The conversation between religion and tech is deepening.
What happens when religion and technology enter direct conversation?
The Belief in the Future podcast, hosted by DZ Kalman, explores the ethical, social, and existential implications of transformative new technologies — like AI — through creative conversations at the crucial intersection of religion and technology.
When the podcast first launched, Kalman described it as a bridge between two worlds often treated as separate. But as Season 2 begins, he suggests that bridge has become a busy crossroads.
Below is an excerpt from the introduction to Season 2, along with links to each new episode.
Transcript:
"Hi, I’m DZ Kalman and this is Belief in the Future, Season 2.
This isn’t a brand new podcast, but also it kind of is. If you’ve listened to the show before, you’ll know that we’ve been on hiatus for almost a year. From the perspective of a world religion, a year isn’t much, but for technology, especially technology like AI, it feels like an eternity.
The show is going to relaunch in a few weeks, but before it does, I want to say a word about what I think the show’s mission is supposed to be, and how that mission has changed since it first launched back in 2024, and why you think you should listen to this show in a podcast environment that’s pretty highly saturated already.
Back when I started Belief in the Future, I said that the show needed to exist because there’s a public perception that religion and technology don’t have much to say to each other, even though they’ve actually been crossing paths for centuries. The tech sector often treated the technology as antiquated and irrelevant, and religious communities just didn’t know how to keep pace with modern technology. Because each camp treated the other as marginal, the coverage you’d see in the media tended to treat the oddity as the story, sort of like how you might write an article about a dog that plays chess because it’s just sort of strange that a dog is playing chess in the first place. When I saw articles about robotic monks or AI Jesuses, it just seemed so obvious that the media didn’t know what to do with these things other than highlight their strangeness.
So that’s where things landed. But that is definitely not where we are anymore.
In the last two years there’s been a series of changes that have brought religion and technology into direct conversation in a way that’s made it clear that this is no longer a sideshow. The obvious reason for this change is artificial intelligence, but within AI there’s really three different things going on. And since I’ve been watching all this happen and haven’t really seen it explained anywhere else, let me take a second to unpack it for you.
First, there’s been a change in the religions of the world, which, mostly in the last year, have really fully understood that AI is something that they need to organize around. And really, I’ve seen so many denominations have formal working groups developed and conferences created for dealing with AI both within themselves and for the broader world. There’s increasingly a sense that whatever playbook religions have been using to deal with technology in the past just isn’t working, that it demands serious self-examination to understand what it means for your faith to meet this particular moment. And at the same time, there’s a huge amount of diversity in what different faiths are trying to do because no two religions have the same structure. In other words, while the Catholics and the Muslims and the Jews and the Mormons are all thinking seriously about AI and have the same basic concerns, their approaches could not be more different. So that’s one thing that’s changed.
The second thing is the world of AI safety, which has been shouting about the dangers of this technology for years, but has only recently come to the understanding that religious wisdom and religious communities really need to be part of their coalitions if they’re serious about changing the culture or passing laws. Because religious leaders carry a moral authority that still matters, and because religious communities are places where people talk seriously about what it means to live a good life. I have been in so many rooms now where religion is just understood to be a part of the coalition to keep AI safe, and I think their presence in that coalition is going to matter in fields other than the AI too.
Lastly, and really to me most surprisingly..."
A Catholic and a Jew read the pope's AI encyclical together
On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued Magnifica Humanitas, a major new document on AI for the world's biggest religion. DZ talked with Brian Green about what it says, why it was written this way, where it sits in the history of major church documents, and whether it is likely to effect change on the AI industry.
The Latter-Day Saints Way on AI
There is more than one type of religious approach to AI. While the Catholic response has received by far the most media attention, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been developing a response that has a stronger emphasis on practice. DZ spoke with Elder Gerrit Gong, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, about the church's approach.
"Technology and religion sometimes seem like oil and water, but they've been crossing paths for centuries and aren't going to stop," says Belief in the Future podcast host, DZ Kalman. Belief in the Future explores the ethical, social, and existential implications of transformative new technologies — like AI — through creative conversations at this crucial intersection. The podcast is affiliated with the Faith Family Technology Network, and is a production of Sinai and Synapses, with support from Templeton World Charity Foundation.
