sehrang joo

I am not only an atheist; I have long been someone with as little patience for mantras as for thoughts and prayers, who believes in manifestation even less than in divine intervention, and who has never once wanted to call myself “spiritual but not religious.” And yet—

And yet I plan to quit my PhD program to pursue an MDiv.

I am currently studying cognitive psychology under a dream advisor at Princeton University. Nobody in my family has a religious vocation. I have scattered memories of itchy Easter dresses, confusing Korean sermons, and a handful of English Sunday School lessons before my family dropped off attending church in either language altogether. In college, I was a philosophy major—but the kind interested in philosophy of science and modal logic, not Anselm or theodicy. My 16 or 18 or 20 year old self—who would undoubtedly be thrilled by my academic achievement thus far—would be somewhere between baffled and horrified to learn that I now want to exchange it for divinity school.

But in April of 2023, I found myself at Nassau Presbyterian Church on Easter Sunday. Something about the service worked on me and for me—enough to move me to tears and to wanting to return. By the time I thought oh no maybe I want to go to divinity school, I’d spent most Sundays there for nearly two years.

Still, the idea of divinity school felt like an intrusive thought. When I started to read more theology, I did so expecting to quickly lose interest. Instead, Religion for Atheists became A New Christianity for a New World, became Is Nothing Sacred?, became Forgiveness: An Alternative Account. It was C.S. Lewis and Rachel Held Evans, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch; it was more philosophy than I’d read in years in the form of Kant, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard. This went on for an embarrassingly long time before I realized that this whim had become my most compelling intellectual interest.

And still, I wasn’t sure that divinity school was the right idea.

Maybe, though, it wasn’t a crazy idea. Maybe some version of these interests had always been part of my experience. After all, I’d been a high school student who sought out archived commencement addresses in lieu of sermons, a college freshman whose philosophical interests started in practical ethics and wanting to reconcile Aristotelian virtue ethics with her convictions about mental health support, a young researcher whose first project began with the question “Are Children Intuitive Theists?” (Kelemen, 2004), and an avid podcast fan who had dearly loved Harry Potter & the Sacred Text for over 9 years. And I really, really loved church. Atheist or not, week after week, I wanted to be there. I loved what I found there. Maybe it was time to let myself grapple with the difficult question of why I’d so clearly been drawn to this space and these practices.

Part of the answer had to include being honest with myself about the challenges of graduate school thus far. Only months before starting my program, I began experiencing debilitating, near-constant migraines. Let me be explicit: In talking about my health, I actively want to resist making a tidy narrative about discovery through suffering; I didn’t ‘find God’ by getting sick, and even if I had, I would trade any amount of self-realization for the return of my healthy body. But it’s also true that when academic validation was most challenging, I started to think more critically about where I was finding community and what still felt meaningful. When that was most difficult, when I felt most unworthy of the kindness and generosity of supportive mentors and friends, what I found was that I could believe in grace even if I didn’t believe in God.

I’ve come to understand my interest in divinity school as a shift not so much in the content of my interests, but in the priorities and intentions behind them. I came into my PhD program wanting, above all, to one day be a genuinely good mentor—to build community that could support people doing work in which they deeply believed, despite existing within an often-flawed system. Now, I want those commitments to be the focus of my work and attention. I want to live up to the conviction that they are important enough to be the entire goal.

Here's an excerpt from that piece:

When I started at CTI and learned that AI was CTI’s first area of focus for their new research project, I’ll admit that my initial reaction was disappointment. The fact that even CTI was thinking about AI felt like, to borrow the drama of CTI’s own language, a source of despair. I suppose I was hoping to find at least one place untouched by the way that generative AI was changing the world. Instead, it seemed that even theologians and even independent research centers weren’t immune from the AI craze.

Several months in, and on the other side of CTI’s workshop on Technology and AI, I’m happy to say that was the wrong first impression. If there is hope in the age of AI, I find it in places like CTI and in the conversations that are facilitated here. I agree with Dr. Greggs’ final closing words from the workshop that “At our very best this is what we should be doing.” “This” is having conversations about theology across different people, areas, spheres of work, and expertises—and doing so in ways that bear on existential, human questions. This workshop included people who are leading librarians working in digital humanities, journalists and writers, podcasters, a poet, an English professor…not to mention the cohort of visiting scholars who have spent the last year thinking about AI from their respective perspectives. CTI may not be doing interdisciplinary conversation perfectly; I heard from at least one visitor that they’d had conversations about wanting more interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education in general, and more also than what is currently possible even at CTI. I’m encouraged, however, that it’s being actively attempted. Being in a room that is even trying to have that challenging, messy, existential conversation is something I found exciting, fascinating, and ultimately hopeful.

As part of my work with CTI, I also gave an interview in the fall magazine about my growing and shifting interests into theology and the study of religion and researched (and sometimes hosted!) CTI's podcast on Theology for Our Times.