ABSTRACT This article introduces the thematic section Heritage and Religion in South Asia and its Diasporas and proposes a new framework for analysing the relationship between religion and heritage. While previous scholarship has often approached this nexus in terms of similarities or conflicts, the article argues that global South Asia offers a productive ground for rethinking the complex ways in which religion and heritage interact and shape each other both discursively and materially. Drawing on contributions from across the thematic section, it moves beyond the established distinction between the 'heritagisation of the sacred' and the 'sacralisation of heritage'. Instead, it proposes a new analytical framework centred on friction, entanglement and reconfiguration—three distinct but overlapping modalities through which religion and heritage interact on the ground. Through examples from South Asia and its diasporas, the article shows how heritage discourses are appropriated, contested and reworked by diverse actors, from state institutions to local religious communities and migrants. By foregrounding uneven power relations and transnational circulations of beliefs, memories and objects, it positions South Asia as a generative site for theorising the dynamic cross-fertilisation of religion and heritage in contemporary societies.

ABSTRACT This article follows the global career of the concept of ‘worldview’ from 1790 to the present, from its origin in German Idealism to its translation and transposition to the UK, the Netherlands, and North and South America. By integrating conceptual history within a sociological model based on apologetics, the article explores the formative power of culture wars in the intellectual and religious life of the past two centuries. It argues that within this apologetic framework different social movements – comprised of scientific secularists, orthodox Christians, liberal skeptics, followers of political ideologies, or indigenous activists – coalesced around divergent definitions of worldview. Worldview helped structure their movements, while providing a means for understanding and counteracting opponents. The apologetics of worldview offers a new approach to the joint history of the secular and religious and provides essential findings for scholars now using worldview and related concepts, such as ontology, for social scientific analysis.

ABSTRACT The Yazidi religious tradition, once anchored in rigid caste boundaries, a central sacred geography, and hereditary authority, is undergoing a profound transformation in the context of exile. This article introduces the concept of vernacular stability to describe the ways in which religious meaning is sustained not through institutional permanence, but through reinterpretation, embodied memory, and everyday ritual practice. Drawing on examples from post-genocide Yazidi communities in Iraq and the diaspora, the study shows how sacred authority is reassembled beyond Lalish, how formerly inflexible caste rules become sites of negotiation, and how trauma shapes moral boundaries and intergenerational transmission. Far from signalling decline, these shifts reveal a form of resilience that rests not on immutability, but on the capacity to translate faith into altered social and spatial conditions. Yazidi religion emerges here not as a static system, but as a field of contested meanings, sustained by improvisation, repetition, and memory.

ABSTRACT Discussions of immortality, the raising of the dead, magic, demons, and the divine permeate the global AI industry. Although positioning itself as a technoscience, it has long animated its technology by appealing to religious rhetoric where men imagine themselves as gods birthing human-like machines. This article considers the industry’s promise to usher in a ‘magical’ age, as it concentrates wealth and power in the hands of an elite in the context of some of the debates about modernity, secularization, enchantment, and disenchantment. It warns that the return to literal readings of stories, which sweep away the complexity and nuance of fiction in favour of the totalitarian potential of myth, helps facilitate the rise of neo-feudalism.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the intersections of religion and artificial intelligence (AI), exploring how AI evokes religious narratives, shapes religious practices, and generates formations analogous to religion. The concept of formations analogous to religion is developed as a critical framework for understanding AI’s religious and cultural implications. It is argued that AI’s cultural significance is often mediated through religious language and symbolism. The article provides an overview of current research and outlines working definitions of AI, religion, and formations analogous to religion. The contributions to this thematic issue are introduced by identifying their key points of convergence: the mystification of AI in narratives and discourses, which can obscure ethical issues and reinforce power imbalances; the integration of AI into religious practices, which can lead to novel formations analogous to religion; and the ‘re-enchantment’ of the digitally suffused world via AI’s perceived autonomy and agency, which creates new modes of human heteronomy.

ABSTRACT As technology advances, numerous interpretations of computer intelligence have arisen since the mid-20th century. As radical form of techno-utopia, posthumanism prophesizes the emergence of the singularity: a critical juncture where artificial intelligence (AI) exceeds human intelligence. Tracing its conceptual origins to the work of Irving Good reveals how the narrative of a superior computer intelligence is shaped by science and by fiction. The article further explores – from the perspective of religious studies – the extent to which the ‘transcendence narrative’ has influenced research in AI. Attempts, particularly by theologians, to interpret this AI optimism as (implicit) religion are rejected. Instead, the article proposes a human-centered approach that understands AI to be a social practice, highlighting the relationships between economic, political, and cultural factors. The historical chess machine, the Mechanical Turk, serves as a metaphor for obscuring the role played by humans in the training and production of AI algorithms.