Who Is Forming Whom Course
Ask the course’s central question: Who is forming whom? Explore how AI systems do not merely serve humans, but increasingly shape our attention, habits, desires, judgments, relationships, and sense of self.
Examine the human person in the age of AI, engaging questions of identity, agency, embodiment, consciousness, responsibility, and what it means to flourish.
Investigate how AI influences moral reasoning, including what happens when people begin outsourcing judgment, advice, discernment, and difficult decisions to intelligent systems.
Explore AI companions and synthetic relationships, asking whether simulated empathy, friendship, intimacy, and spiritual accompaniment can reshape expectations of human relationships.
Study religion as a technology of formation, comparing religious practices of attention, discipline, ritual, community, and moral cultivation with the formative power of digital platforms.
Analyze AI in healthcare and spiritual care, examining questions of dignity, vulnerability, dependency, compassion, human oversight, and the boundaries of automated care.
Confront transhumanism and technological visions of human enhancement, asking whether intelligence, longevity, optimization, and the overcoming of human limits necessarily constitute flourishing.
Investigate digital immortality and AI afterlives, exploring avatars of the deceased, synthetic memory, grief technologies, identity, consent, and competing religious understandings of death and human continuity.
Examine AI, politics, work, and public life, asking how algorithmic systems reshape power, persuasion, expertise, inequality, human purpose, and competing visions of the good society.
Complete a Human Formation Impact Assessment, evaluating a real or emerging technology by asking a deeper question than simply “Does it work?”—What kinds of persons, relationships, communities, and futures does this technology encourage us to become?
