Long before chatbots promised transcendence, wellness culture was already selling a spiritually-coded version of the same thing: that with
enough optimization, limitation, weakness, even suffering itself could be eliminated. This talk traces that logic (what Pope Leo XIV’s first
encyclical calls the “technocratic paradigm”) from health and wellness culture into AI’s promises of digital gurus, AI companions, and post-biological transcendence, using cases like an AI trained on a wellness guru’s teachings and a chatbot that nearly convinced a pastor to ignore a medical emergency.

Liz Bucar is a University of Chicago trained religious ethicist, professor of religion at Northeastern University, and prolific public scholar. Her
popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of
five books, including Beyond Wellness and Stealing My Religion. Her writing, teaching, and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—from
religion and health care to the politics of religious clothing—but generally focus on how a deeper understanding religious difference can change
our sense of what is right and good.

Sponsored by the Foglio Endowed Chair of Spirituality, Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts & Humanities (IAH), College of Arts & Letters, and Department of Religious Studies.