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Beatrice Marovich

@beamarovich.bsky.social
1.2K followers 365 following 275 posts

I’m a professor in religious studies, theology & the environmental humanities. I write about death, the underworld, and the things that take root there. website: www.beatricemarovich.com substack: beatricemarovich.substack.com

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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
There are so many reasons for people to be suspicious of one another right now. It’s tiring. I think we are all weary.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Yes, I wrote something about brainrot. Yes, I know you may find this cringe. But I wrote a whole dissertation about the way animals shape culture. I see it happening now, with AI & can’t help worrying that our attachments to nature might be used make us more comfortable with the new unrealities.
open.substack.com
The Cuteness Trap: Do Animals Make AI Disarming?
I FOUND ITALIAN BRAINROT not because it emerged magically in my TikTok feed, as many strange things do, but because I went looking for it.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
I have sometimes stopped where I am and listened to passages over and over again so I can copy them down.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
And he will make it a new national holiday; Undead Day
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
Health care always seems to be a weak spot for republicans
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
Maybe the writer had an AI hangover
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
We’re back to using paper again on campus, and the debates are heating up in the faculty copy room.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Maybe you’ve seen those viral TikTok bunnies, on trampolines? If you have, don’t judge me, but I was briefly fooled by them. I wrote about thieves of joy, and how those unknowing bunnies are a little icon of this moment: one where our sense of reality is starting to glitch.
open.substack.com
Unknowing is a Technology for the Digital World
Surviving the new unrealities
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
*through slop
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Professors are being encouraged to assign less reading material, because the kids can’t process it. But I am genuinely concerned about kids losing the ability to effectively skim: a crucial navigation skill. Preference-based scrolling through slip doesn’t teach this.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
I’ve started to feel like friction (something I’ve never particularly liked) has become a weird attractor for me. It’s like some mineral that I’m missing from my diet, and I have to eat bitter things in order to get it.
open.substack.com
Friction is Therapeutic
Against easiness
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
I will admit that there are many instances where I am OK with (or even in favor of) shearing down text. Indeed, this article would probably benefit from some editing! But I find the idea that a thick book is “unreadable” to be a bad one.
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Jesse Dukes @curiousdukes.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Trailer is out! This summer we're releasing a seven episode limited series podcast on AI in schools called The Homework Machine. Its based on over 100 interviews with teachers and students, and the student interviews especially are funny, gut-wrenching, real talk from the youth.
teachlabpodcast.com
Coming Soon: The Homework Machine
Most education technologies are invited in by schools. But generative AI crashed the party.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
If I could like this ten times, I would. Reading it felt like a big, long, yes. Thinking about having my students read it in the fall.
open.substack.com
compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Yes! And I have admittedly been drawn to read sooo many books simply because I wanted to better understand a particularly compelling person’s mind!
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Keegan 🎃sinski @keeganosinski.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
"I am less like a moth, when I read a book, and more like a mammal." I always love @beamarovich.bsky.social's work, and I can't wait to read more of her reflections on mystery and others' interior lives in the digital age.
beatricemarovich.substack.com
Watching People Read (Interiority After Mystery I)
A series on inner life and algorithms
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
This is an experiment in thinking out loud. If you’re curious about the shifts we’re living through, and interested in thinking about their subtler effects, I hope you join me!
open.substack.com
Watching People Read (Interiority After Mystery I)
A series on inner life and algorithms
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
I’m launching a new series on my Substack, which I’m calling Interiority After Mystery, to explore how digital life is reshaping what it means to think, feel, and pay attention. It’s a reflection on what might be getting lost in the transitions we’re living through. And what might be transmuted.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
But, below the cynical surface, I think it’s also an indicator of broader cultural shifts in terms of how we read and think, and how we experience inner life in the first place.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Performative reading is getting dragged online. In part, it’s triggering suspicion: there’s a lot of moral outrage about technology, so it’s a good time to virtue signal with a book.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
Thank you for reading! Hope you find it useful
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Exbodiment: I love that way of putting it. I agree that this is a difficult, and deeply intuitive, practice that’s at risk right now.
substack.com
Beatrice Marovich on Substack
Exbodiment: I love that way of putting it. I agree that this is a practice that’s at risk right now. “Language is humanity’s superpower. Without it, culture, cultural evolution, global cooperation, ...
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
AI like ChatGPT is trained to follow a protocol when they talk about religion: no bias, no advocacy (essentially no theology). But ChatGPT admits that complete neutrality might be impossible. What happens when a machine built for objectivity starts doing theology anyway?
open.substack.com
AI and the Illusion of Religious Neutrality
Even ChatGPT can see its religious bias. Why can't we?
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Nightmare stuff!
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
“If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.”
open.substack.com
In my zombie era
The third stage of culture in the age of infinite information
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
I just picked my 9 year old daughter up from summer camp this weekend, and I can’t look at news about the Texas floods without crying.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 05/07/2025
“What people describe as ‘the end of the Internet’ isn’t a real end. We are waking up—the Otherworld’s glamor has faded and we are coming to in the mortal world.” Loved this; though I’m pretty convinced that otherworlds are a feature of our mortality, not a bug.
open.substack.com
The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland
from the Philosophical Research Society panel with Tara Isabella Burton, MemeAnalysis, and Gary Lachman
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
But he also makes the point (which I agree with) that AI is doing the work of exposing the incredible rot in American education.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Not much that’s totally new here, if you read the original article, but he does note (and based on conversations I’ve had, I agree) that if you don’t work in academia you probably don’t realize what a seismic shift is happening.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
Sean Illing interviewed The NY Times reporter who wrote that now infamous article about everyone cheating their way through college.
podcasts.apple.com
If AI can do your classwork, why go to college?
Podcast Episode · The Gray Area with Sean Illing · 06/30/2025 · 59m
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
For my religious studies & theology friends who have been interested in the spiritual uses of AI: “Within self-optimisation culture online, where some want a weekly workout routine, others essentially want a personal spiritual trainer.”
dazeddigital.com
When ChatGPT becomes your spiritual guide
As more people turn to the chatbot for immediate answers about all things metaphysical, are we losing our patience for truly transformative experiences?
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Forty years ago Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg as an ironic feminist myth of resistance. Today, I feel more like a cyborg than ever & authoritarian-style politics are infused with the destabilizing irony that Haraway used as a tool of critique. I wanted to see how her political myth holds up.
open.substack.com
I'd Actually Rather Be a Goddess Than a Cyborg
Craft, Power & the Politics of Myth-Making
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Yes! Multiple angles through which to see this phenomenon happening.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
And it’s anyone’s guess at this point what those changes are actually going to be, or how they will impact social life, culture, and relationships.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
I think, for many people, these edge cases are unsettling because they are an indicator that something is changing in terms of how we experience our inner lives. We can also see that this happened with shifts in other media technologies.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
But I also think that the reason why this is unsettling for so many onlookers is not necessarily because they worry that they (or people they know) will be subjected to the same sorts of delusions. Or that they think this will become some new normal.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
I agree with her. But this is the comment I left: I think you’re right that, when we look at shifts in media technology in historical context, we see people essentially exploring gestures at transcendence in various ways, as a mode of exploration.
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
For those of you who’ve read that piece in The NY Times on ChatGPT and spiritual psychosis (or that similar Rolling Stone piece), Katherine Dee explains it as just another enchanted response to a new technology (it’s happened before, it will happen again).
open.substack.com
Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis
yup, still thinking about it
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
I mean, you almost *have* to be there!
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
It’s always sad when a really terrible, mythically bad, restaurant closes. I hope a few of them are still open when we take Matilda on a pilgrimage to her birthplace
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David W. Congdon @dwcongdon.com · 12/06/2025
Is theology dying? Personally, I think it is. @beamarovich.bsky.social interviewed me and many others on this topic and wrote an excellent piece for The Other Journal. I recommend reading it. theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...
theotherjournal.com
Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: th...
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Like you’ve never dared to do before, lol
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Reposted by Beatrice Marovich
Jason Goroncy @jasongoroncy.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
A wonderful 'kind of report' on the death, or something, of the academic discipline of #theology, by @beamarovich.bsky.social. #academia theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...
theotherjournal.com
Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: th...
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Contimentalist @contimentalist.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
“But perhaps the affirmation of being valueless to a culture with questionable values…is one of the best things we can pass along to others, in whatever conditions of struggle they might find themselves in, and in whatever form they stumble upon theology.” Great piece from @beamarovich.bsky.social
theotherjournal.com
Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: th...
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Beatrice Marovich @beamarovich.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Let me know if you try, and what works (or doesn’t!) I definitely want to experiment
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Keegan 🎃sinski @keeganosinski.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
It's been a really rough week at my place of work, but this conversation with @beamarovich.bsky.social and many of my friends has made me feel buoyed and accompanied in my professional despair theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...
theotherjournal.com
Is Theology Dying? - The Other Journal
People often assume that theology is only for true believers: those who want to defend the existence of God against the skepticism of secular outsiders. But there’s an old open secret in the field: th...
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