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence”

This special issue proposes to examine the intersections of spirituality, technology, and artificial intelligence in ways that resonate with CR: The New Centennial Review’s commitment to critical, interdisciplinary inquiry into contemporary cultural, political, and philosophical questions.** As AI technologies increasingly mediate human experience, decision-making, and meaning-making, they also reshape longstanding questions historically central to spiritual and religious traditions, including questions about sentiency, consciousness, embodiment, ethics, expression, and transcendence. This issue invites contributions that interrogate how AI and other forms of digital technologies both challenge and reconfigure concepts such as personhood, ritual, care, authority, and the sacred, while also attending to the uneven global, racial, and economic conditions under which these technologies emerge and operate. 

Attending to both speculative horizons and lived practices, the issue seeks to move beyond reductive binaries of belief/unbelief or human/machine, instead positioning spirituality as a dynamic site for analyzing technological futures and as a critical analytic for understanding how technologically mediated worlds are transforming the boundaries of mind, experience, and ethical life. In doing so, it advances the CR’s aim to cultivate theoretically rigorous and politically attuned scholarship while offering new critical vocabularies for understanding how spiritual imaginaries shape and are shaped by emerging AI-driven worlds.

Potential Topics Include (but are not limited to):

• Spirituality and Artificial Intelligence
• AI and the Future of Human Meaning-Making
• Consciousness, Simulation, and Spiritual Experience
• AI, Mysticism, and Machine Consciousness
• Spiritual but Not Religious in the Age of AI
• Artificial Companions and the Reconfiguration of Care
• AI, Ritual, and Digital Practice
• Prayer, Meditation, and Algorithmic Guidance
• Technological Mediation and the Sacred
• AI as Oracle, Medium, or Divinatory Technology
• Chatbots, Presence, and Spiritual Intimacy
• AI and the Transformation of Interior Life
• Posthuman Spirituality
• AI and the Problem of Personhood
• The Soul After Artificial Intelligence
• AI and Philosophies of Mind
• Religious Disaffiliation and Technological Meaning Systems
• AI Gurus, Influencers, and Digital Charisma
• Spirituality, Attention, and Platform Capitalism
• AI, Wellness Culture, and Neoliberal Spirituality
• Digital Mindfulness and the Commodification of Presence
• AI and Therapeutic Culture
• Death, Grief, and AI Resurrection Technologies
• AI Afterlives and Digital Immortality
• Haunting, Spectrality, and Artificial Presence
• AI and Secular Spirituality
• Religious Language in AI Discourse
• Techno-Utopianism as Political Theology
• AI and Contemporary Forms of Gnosticism
• AI and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity
• AI, Magic, Occultism, and Esotericism
• AI and New Religious Movements
• AI and Speculative Futures of Religion
• Decolonial Approaches to AI and Spirituality
• AI Colonialism and Spiritual Extraction
• Environmental Spirituality and AI Ecologies
• AI, Climate Crisis, and Apocalyptic Imaginaries
• Feminist Approaches to Spirituality and AI
• Queer Spiritualities and Artificial Futures
• AI and the Transformation of Ethical Life
• Generative AI and Sacred Art
• Buddhism, Mindfulness, and Artificial Consciousness
• Spirituality Beyond the Human/Machine Binary
• Religion Without Religion in Algorithmic Culture
• Postsecularism and AI
• Spiritual Experience in AI-Mediated Worlds
• Spiritual Crisis and Technological Modernity

**NOTE: In developing proposals and projects, please keep in mind CR: The New Centennial Review ’s commitment to “philosophically inflected interventions, provocations, and insurgencies that question the existing configuration of the Americas, as well as global and theoretical work with implications for the hemisphere.”

Please send questions and queries to Dr. Morgan Shipley at shiple18@msu.edu.

If interested in contributing, please email shiple18@msu.edu by October 1, 2026 a short biography and 300-500 word abstract, clearly outlining specific subject, critical argument, and significance of contribution.

Publication Schedule:

• Abstracts Due: October 1, 2026
• Invitations to Contribute: No later than November 1, 2026 
• Final Articles Due: August 15, 2027
• Publication Date: Spring/Summer 2028

CR: The New Centennial Review is devoted to comparative studies of the Americas that suggest possibilities for a different future. CR is published three times a year under the editorship of Scott Michaelsen (Department of English, Michigan State University) and David E. Johnson (Department of Comparative Literature, SUNY at Buffalo; Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile).

The journal recognizes that the language of the Americas is translation, and that questions of translation, dialogue, and border crossings (linguistic, cultural, national, and the like) are necessary for rethinking the foundations and limits of the Americas. Journal articles address philosophically inflected interventions, provocations, and insurgencies that question the existing configuration of the Americas, as well as global and theoretical work with implications for the hemisphere.