Ari Y Kelman is the Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University, exploring the hidden logics that animate Jewish learning and Jewish life.https://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/en-ushttps://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/notes/helsinki/https://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/notes/helsinki/I spent last week in Helsinki, Finland, at a conference about Religious Literacy and religious pluralism. We did what most interesting conferences do, which is take the subject around which the conference was organized and interrogate it until it is meaningless.Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/notes/ais-religious-pretensions/https://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/notes/ais-religious-pretensions/In my previous post, I wrote about the version of God that emerges from much talk of AI and its powers. In this post, I want to talk about the idea of religion that is emerging from some of the news coverage about AI's religious pretenses.Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/notes/the-small-god-of-ai/https://direction-b--ari-y-kelman.netlify.app/notes/the-small-god-of-ai/It is something of a commonplace to recognize that people are talking about AI in religious terms. Sam Altman, of OpenAI, famously said that entrepreneurs don't want to start companies -- they want to start religions.Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT