In conversation with this year's presidential theme, "The Future," these three papers tackle religious and technological imaginings of what lies ahead. Examining preppers, haunted houses and heavy metal, these three authors stage a conversation about science, technology, and religion in uncertain times.
According to a Pew Research survey from 2022, 40% of US adults believe humanity is ‘living in end times’, although it would not be difficult to believe that the present number is significantly higher. These views are informed by current events, but also substantially informed by representations of the apocalypse in popular culture. This paper will concentrate on how apocalyptic fiction allows us to confront hard questions about personhood, race/othering, and human rights.
I look at three post/apocalyptic works: Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark, C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust, and Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home. Through these examples, I highlight some of the ways we can critically read popular fiction texts as spiritually and socially relevant to how we imagine humanity will exist in the future, as well as point to the challenges we must navigate in our present apocalyptic era.
In this paper, I will look at two popular music artists who express prophetic critiques of space colonization as a solution to the ecological crises of our time. The first is the 2019 thrash-metal album Infest the Rats' Nest by the protean Melbourne-based rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (KGLW). The second is the 2024 "yacht doom" album How to Think Like a Billionaire by the Nottingham prog rocker Bill Fisher. Placing Fisher's and KGLW's music in the context of metamodernism, an emerging cultural dominant characterized by superhybridity, as well as the work of Mary-Jane Rubinstein on science and religion, I will argue that both artists draw on science fiction, mythical images of fiery destruction, and the tropes of heavy metal to dash the dreams of technofuturists at a time when SpaceX and Blue Horizon were positioning themselves as the ones to sell humanity a post-apocalyptic future.
This paper revisits ScareMare, the long-running hell house attraction operated by Liberty University. Earlier scholarship carefully documented how “hell houses” relied on graphic theatrical scenes culminating in vivid depictions of hell designed to provoke immediate conversion. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interface analysis, and sustained interaction with the AI chatbot hosted by TrueLife.org, this paper argues that ScareMare has shifted from shock-based evangelism to a dispersed digital infrastructure of persuasion. Visitors can now enter into an online environment of testimonials and chat with an AI interface that promises answers to questions about God. Within this framework, conversion becomes an extended question-and-answer process mediated by algorithmic authority that relies on limited training data containing neither information from the Bible nor past user's contributions. Relying instead on the history of material culture, the AI's evangelical strategy simulates dialogue while limiting the improvisational exchange often central to evangelical witnessing.