The rise of artificial intelligence signals more than a technological shift: it marks a crisis of authority, unsettling our confidence in who and what we should trust for how to think and believe. Drawing on the Transcendentalist tradition, this sermon and the Forum that will follow will ask how faith might respond to this crisis with responsibility and moral imagination.

Russell C. Powell is Research Associate with the Transcendentalism Research Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. A scholar of religion, ethics, and politics as they relate to American environmental concerns, Russell is completing a book manuscript on Emerson’s relevance to ecological ethics. (Russell is also one of Nate and Kit’s oldest friends from divinity school.)