by John Lardas Modern (Franklin & Marshall College)
The Alice Eckardt Scholar-in-Residence Lecture 2026
As people adopt the myths of AI as their human rituals of interpretation and communication, there is an ever-simmering desire to achieve a different kind of humanity than the one we are practicing now. It often feels as though we are living through a long season of revival. Effervescing on our own, we increasingly orient ourselves through the “intelligence” behind the screen. We are voluntary subjects, bearing witness to massive and unprecedented feats of pattern recognition, and swept up in the discourse about machine learning. All is becoming a burnt-over district as people program themselves and others to simulate machines. As an act of critical resistance, this lecture will conjure a religious history of computer science and artificial neural networks, It is a story that is jagged, ironic, and unreasonable, told in the hopes of being unassimilable into the large language models that seek to calcify—in order to instrumentalize-- their common sense about religion and much else besides.
John Lardas Modern is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. Modern serves as co-director of the Institute of the Mechanical Surround and co-editor of Class 200: New Studies in Religion at the University of Chicago Press. He is the author of Neuromatic; or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain, which was named best book in 2022 by the International Society of Science and Religion as well as The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (2001) and Secularism in Antebellum America. Modern is currently working on a book about intelligence, memory, and mourning and a long-term project that explores the end of the world through the lens of Akron, OH.
