In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
Albert Camus, Return to Tipassa
On a rain-soaked evening in 1983, somewhere between Valencia and the Straits of Gibraltar, I found myself hunched inside a concrete drainage pipe. The bike I had bought in a French supermarket lay beside me; the few possessions I owned were wrapped in black bin-liners. I was cold, wet, broke—and spiritually bankrupt. Yet as lightning cracked across the cornfields, a wave of indescribable joy surged up from nowhere—Camus’s “invincible summer.” It was not a thought, but a feeling: of being held by something vast, loving, and utterly real.
Struggling with a search for meaning is not something unique to me. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among young people in the UK; many more self-harm or medicate their way through a fog of purposelessness. We suffer, I believe, from a crisis of meaning that is at least partly maieutogenic—caused by schooling itself.
Traditional religious cultures everywhere offer meaning-making frameworks that nurture connection and hope. And the evidence backs this up: systematic reviews show that religion enhances wellbeing by knitting people into caring communities, reducing anxiety and depression, promoting healthy habits, and even extending life expectancy.
My own state education in the UK claimed neutrality on religion but functioned, in practice, as a kind of disenchantment machine. The data seems to suggest that this might be a general effect of education. As compulsory secular education has expanded, traditional religious observance has declined—and suicide and depression have risen.
I understand that we cannot use education to induct children into traditional religious frameworks. There are too many different traditions, often in conflict and with values that do not always align with the values of modern education. But if we strip away the old consolations, do we not owe the young something equally substantial to help them navigate their lives? I want education to reach those who struggle with meaning, as I once struggled, and to offer something real—something spiritually nourishing.
Religious Education (RE) should be the obvious place to offer this. I trained as an RE teacher for this very reason. But I quickly left the profession, profoundly disappointed. Instead of guiding pupils through life’s great questions, I was expected to deliver “neutral knowledge” about the food on a Passover table or the Five Ks of Sikhism. Meanwhile, the questions that wake us in the night—Why am I here? What can I trust? How do I live well among strangers?—were left unasked.
Can generative AI help us restore the power of meaning in education? To answer this, we need to take a detour into the long relationship between technology and learning.
The Long Arc: From Relationship to Representation – and Back Again
According to David Lewis-Williams, cave paintings among the San Bushmen—such as this beautiful eland painted in haematite and blood during the full moon—functioned as a powerful form of educational technology. Far from being mere representations, these images were understood as alive, capable of speaking to participants during ritual. In trance ceremonies, shamans and initiates would cross the threshold of the cave wall—seen not as a surface but a portal—entering into a shared cultural space where the energy of the eland, a kind of trickster spirit for the San, could be experienced directly. This seems to be exemplary of the role of technology in education: not just a means of transmitting useful information but more centrally a way to induct individuals into the collective identity and expanded consciousness of a larger cultural space of dialogue between voices.
Four thousand years ago in Sumer, the first formal schools—the eduba, or “tablet houses”—were built to support a disruptive new technology: cuneiform writing. Pupils sat in rows copying wedge marks under the watchful eye (and sometimes the whip) of the father of the tablet house. Writing allowed knowledge to spread, but it also changed its character. In oral cultures, knowledge is a relationship—expressed in songlines and stories that map meaning onto land and life. Writing transformed knowledge into a representation—something you can store, test, trade.
Socrates warned us of the danger. “Writing,” he told Phaedrus, “is like painting: the figures look alive but fall silent when questioned.” A written word cannot adapt or respond. It offers the illusion of wisdom, while memory and mutual understanding quietly erode. Writing, Socrates said, was a pharmakon—both remedy and poison.
The printing press deepened this shift. Gutenberg’s movable type lowered the cost of books and made mass schooling possible. Comenius even modelled the classroom on the printing press: the teacher as the inked platen, pupils as the paper, discipline as the iron press ensuring a sharp impression. This print-based vision lies behind the modern exam system, which checks whether students have successfully absorbed book-based knowledge.
But literacy brought unintended consequences. The Jesuit scholar Walter Ong argued that the modern autonomous self is largely a product of solitary reading. In oral cultures, identity is relational, formed through communal rituals and shared speech. Print literacy, by contrast, creates an interior space for individual reflection, abstraction, and distance. Thought becomes more analytical—but often less embodied, less connected. Ong observed that oral cultures think in more holistic, mythopoetic ways—ways that, in religious terms, treat the world as alive with voices.
Today, generative AI may invert some of the negative effects of print culture. Instead of freezing words into static text, it treats meaning as a living cloud of probabilities. Ask it the same question twice, and it offers different but coherent replies. It is dialogic by design—more conversation than conclusion. But whether that conversation liberates or narrows depends entirely on how we use it.
Toward Relationship with the Cosmos
Print literacy—and the schooling systems built around it—have achieved much. But they have also contributed to a modern crisis of meaning. Could a new communications technology—generative AI—combined with a dialogic pedagogy, help reverse the damage?
Dialogic education aims to develop dialogic selves—students who can listen deeply, reflect critically, and question openly. Research shows that teaching students to talk and reason well in groups not only improves collective outcomes but strengthens individual thinking too. Why? Because students internalise the group dialogue, asking themselves the same reflective questions: “Are you sure?” “What are the other options?”
Psychologist Ethan Kross has shown that this kind of self-distanced thinking—talking to yourself from the outside, using your own name even as you address yourself—can reduce anxiety and improve decision-making. In dialogic education, we sometimes cultivate this through video-based group dialogue reviews, where students observe and assess themselves from a third-person perspective. Seeing yourself from the outside helps you change—often without needing to be told.
This ability to hear both your own voice and an imagined ‘other’ outside voice is what makes us more than smart—it’s what makes us human. And it opens the door to genuine community, where trust and shared inquiry can flourish. Education, at its best, expands each learner’s dialogic space: from local conversations to global ones—with Shakespeare, Confucius, and perhaps even, as Einstein or Carl Sagan might say, a learning dialogue with the cosmos itself.
How to Use AI in Religious Education
1. AI as a Reflection Tool
Research shows that talking to AI therapists or journalling bots can help users gain psychological distance from their own thoughts and emotions. This self-distancing—what Kross calls “chatter management”—can increase wellbeing, reduce rumination, and strengthen insight. In RE, we might build on this with structured activities drawn from the Big Ideas for RE framework (https://bigideasforre.org), especially the goal of helping students make sense of life experiences.
Imagine weekly classroom moments where pupils reflect on moral challenges, suffering, love, forgiveness or joy—not only alone, but dialoguing with a carefully tuned AI. “What should I do?” “What does this feeling mean?” “Why does this matter?” The goal is not to outsource answers to the machine, but to deepen personal awareness through meaningful inner dialogue—supported by technology.
2. AI to Support Global Consciousness
Now imagine a different kind of curriculum altogether—not a document, but a living global dialogue. A moderated AI-supported platform where people from around the world share what gives their lives meaning: secularists, humanists, Muslims, mystics, atheists, artists, farmers, scientists, and seekers of every stripe. The only entry requirement? A willingness to share, and to listen—with benevolence, and with the intent to learn.
RE classes could become hubs in this planetary conversation. Students could join live or asynchronous dialogues with peers in other schools or countries, exploring one central question: What gives your life meaning? The goal wouldn’t be to produce exam answers or propositional knowledge. It would be to help each student develop a stronger sense of their own values, their own inner compass.
AI makes this possible. It can sort people from around the world into small groups according to their shared interests—but also their differences—such that dialogue might be more constructive. At the Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFICambridge.org), we are experimenting with how to coach people in better dialogues individually and use AI to moderate group dialogues online. AI can prompt discussions, keep them going with guidance, and also feed in relevant knowledge.
Even for those who don’t find personal transformation, the benefit would be real: understanding how people make sense of their lives is useful in any walk of life—from therapy to diplomacy to sales.
My proposal is simple: let’s reimagine RE as both an app and a global platform, supporting real-time conversations about meaning and purpose. It would serve not only the students, but all participants in the dialogue. Could such a platform grow into a new kind of community—a shared spiritual ecology? The only way to find out is to begin the journey.
And perhaps that journey itself—seeking meaning together across our differences—is all the answer we need.
Conclusion: Toward a Planetary I–Thou
The Sea of Faith Network was born of Don Cupitt’s startling claim that “God” is best understood as a human creation—yet one that can still lure us toward a fuller life. AI, similarly, is a human creation that can lead us either toward shallow distraction or deeper connection. The choice is ours.
If we redesign RE around AI’s dialogic affordances, we can move beyond simply teaching about religions. We can nourish the positive aspect of the religious impulse itself: the impulse to reconnect (re-ligare) with all that is other and outside—ultimately, a living connection with the cosmos which brings with it a deep sense of meaning and purpose. Students won’t graduate with a single creed, but with a profound capacity: to hold multiple perspectives, to stay open to meaning, and to engage in a dialogue that never ends.
Professor Rupert Wegerif is a researcher and educator who focuses on the role of dialogue and technology in learning. He leads the Digital Education Futures Initiative and the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group, and has published several books and articles on dialogic education. As well as his PhD in Education Technology, he has a PGCE specialising in RE from Bristol University.