Posthuman Priests: Exploring the ‘New Visibility of Religion’ in Robotic Re(-)presentations of Religious Rituals

Abstract

In 2017, visitors to a church in Wittenberg were given the opportunity to receive blessings from a robot. The so-called ‘robot priest’, named ‘BlessU-2’, poses a lot of questions and possibilities. One of these is about the ways that robots might mediate and represent religious teachings, beliefs, and experiences, which is the focus of this paper. Taking Hoelzl and Ward’s ‘new visibility of religion’ hypothesis, the paper asks about what kind of visibility BlessU-2—and similar robots in religious contexts—represents: is it whimsical; novel; authentic; secular? By locating the robot in historical and theological frameworks, the nuances of what it represents and how it might be seen to mediate religiosity in some way are revealed and discussed.