Artificial intelligence (AI) as an object and term remains enmeshed in our imaginaries, narratives, institutions and aspirations. AI has that in common with the other object of discussion in this Cambridge Companion: religion. But beyond such similarities in form and reception, we can also speak to how entangled these two objects have been, and are yet still becoming, with each other. This introductory chapter explores the difficulty of definitions and the intricacies of the histories of these two domains and their entanglements. It initially explores this relationship through the religious narratives and tropes that have had a role to play in the formation of the field of AI, in its discursive modes. It examines the history of AI and religion through the language and perspectives of some of the AI technologists and philosophers who have employed the term ‘religion’ in their discussions of the technology itself. Further, this chapter helps to set the scene for the larger conversation on religion and AI of this volume by demonstrating some of the tensions and lacunae that the following chapters address in greater detail.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

This chapter reviews progress in the field of artificial intelligence, and considers the special case of the android: a human-like robot that people would accept as similar to humans in how they perform and behave in society. An android as considered here does not have the purpose to deceive humans into believing that the android is a human. Instead, the android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. To make progress on android intelligence, artificial intelligence research needs to develop computer models of how people engage in relationships, how people explain their experience in terms of stories and how people reason about the things in life that are most significant and meaningful to them. A functional capacity for religious reasoning is important because the intelligent android needs to understand its role and its relationships with other persons. Religious reasoning is taken here not to mean matters of specific confessional faith and belief according to established doctrines but about the cognitive processes involved in negotiating significant values and relationships with tangible and intangible others.

This chapter deals with various aspects of centrism in global historical scholarship. It firstly inquires whether as a research field, global history has developed distinct ways of defining narrative centres. Within an eye on longer academic transformations, it secondly contextualises the growing critiques of Eurocentrism in different parts of the world. On that basis, the chapter thirdly investigates various efforts overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives that characterise different branches of global history as a research field. It then turns to the lived realities of academic historiography, considering it as a professional field that is comparable to other global professional realms. Doing this brings a very obvious inconsistency to the surface: our concepts have changed, our global thought has become decentred, and there has been a growing consensus when it comes to criticising Eurocentrism and other forms of hegemonic thinking. However, while this marks a great change in our disciplinary cultures, many of the hierarchies in the worldwide patterns of historiographical knowledge production that emerged during the nineteenth century are surprisingly intact today. This poses a particular problem to historical scholarship operating on a transregional and global level

This chapter captures the extent to which journalism fields marginalize African journalists in the coverage of international events unfolding on the continent. This marginalization leads to a continuation of bifurcation in the field that was also present during colonization. It shows that the effect of this bifurcation is that African audiences primarily learn about events happening across the continent from the Global North as opposed to African journalists. Chapter 4 shows how African journalists are marginalized in their fields and how they understand and explain this marginalization.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Chapter 2 delves into the primary actors and socio-historical events that have led to producing Hindu nationalism’s multiple political imaginaries and policy imperatives. It chronologically follows how Hindutva and discourses of economic development have interacted in post-Independence political regimes. I show how the BJP has been able to build multiple narratives, using both technocratic organisations and populist mobilisation, to gain several forms of legitimacy, many of which contradict one another. Scholars have written entire books on Hindutva’s ideological basis and its interaction with economic development. My intention is to give people an overview so they can appreciate how my specific research and argument fits into existing conversations and concerns. This chapter introduces how the BJP adopts two distinct forms of persuasion, making claims about the (sometimes magnificent, sometimes repugnant) past and the future to different degrees: (1) returning to an ancient, mythic, and strategically changing cultural unity; and (2) ‘cleaning up’ persisting economic and moral decadence in pursuit of invulnerable national glory.

Consensus-building legitimacy has to do not just with reason but also, of course, emotion – what feels right. We think something is right and good based on what ‘feels’ that way, appealing to normative ideas and sentiments behind rationales (to paraphrase one of my interviewees, in combining the prose of policy with the poetry of politics). Whether this book speaks to students or scholars of populist movements, technocratic managerialism, policy elites, or Indian politics, it contributes to a growing corpus of knowledge on strategies of the powerful. Studying the politicisation of expertise provides invaluable understanding of how the right wing is able to construct effective narratives and be convincing of its multiple, potentially contradictory, formations.

The prologue begins with the illustrative example of a single soldier whose attempts to rationalise the war in letters to his son reflect the broader themes of the book. This man’s child, Bentley Bridgewater, donated a sequence of letters written to him by his father to the National Army Museum. In these, the reader is confronted by a man looking to maintain his relationship with his distant son whilst also crafting a meaningful narrative around his war experiences. In short, it helps to expose the ways in which men sought to create or imagine agency. The preface moves on to explicate the central importance of narrative (and agency) in human cognition and sensemaking, exploring its role in psychology but also in its broader historical context.

Government policies, stories, and institutions lie at the heart of the argument. Widely embodying the term ‘applied science’, they made it visible and real. They have also been sites of interplay between organisational and professional promotion and public discourse about Britain’s prospects. Summarising the book, this chapter reflects on the continuity between the nineteenth-century emphasis on pedagogy and the twentieth-century focus on research. It suggests that because the meaning of applied science is rooted in national debate and experience, it differed from terms growing out of other national experiences, such as the German Technik. Its trajectory in other English-speaking countries should also be studied individually. The imperial experience meant the term may have been transformed as it travelled. In sum, its meaning was not the work of just a few intellectuals. Instead, the character of applied science developed through the complexities of history and widespread public debate.

Remarkably, the classification of science is only now being studied historically. The introduction specifies this book’s question: What made applied science seem such a potent economic, cultural, and political elixir in the United Kingdom for many decades and then saw it superseded? The book explores the meaning of the term that gave it such potency using five tools: institutions, narratives, sociotechnical imaginaries, concepts, and ideologies. The term has epistemic connotations; it has been promoted and blamed for its science policy implications, and cultural reality once weighed heavily. The book explores the relationship between ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ with their different emphases to describe the space between pure science and the market. The argument has three parts: the nineteenth-century concern with pedagogy, the early twentieth century as attention shifted to research, and the period after World War Two in which the visibility of applied science first rose and then collapsed.

This chapter sets the broader context for the book, which repeats a study on transition to first-time motherhood undertaken 21 years earlier. It asks what a new study on motherhood can tell us about how expectations and experiences are configured in harsher neoliberal conditions and digital landscapes that can empower and individually and experientially, undermine. In this first chapter, the context against which contemporary motherhood is experienced is compared to the earlier study. This chapter will also provide the theoretical and conceptual framework for the book through a focus on definitions and debates around motherhood and narrative construction, gender, and contextual, structural factors. The methodological details of the two qualitative longitudinal studies (which use the same research design) on transition to first-time motherhood are outlined in this chapter, setting the scene for the data presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. The chapter asks if it has ever been a more challenging time to be a woman who is also a mother.

I argue that moral intuitions are guided by social heuristics, which are not distinctive from other heuristics in the adaptive toolbox. One and the same heuristic can solve problems that we call moral and those we do not. That perspective helps explain the processes underlying moral intuition rather than taking it as an unexplained primitive. While moral psychologists debate over whether our moral sense is reflective and rational, as in Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory, or intuitive and nonrational, as in Jonathan Haidt’s theory, I believe that any assumed opposition and ranking is a misleading start. Both intuition and deliberation are involved in moral behavior, as they are in decision-making in general. The result of deliberation may become automized over a lifetime or generations, or intuitive judgments may be justified post hoc. If Darwin is right that the function of morality is to create and maintain the coherence of groups, then social heuristics are the tools towards that goal. This adaptive view explains apparent systematic inconsistencies in moral behavior and takes the phenomenon of moral luck seriously. Virtue is found not only in people, but also in environments.

Why do successive education reforms within a country resonate with familiar assumptions about educational goals, society, class, and state, even at moments of radical change? Repeating cultural narratives sustain continuities within institutional change processes, by influencing how new ideas are interpreted, how interest groups express preferences, and how institutional norms shape political processes. Repeating narratives make it more likely for some types of reforms to be implemented and sustained than others. This chapter develops a theoretical model suggesting how cultural narratives are transmitted across time and an empirical method for assessing cross-national differences in cultural narratives. Each country has a distinctive “cultural constraint,” or a set of cultural symbols and narratives, that appears in a nation’s literary corpus. Writers collectively contribute to this body of cultural tropes; despite individual fluctuations, they largely reproduce the master narratives of their countries. Computational linguistic processes allow us to observe empirical differences between British and Danish cultural depictions of education in 1,084 works of fiction from 1700 to 1920. Cultural narratives do not determine specific outcomes, as tropes must be activated in political struggles. Yet we can show how significant cross-national differences in literary images of education resonate with British and Danish educational trajectories.