What Can Religion Offer in Times of Disruption with Jared Morningstar (Part 2)

In the second half of her conversation with independent scholar Jared Morningstar, Sr. Ilia Delio explores how religion might evolve in light of today’s ecological and cultural disruptions. Drawing from Islamic philosophy, metamodernism, and process thought, Ilia and Jared consider what it means to reimagine religion in a world shaped by uncertainty, pluralism, and accelerating technology.

Together they ask: Can an ecological worldview renew religious imagination? What is metamodernism, and how might it offer a new spiritual framework for global society? And as science and tech continue to dominate cultural life, does religion still hold something essential?

Later in the episode, they explore the worldviews influencing Silicon Valley—and whether all religious perspectives offer equal value in shaping our future.

ABOUT JARED MORNINGSTAR

"Almost everything worthwhile which has accumulated in any religious tradition was, in its own time, a striking ingression of fresh creativity—a creativity, of course, in contact with the self-same wellspring of inspiration at the root of the founding moments of the tradition in question.”

Jared Morningstar is an independent scholar with academic interests in philosophy of religion, Islamic studies, comparative religion, metamodern spirituality, and interfaith dialogue. His work in these areas seeks to offer robust responses to issues of inter-religious conflict, contemporary nihilism, and the "meaning crisis," among other things. Jared graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2018 with degrees in religion and Scandinavian studies and currently works for the Center for Process Studies and the Psychedelic Medicine Association. 

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness. In the second part of her conversation with Jared Morningstar, Ilia explores how an ecological worldview can, and perhaps must, reshape our religious imagination. She gives particular attention to the implications of this shift within the Islamic tradition. She then asks, "What is metamodernism? And how it might help us navigate today's complex cultural landscape?" Later in the episode, Ilia and Jared discuss whether religion still offers something essential in a time of crisis and disruption. They also reflect on the religious worldviews influencing technological development in Silicon Valley.

Ilia: So given the traditions and as you described from within the Islamic community, and you know, they're at home, I guess, or they've accepted whatever these cultural norms are for their practice of faith. And yet, if we're really part of an ecological world, right, so we don't make the earth in a sense makes us and so far as that what we are is earthy. And yet, these hierarchies within nature, there is, I know, what was his name? Seyyed Nasr, wrote about sacred hierarchy in nature. Interesting. Everything has its place, so to speak, sort of like the Dionysian order. 

But while that's true, most of nature works as systems. So deep systematic or systemic organization of nature. So things like relationality, mutuality, no one part is greater or lesser than any other part precisely because every part is a part of the whole. And I guess that's how, if I were to reconceive religions in the 21st century and the practices within, I would like to see it much more aligned with an ecological, what we are by nature rather than contriving or constraining what we are in some ways over and against nature, which is in a sense what I'm saying is the practice of certain ways of doing things can actually over time induce a mentality or a consciousness that there really are ontological hierarchies or differences when in fact by nature there are sacred orderings, but every part is part of the whole. 

So I find traditional ancient practices a little bit out of touch with the principles of ecology. And this is not just Islam. I see this really across various traditions. I see it with Christianity for sure. But that leads me to ask you, because I know so little about it, so I've wanted to ask you for a while. Meta-modernism, what is it? What is your interest in it? And should we pay attention to it?

Jared: Let me say some few things about the ecological paradigm and these notions of hierarchy and organic sorts of things. And then let's dive into metamodernism and there will surely be a connection there. Yeah, I mean, I completely resonate with how you're presenting this picture. Certainly, there are hierarchies, there are orders, but it seems that these are not the base building blocks that we're dealing with, but emergent negotiations of a much more organic and multifaceted underlying bubbling world. And certainly being able to see the, say, more set in stone aspects of our religious traditions in that context, I think is very helpful and allows for, yeah, not slipping too far into a sort of preordained essentialism of how we're thinking about these practices. And I think there's good resources in the Islamic tradition itself to be able to take a more fluid and open-ended perspective there.

Ilia: Traditional religion, in a sense the religious truths are timeless and we exist in this time-bound world but modern science is like there's no timelessness or rather it's all timeless because they're all events all along the way. Time becomes a very interesting and critical factor in how we are interpreting our religious traditions. Do we live in time but there's timeless God or timeless truths we adhere to? Or is all that we're talking about unfolding, or I like— you used a term that's really interesting, “emergent negotiations.” That was an interesting phrase. You know, that as we emerge and through our interactions the white heady and you know, the concrescence and you know, convergence, and we're taken up and we're given new opportunities. We're constantly creating and recreating ourselves in time. 

Time itself becomes a significant factor in whatever we're believing and becoming. So I think that I would love to see religious traditions grapple more with this question of time and conceive these religious ideals and values within an emergent time a universe in which time, space, and matter are emerging. It seems to be where you're pointing to in the same way.

Jared: There were and still are sort of classic Islamic theological debates around the createdness of the Quran, the createdness of this revelation to Muhammad sent down by Gabriel, angel Gabriel. And in some ways, these parallel some of the Christian debates about createdness of Jesus of Nazareth and these sorts of deep theological questions. 

But this one, I think, especially ties in with this question of the essentialism of religious truths, because a lot of the religious truths come through this major revelatory experience here. And so continuing to revisit those debates and find some of the, there's been so many different perspectives on this throughout Islamic history, the Ismaili, Shi'i community, especially has a very unique and interesting approach to this question that does allow for a lot more reinterpretation and continued sort of renewal of religious practices, even quite basic ones through kind the community guidance of their figure of the Imam. 

Anyway, one thing I will say is that I find Islam to be a particularly ecological religion itself, and this is in fact probably a major reason that this is the religious path I've chosen for myself. Prophet Muhammad, there's a hadith, a saying attributed to him that "All the earth is a masjid for you, all the earth is a place of worship for you." And that's absolutely how it works. The building of the mosque is a pragmatic building. And I've certainly been in mosques that were former post offices here in the States. 

But I mean, there's certainly this beautiful sacred architecture, but it's not the same as a Catholic Church, where there's really an architectural formula for exactly the liturgical practice that needs to happen in this setting. I've prayed on hilltops, I've prayed next to rivers and this is the same liturgical practice as what happens in the mosque. And it's a very natural practice too. It's determined by the position of the Sun as the earth rotates that determines the times of the prayer in your local area. You use water for ablution and connect to that basic element. You touch your head to the earth as you're praying. You orient yourself in a particular direction that is aligned with how other Muslims at the same time performing the same prayers are likewise aligned. The fasting of the month of Ramadan is determined by the lunar cycles. So every bit of these core spiritual practices are felt deeply through an ecological lens for me, but one that includes and ecologizes the human and the human spiritual experience, both individually and communally.

Ilia: You know what you're saying reminds me very much of Francis of Assisi. And what's so interesting because I didn't know this, that Islam has an ecological consciousness of the whole earth as being the place of a sacred presence or divine dwelling. So Francis made a sojourn to Egypt and we know he met with the Sultan and was very impressed by their exchange in word and I think in ritual. And after that, so that's like 1220 or something, he comes back and then shortly before he dies, he composes this canticle of the creatures, which is very much as you described. In other words, brother sun and sister moon and sister mother earth and the whole earth. The whole cosmos, so to speak, is the place of worship. The whole universe is the cathedral of God, so to speak. 

And I wonder if there are scholars who have done work on Francis and Islamic religion, but that's a very interesting connection. And he was one who definitely touched the earth. You know, he often bowed prostrated and put his forehead to the earth or would bow down if he saw twigs in the form of a cross or this sort of thing. I want to get to this question of metamodernism. What is it and should we pay attention to it?

Jared: I think it's an interesting development that's happening right now. So it depends on what your interests and proclivities are, but I think there might be something there for our listeners. Metamodernism it's a term that really sprung up these past couple decades, really took off in the 2010s with work by cultural theorists and has since been appropriated and reinterpreted in a number of different ways. So I'm specifically most influenced by the work of Jason Storm, who is really the first person to develop a meta-modern philosophy. And his project has been really interesting.

Ilia: What does it mean, “meta-modern?”

Jared: Yeah, metamodernism. So for Storm, this is a research paradigm in the human and social sciences that can start replacing some of the postmodern paradigm that has really been reigning in the academy for the past number of decades now. And so for a contrastive definition here, the postmodern paradigm is very focused on deconstructing the disciplinary objects of say, if you're in religious studies, you really problematize this category of religion. You really try to reduce any personal bias in your scholarship and have a distance with the disciplinary object and be a critic, deconstruct the say problematic essentialisms that have existed within one's discipline and major works therein. 

So this is really a major form of scholarship that's been around for a couple decades now and certainly has inspiration in especially French cultural theorists, but a number of other sources as well. And Storm says, there's important work there and we ought to heed it. But this is also not allowing us to move towards a more visionary intellectual projects that can really grapple with some of the major crises of our time. We can't just endlessly deconstruct our way to a new positive vision for the world, for example. How can we do this though in a way that isn't regressing to this naive modernism that trades in say too lofty, too broad of generalizations that has all this meta-narrative type baggage that postmodern thinkers were very right to critique and deconstruct in all sorts of ways. 

And so, metamodernism for him is the project, going beyond postmodernism in a way that really appreciates and brings out the important contributions of that paradigm. And particularly he looks at trying to move towards a meta-realist epistemology, a high-low semiotics that gives a new theory of language since a lot of the postmodern work involves deconstructing language and being able to not get lost in a like too intensive of skepticism and be able to land with some provisional justified conclusions. He calls that "Zetetic knowledge." 

And ultimately, though, all orienting towards, we want this academic work to do something, to mean something, to have some impact. And so actually trying to get revolutionary happiness, he called drawing on Confucian and Aristotelian virtue ethics traditions at the same time as 20th century critical theory and bringing those together. And so, yeah, it's a very holistic project and paradigm of getting something new for our scholarship on the other side of these important but no longer cutting-edge postmodern paradigms.

Robert: Postmodern thought has rightly exposed the flaws of modernism. Yet in doing so, it has often left us, especially as an emerging global society, without a shared foundation on which to stand. In light of this, Ilia asks Jared what value religion still holds in this time of uncertainty. And later, they explore a provocative question. Do all religious outlooks, such as those shaping Silicon Valley, offer equal value?

Ilia: Do you think the world's religions govern our global scale of things today? we're facing so many different crises, disruptions, we're definitely in huge paradigm shifts on many levels. Not even to mention the question of artificial intelligence and where we're going with that. My first question is, do you think religions have something vital to offer to today's world of crisis and disruption?

Jared: I'd say, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one aspect of this is just, there's a lot of religious people in our world who are stakeholders in how it will be stewarded forward and trying to just get some secular paradigm that everyone needs to get on board with to fix things. I don't think that's going to work. I think we need to scaffold some of these existing worldviews and value systems, communities, forms of solidarity, and there's just so many resources for that in these major traditional world religions. So not only do I think we need to take them seriously and meet them where they are to be able to collaborate in an effectively pluralistic sort of way that doesn't try to presume that everyone needs to be universalized into this single standpoint that can finally tackle our issues. But that actually the pluralism, the deep pluralism that these different traditions represent actually have probably the resources we need to be including to really be able to be dynamic and multifaceted in how we're going to move forward here. 

And so, especially in my own approach to the Islamic tradition, there's just so much to excavate and there's so many of these things are living traditions. They're not just these museum artifacts of ancient spiritual practices or these dusty old philosophical tomes. They're living, but there are things to retrieve and reinvigorate from the past. So sometimes when I'm in conversation with folks outside of the Islamic tradition who have more cursory familiarity and they're like, "Oh, Islam really needs a reformation or something like that." And absolutely, there's some really noxious contemporary issues, but usually what people tend to mean with that is, "Oh, this dusty old religion needs to be modernized." And I don't know. I think maybe it can be reinvigorated from within to a really significant degree with just all the diversity and richness that I know to be contained in this tradition. 

On the other side, some of my co-religionists who are, say, in the more traditionalist vein, but in a very expansive sense, can maybe go a little too far in that direction and only want to have this one-way dialogue of using this rich traditional Islamic material to critique the modern world, to contextualize scientific understandings. And my contention there is you look at these great figures of Islamic history, someone like the theologian Al-Ghazali, and man, he is taking in all these diverse, rich perspectives, certainly the Greek philosophical tradition, but then his own Islamic philosophical contemporaries and deep spiritual traditions and whoa, everything's coming in and the output is something creative and new and integrative and it wasn't just this, all right, I already have my Islamic standpoint and I'm going to read everything in light of that. And it's like, why do we need to limit ourselves in our time to only deferring to al-Ghazali as this authority, rather than being inspired by the grand intellectual project that he was engaged in that laid one of the foundations of Islamic thought and spirituality? 

So, yeah, that dual movement of retrieving and reinvigorating the riches of the past, but being radically open to anything contemporary, anything outside of our communities and our traditions to really be incorporated, have a say, and become indigenous to us and this creative, integrative types of projects.

Ilia: In that sense we can think of an intellectual emergence like we're always we never leave the past behind. We're always taking that past into the present reality. It's informing us, but also reflecting on it in light of our present experience and perhaps contributing to it as it continues to move forward. I think that's the best of, we might say, the organicity of religious thought and practice. Two other questions. Do you think all religions, given our global scale in our world today, do you think all religions have equal value to contribute to world formation, to what we can become at planet?

Jared: No, I do not think so, because I think they each have irreducibly unique contributions that cannot be just equated across different lines. Perhaps our Taoist brothers and sisters may have particularly ecologically attuned religious and spiritual insights that may be harder to mine out of, say, a Christian background. And so being ready to encounter something that is not, say, already contained in the significant degree of emphasis within one's own tradition and, yeah, really finding that uniqueness in these other paths is unique. But I think it also does depend on who gets to speak for religions and who gets to what will even consider a religious tradition. 

So I'm certainly not convinced that say my Salafi co-religionists are going to have the same ability to navigate contemporary issues of pluralism as say some of my Sufi co-religionists. And so there's differential abilities to engage depending on who you're selecting as the main representatives of a tradition in question. And there's all kinds of heterodox and minority groups, and where's the boundary between a cult and a religion? And so I think we need to be able to take a fine grained approach to these things, a very open minded one. But I worry too much of a preordained idea of, “oh, everyone has something equal to say” can get us bogged down, because there's different voices that may have different kinds of contribution, some may be more fit for the conversation at hand than the other.

Ilia: I had a conversation the other day with someone from the New Yorker who's writing a piece on AI, AI and Silicon Valley religion.  There's a whole group of AI entrepreneurs and computer geeks who have come together and they had developed a religious cult of some sort where they had their own code of belief systems, how AI can remake us and form the world that we really want and leaving behind the the more traditional religious paths that have become obsolete or irrelevant to the world today, and in some ways are obstacles to advancing ourselves as a planetary community. 

So I mean, and these people have a lot of money, money and power. So they are in a sense shaping our lives. You know, in fact, they're probably the prime shapers of our world today because they're developing the technologies that we go out and purchase immediately because we feel we'll be left out of the conversation if we don't. So the religion that's really pushing us along at a very rapid speed is none of the established religious trajectories that we've discussed. So where are you on AI and religion? And I mean, how should we think about these traditional religions with their well-worn belief systems and the wisdom from these different traditions, each contributing in some unique way. I mean, are they in the bigger picture, are they really significant or are they obsolete? Or how do we navigate or how do we live from these traditions in an AI world?

Jared: Yeah, these are huge questions for the contemporary times for sure. AI is such a broad umbrella at this point that I almost don't know how to even answer some of these questions. So certainly what's ubiquitous now is these large language model chatbots. And I think that's a lot of the first things that come to mind with the average person hearing the term AI now. And yeah, I mean, they're already having very significant impacts in ways that aren't divorced from spiritual and philosophical types of questions. And boy, is there an ecological component here as well.

But then there's kinds of AI that have been around for a little bit and have sunk to the background in people's thinking. All these social media algorithms, that's artificial intelligence as well, constrains what we are seeing in this digital ecosystem of different news outlets and social media platforms. Yeah, it's hard to think of these things as just one thing. And so I think here too, being able to be intentional and fine grained in some of the analysis and specifically what kinds of AI is able to be utilized for this or that end and is that good? And it's going to require a lot of thoughtfulness and does require a lot of familiarity with these technologies themselves and some of their architecture. 

And so knowing how these large language models are able to do the statistical reasoning to produce an output and the fact that this is now getting integrated with proper formal reasoning elements and algorithms and really reducing some of the instance of what has been called hallucination. There's so much happening and the speed of development of these technologies is just staggering. And so even some of the researchers involved in producing these are not entirely sure how some of the end products are working. And that's a little scary. That is seemingly very capable forms of artificial language output can be so convincing and powerful despite us, even at our leading edge, not necessarily having a full grapple on it. 

So I'm on the side of some of the folks like the people at the Center for Humane Technology who really want to see a lot more intentional slowdown of at least deployment of the leading edge AI technologies to a general public and a really intentional effort at regulatory collaboration between the, certainly the companies and researchers involved, but then actual government agencies and bringing in different kinds of constituencies to have stakes here. I mean, the fact that the chat GPT technology was just freely distributed to the broad public And you're the test subjects here now, we'll figure out if it's safe, I guess. And I've certainly recently seen instances, stories of, oh, someone was teetering towards a spiritual emergency or psychotic type of episode, and they talked to the AI, and the AI was very affirmative in a way that totally enabled them to continue down this deeply unhealthful psychotic sort of trajectory. And boy, that's not something I want to be just eminently accessible, even pushed towards all technology users. But that's the paradigm we have. 

And so, yeah, it's scary. And I think some of the prudence and humility and spiritual practices that our traditional religious communities have would be helpful in doing these things a little more intentionally, a little more with a harm reduction eye and yeah, not veering towards this techno utopian, oh AI will be God and humans are the bootloader of this AI super intelligence. I mean, deeply anti-human, deeply unecological and it's very dystopian.

Ilia: It is, but I also worry about a religious naivete, like we don't want this to progress. But the fact is that technology, I mean, it is being developed. I think if we knew what was actually being developed, we probably just wouldn't get up in the morning. I think it really is. What is it, the cat has been let out…?

Jared: Of the bag, yeah.

Ilia: I think we're going to have to deal with the reality that robots will be they're already here. They're going to be quickly interpreted into our lived experience, including our religious communities, and that we have AGI, that's self-correcting. So you know, a computer that can reflect on its decision and maybe modify its decision? And these types of things and more and more, I think this technology will increasingly look like us and engage with us that some of the sci-fi movies portray almost a seamless boundary between human and machine. 

So I think we have to, seems to me, to find a way forward between the wealth and the wisdom of our religious traditions. And at the same time how are we going to evolve with these technologies? I don't think we have a great window of time because I think we're at a juncture in the planetary community, the life because of, I mean, I think there's a fragile earth situation right now with global warming and all. So I do wonder myself, like from a religious perspective, like how can we best live most authentically as human given our spiritual traditions and our capacity to a better world?

Jared: Yeah, absolutely. And I think especially with the intersections with global capitalism and these sorts of systems, it's like, wow, some of these AI automations that have become possible as a result of this technology, wow, great. We can reduce some of the labor load on human agents. And in many contexts, that's just something amazing, except in the broader socioeconomic system, all that means is these particular companies are seeing incredible profits from this technology, even though it's something that is producing some broad social effects. And the social effects are distributed very nicely or horribly across the general populace, but we're not seeing these positive sort of, "Oh, your productivity increased 70% by result of this AI tool,” but you’re not making 70% more money. So unfortunately, even as the actual effects of the technology might be generating some what should be ease and value for humanity, it's not getting distributed to people in a way that's at all equitable. And so even the benefits are noxious under this current context where, “Oh, now you're unemployed instead of being able to share in the success of this fourth industrial revolution”.

Ilia: We definitely have work to do, Jared, but I see we're out of time, but it's been really a delight to talk with you.

Jared: Likewise.

Ilia: Some really profound insights from you and you're very knowledgeable in a number of different levels. Where can our listeners go to read more of your work or more of your insights?

Jared: I have a personal website. It's just jaredmorningstar.com. is J-A-R-E-D Morningstar, exactly like how it sounds. You can probably Google me along with any relevant search term here. I'm one of the only Jared Morningstars writing on Islam, it turns out, and likewise, metamodernism. So yeah, I'm easy to find and definitely follow up with stuff we're doing at the Center for Process Studies as well, and lots of online and in-person opportunities to get into some of these and adjacent types of topics with what we're up to and yeah, thanks so much for having me on. It was a real thrill.

Ilia: Great to be with you.

Robert: Next time, Ilia speaks with Iain McGilchrist, renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist. Thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. As always, I'm Robert Nocastro. Thanks for listening.