This panel examines the entangled futures of ritual and technology, asking how digital systems and artificial intelligence reshape, and are reflexively reshaped by, the sacred. Drawing on case studies ranging from Appalachian serpent handling and Catholic eucharistic practice to electronic health records and online atheist communities, these papers interrogate ritual's resilience and transformation in an age of algorithmic governance. Together they reveal how datafied bodies, networked media, and machine learning do not simply displace traditional ritual logics but generate new sites of moral authority, communal formation, and meaning-making. The panel moves from ethnographic and historical analysis to methodological reflection, with one paper that deploys algorithmic tools to analyze ritual itself—raising pointed questions about what is gained and lost in translation. Across these diverse cases, a shared provocation emerges: as AI increasingly mediates human practice, what counts as ritual, who holds authority over it, and what futures does it make possible?
This paper ambiguates the line between algorithm and ritual, demonstrates a novel natural language processing (NLP) technique, and shares some sociological insights from our data analysis of non-religious rituals. In one sense, this paper is a description of an NLP methodology and the insights it offered to the study of the rituals that non-religious people perform. In another sense, this paper describes an esoteric ritual of translation: a procedure to transpose semantic objects into and out of latent space to reveal patterns in a dataset. This method was invented for the interpretation of unstructured data collected in a study of rituals of the non-religious. It has assisted us with the study of interview data (n=40) and survey data (n=3,175). I show how the subject of study (ritual) merged with the methodology of study (NLP) to describe how NLP is something of a ritual itself.
This essay argues that algorithmic governance is not merely a technical framework for regulating AI but a ritualized social order that forms subjects, manages thresholds of belonging, and organizes collective expectations of the future. Drawing on Bell (1992), I interpret audits, scores, and oversight procedures as practices of ritualization that authorize certain judgments as objective and trustworthy. With Turner (1969), I show how algorithmic systems govern liminal moments—hiring, credit, and welfare—by converting uncertainty into administratively legible transitions. Against this, Wainwright’s Eucharist and Eschatology (1971) offers a theological critique: algorithmic governance is teleologically thin, habituating communities to prediction and control rather than promise and reconciliation. I therefore propose a eucharistic counter-ritual: communal practices of discernment that resist reducing persons to sortable data and form them for participation in a future received as promise rather than managed as risk within contemporary regimes of algorithmic authority, administrative sorting, and anticipatory governance.
In the late twentieth century Appalachian serpent handling largely vanished from scholarly and public view following early portrayals like Holy Ghost People (1967) and later controversies surrounding Salvation on Sand Mountain (1995). The practice persisted and has recently entered a media age: worship is livestreamed, pastors preach to remote audiences, while congregants sustain fellowship through social media and digital testimonies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how digital mediation reshapes ritual presence and continuity in these Pentecostal communities. I argue that this mediated worship is not the dilution of a once-secret rite but its transformation into a mediated form of presence—a “digital afterlife” through which practitioners imagine a future for their faith. Returning to a tradition long absent from the scholarly gaze, this paper asks what happens when ritual moves from mountain sanctuaries to social feeds, and how embodied presence is made visible, archived, and replayable.
Electronic health records (EHRs) are typically understood as technical infrastructures for storing and transmitting clinical information. This paper argues that the clinical record also operates as a ritual technology that produces what might be called the datafied body—a structured moral and epistemic object that organizes care, authority, and decision-making within contemporary medicine. Drawing on ritual theory and science and technology studies (STS), I examine documentation practices, interoperability protocols, and data standardization as ritualized performances that transform embodied patients into portable informational forms. These practices do more than record clinical reality; they establish what counts as legitimate knowledge, stabilize institutional hierarchies, and authorize particular forms of intervention. By interpreting the electronic health record as a technoscientific ritual system, the paper illuminates the sacral logics through which data infrastructures generate moral authority in modern healthcare and demonstrates how technological mediation reshapes the religiously resonant categories through which bodies, care, and responsibility are understood.
Those who leave religion and adopt the atheist identity often attribute their deconversion to logic, reason, or science, and they describe their experience as a sudden awakening to the falsity of religion. Drawing on digital ethnography of the atheist forum on Reddit, this paper argues that deconversion is more often the result of changes to how deconverts felt about religion, rather than what they thought about religion. It identifies a particular ritual practice through which atheists learned to feel angry about religion, explores how that ritual worked in a digital space, and reflects upon the significance of approaching rituals as a means of changing feeling rather than changing beliefs.