The Divinity School
In earlier eras, divinity faculties catalyzed concrete revolutions in knowledge and justice—Harvard College (1636) and Oxford’s Christ Church began as training grounds for clergy, yet matured into research universities. Union Theological Seminary’s Social Gospel scholars lobbied New York City to form the nation’s first municipal public‑health departments. Boston University School of Theology alumnus Martin Luther King Jr. converted prophetic ethics into U.S. civil‑rights law. We stand in that lineage, but aim our lens at an expanded cosmology of intelligence—be it through physicalist (fundamental laws), religious (divine will), or naturalistic (entelechy of the life force) perspectives.
Anchored by Bonnitta Roys process‑relational metaphysics, which treats mind and life as phases of a single generative field, we endow our students and faculty with the powers to influence and rightly accelerate finance, policy, and innovation that harmonizes technological progress with biological intelligence. Our curriculum trains visionary leaders in Four Powers—Awakened Perception, Visionary Scholarship, Crazy Wisdom, and Passionate Action—so they can recognize the limitations baked into institutions, industries, and sciences and design worlds beyond it.
Only an institution built for questions of purpose, obligation, and awe can align machines, policies, and institutions with the universe's deep continuity—and help society act on that alignment at scale.
Developing Novel Futures
We teach you to assemble visions big enough and clear enough to move governments, investors, and cultures.
Training Advanced Leaders
We Develop Leaders Who Can Operate in The Same Causal Properties of Nature
Moving Institutions
We transform isolated excellence into coordinated, comprehensive movements that shift civilization.
Developing Novel Futures
We teach you to assemble visions big enough and clear enough to move governments, investors, and cultures.
Each student enters one of two tracks: Horizons of Biological Intelligence or Naturalizing Machine Agency. One is oriented toward discovery , revealing the intelligences already living in ecosystems and organisms. The other is oriented toward invention—designing technologies that participate with, rather than extract from, living systems. Together, these tracks form the intellectual and ethical scaffolding for a new, balanced ontological portfolio, primarily targeting an alternative to the dominant bet on AI monoculture.
Students work in small teams within their tracks to advance a concrete initiative. The form is open: a multimedia story, a policy white paper, a speculative prototype, or a public-facing synthesis that reframes a civilization-scale challenge.
At the program's culmination, all students gather for a final in-person retreat. There, each track presents its work, and the entire cohort must weave their contributions into a single, coherent strategic document—a compelling proposal for governments, foundations, or public institutions to invest in alternative futures to the current trajectory.
This track explores emerging fields like cognitive science, collective intelligence, and synthetic biology, revealing that we may have underestimated the number of minded agents in our world. These fields open up surprising new areas of research. Whether your background is in ecology, education, medicine, cognitive science, psychology, biology, agriculture, contemplative practice, or systems change, you'll explore biological systems' remarkable capacities—including cognitive abilities—that we neither fully understand nor can replicate with our most advanced technologies.
In this track, students and teachers will develop a compelling vision of how these under-explored realms of biological intelligence—including aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual horizons—can accelerate human development and restore our relationship with the natural world. Students highlight and advocate for discovering and properly valuing biological capacities that play crucial roles in maintaining and regenerating the living systems we depend on.
This track explores the distinction between human intelligence and machine agency, focusing on their proper alignment. We ask: "What tool applications best serve the living world and help people recognize the biosphere's natural intelligence?" We address concerns that machines may subvert human agency by monopolizing our attention, thereby accelerating existential risks. You may be a builder, strategist, engineer, or technologist who has recognized the limitations of conventional technological frameworks. You may also be a thinker, theorist, or activist examining how machines influence meaning and power.
In this track, teachers and students develop an innovative approach to understanding machines as beneficial extensions of human agency. Their goal is to weave together science, philosophy, art, and engineering into a compelling framework of "naturalized machine agency" that will redirect government interests and capital investments toward these ends.
Malware emerges when our visions stray from reality's deep structure—when exciting ideas become distorted by inherited cognitive patterns.
Realigning with Reality's Deep Structure
Many of today's most intractable challenges stem not from poor reasoning or insufficient data, but from deeper metaphysical distortions in our understanding of time, causality, intelligence, and agency.
We call these distortions malware—deep cognitive defaults and unquestioned metaphysical patterns that silently shape how we think, lead, design, and define what's real. This malware permeates our language, assumptions, and institutional models, influencing how we define problems, measure success, and envision change.
As you move through the program, you'll notice that even the most powerful ideas can feel incomplete—as if they're solving for the wrong thing or missing something essential. This isn't a failure of logic—it's a sign of malware. We will encounter this throughout the program when frameworks collapse, metaphors flatten reality, or strategies suddenly feel hollow. In these moments, you begin to see the inherited architecture beneath your mind and the minds of leaders around you.
While there are dozens of examples, a few common ones are:
- Linear time → Time as experiential relationships, not distances or any other spatialized metaphor.
Influenced by process thinkers like A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. - Additive change → Biological and cultural evolution and scientific development occur mostly through mutations and extinction events, not developmental processes and accumulation.
Influenced by Stephen Jay Gould, Thomas Kuhn, Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling, Jean Gebser and Merlin Donald. - Newtonian causality → Complex potential is latent in the constantly active flux of changing background relationships.
Influenced by Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, William Connolly, and Christopher Alexander. - Disembodied mind → Mind is not a detached observer; it is what the body does without any remainder.
Informed by Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Mark Solms and the field of 4E cognitive science. - Whole-part confusion → Systems don’t just nest parts into wholes. Parts and wholes-like seeds and trees-precede and give rise to each other in mutually generative processes.
Reflects the design logic of Christopher Alexander and Michael Levin’s work on morphogenesis. - Hierarchy as one-way control → Real hierarchy isn’t about dominance. It’s about increased freedom through deeper dependency.
Inspired by John Heron’s work on collective meaning‑making - Stratified reality → Understanding requires relational context and historical causes. Going “deeper” into lower levels of structure (e.g. physics) doesn’t get to the bottom of things.
Challenges ontological reductionism in favor of ecological embedding (Roy, Simondon). - Ultimate Symmetries → We often assume that foundational opposites are equally important, but in reality, ultimate categories are asymmetrical. For example, in a world with “many,” you can understand the “one,” but in a world with just “one,” you can never derive the “many.”
Based on Hartshorne’s and C.S. Pierce’s metaphysics of asymmetrical dependence.
By the end of the program, you'll be fluent in identifying foundational errors in dominant systems and skilled at building alternatives that are alive, generative, and aligned with reality's deeper continuities. This capacity develops both a spiritual depth in how you engage with the world and the ability to bring others into alignment with your vision.
Institutions don't move because of isolated excellence. They move when something novel, coordinated, and comprehensive comes along.
No matter how thoughtful or technically sound your individual project is, it likely isn't enough to shift institutions, redirect capital at scale, or transform civilization's self- understanding.
In the final months of the program, we shift our focus to Passionate Action and organize as a Think Tank for assembling great ideas into a generative force that can work with institutional inertia. Together, we examine what's worth building and why, shaping an intervention compelling enough to stand alongside AI as a credible vision for investment, governance, and meaning. This is where we co-design our moonshot idea that could change the world.
We end with a four-day in-person immersion, during which we co-create a document, proposal, prototype, or ready-to-launch coalition of activities that scales into something institutions, funders, and movements can clearly see, understand, and embrace.
When a cohort's visions strongly align with institutional opportunities, we actively support these transformative ideas through our established networks. Through this incubation process, we ensure the most compelling and well-developed ideas can take root and create lasting impact in the real world.
Training Advanced Leaders
How Do We Create The Worlds We Really Want?
Throughout time leaders have forwarded the course of history. However, most were caught in the story of their historical era. Great leaders—those who have changed the course of history—transcend the given reality of their times with penetrating vision and a sense of connection to a divine source, and hold themselves to a higher purpose. These are traditionally thought of as religious, spiritual or mystical leaders. We situate our Leadership Program from the view of the deeper, spiritual aspects of the human. Right from the start, this view is front and center.
The Divinity School is designed to transform the way you look at the world, face challenges, and set goals for yourself and others. The program forges leaders who can see deeper into reality, make decisions that benefit the whole, and align humanity with the natural intelligence of the universe. Our faculty, whom you will meet, are cutting-edge scientists, technologists, policymakers, and cultural innovators, but the goal of the school is not to memorize their objective knowledge or adopt their opinions. It is to teach you how to identify the skills that empower them to be original, and then train you to practice and expand your own mastery in them — students master the powers to lead their community in realizing their vision of a more vibrant world.
Today, there's a notable absence of a robust theory of change to guide leaders. It's troubling that previous methods of shaping our human life-world are no longer effective. As democracy gradually turns into a mere semblance of participation, authoritarian regimes are increasingly sought to prevent impending collapse and chaos. On one side, religious fundamentalism and its ethnic-nationalist-corporatist variant, fascism, are gaining momentum. On the other side, technologists promise that AI can evade these threats by providing a truly rational, computational intelligence, free from the human imperfections that lead to ideological fervor.
As human civilization has evolved, so too has our ability to intentionally and creatively design our environment. This creative capacity is referred to as "ontological design," as the worlds we construct influence the type of people we will become. There are three major eras in our world-building activities that will sound familiar to most people: the premodern, modern, and postmodern. In addition, there is a new, metamodern approach. World-building is both a collective activity, but this activity is constrained by, or afforded by, the ways in which individual persons conceive of themselves relative to the world-building collective. Each era, therefore, is uniquely characterized.
The premodern approach to world building involved primarily human and animal labor. People understood themselves as (along with the animals) part of the natural cycles of birth and death. There was very little understanding of the individual self. People experienced their individuality as pre-constituted by the collective.
The modern approach to world building is drastically different. Legacy institutions, such as democratic nations, educational academies, and institutionalized religions, were constructed using this approach. It differentiates between mere labor, which involves repetitive cycles leading to no significant outcome, and work, which yields enduring features in the world.
In the modern era, the emphasis is on the differences among individuals, particularly regarding their talents and positions. High-status and talented individuals acquire leadership roles and shape the world for everyone else. These leaders, along with their institution's members, perceive themselves as the source of agency (power over) constituting the collective. This is the fundamental world-building power of colonialism.
Postmodernism, exemplified by the response of the 1960s generation in the US, rejects this type of world-building power as the participatory implications of democracy began to be taken seriously. This is the domain of "action" as Hannah Arendt defined it - the participation of people (the demos) in the political sphere, primarily through the hermeneutic processes of speech acts. Action, in this context, is the public expression of one's inner sense or the declaration of one's intentions for the making-of-the-world. Individuals began to perceive themselves as agents who could collectively influence the broader community.
We can see that the modern era has come to an end. Billionaires such as Bill Gates have invested billions of dollars in projects, including nuclear energy in China and vaccination programs in Africa, only to be hindered by the power of collective opinion and its amplification through social networks. Philanthropists have discovered that investing billions of dollars in social benefit programs often makes little difference and can even lead to outcomes contrary to their initial intentions. After numerous efforts were undermined by civil resistance, our "leaders" have had to confront the reality that “We weren’t in Kansas anymore.”
The postmodern approach to world building, which gained prominence in the 60’s, led to significant social improvements through the work of dedicated activists. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that there is something extremely problematic and dangerous about this postmodern turn. It is narrowly focused on dismantling existing structures, with little capacity to envision alternative, restorative, and re-enchanted worlds.
We now introduce the new approach known as metamodernism. The metamodern approach is evident in the concepts of Inner Development Goals, Bildung, the recent shift towards mindfulness, and the increase in therapeutic coaching based on various stage theories. These concepts are all extensions of the human potential movement that shifted away from collectivist/activist approaches to primarily focus on the individual's inner life. While these trends are promising, they often focus too much on the individual's interior and lack sufficient emphasis on world-building capacities. Additionally, these movements often avoid leadership and promote a peer-to-peer ideology.
Secondly, there is a kind of equal and opposite approach emerging, where people are returning to legacy religions. While this is in some sense a rerun of premodern sensibilities, what it shares with metamodernity today and how it differs from premodern religions of yesterday, is its distinct focus on the individual growth, healing, and salvation. Even when embedded in a community church, the self is construed to be a sovereign individual, the locus of self-transformation.
Where do we go from here?
We envision an approach that both incorporates and transcends all existing methods. We believe it's both feasible and essential to develop exceptional leaders whose character and vision can expedite the transformation of collective identities. Like contemporary leaders, they perceive themselves as individuals capable of shaping the world. However, unlike traditional leaders, they recognize that their ability to do so relies on the willing participation of free individuals in a collective. This presents a unique challenge in the history of human culture. This brings us to the core question:
Moving Institutions
Securing the Nation’s Future with Advanced Intelligences
AI is rapidly making traditional education models obsolete while threatening students' potential for self-determination. We're developing new approaches that harness AI to empower human creativity and discovery in the AI era through several initiatives: researching education's historical failures to enhance technical, cultural, and moral relevance; creating institutional models for flexible and locally-relevant education; fostering public engagement; and developing curricular frameworks. At the heart of this effort is The Divinity School, an MA-level program that serves as a living case study—demonstrating how metacognitive perspective-taking is key to embedding AI education into higher learning. Beyond this, we are creating scalable models for all educational levels to ensure the next generation develops the cognitive tools necessary to navigate an AI-shaped world. Through direct collaboration with municipalities on education design and strategy, we can transform local and national education systems. Our movement goes beyond critique to actively shape education's future through policy innovation, public discourse, and real-world implementation. This brief describes our initiatives.
The Futures We Must Shape
Bi-annual Alignment Briefing for GPs, CEOs, and Program Officers at Funds, Foundations, and Institutional Organizations
Every six months, our Alignment Briefings distill the signal from the noise on the most consequential question of our era: How do we steward and deploy advanced intelligences—Biological and Artificial—so that we build safer, more abundant, more novel, more free futures? This is your window into the future and your strategic advantage to build a more balanced ontological portfolio.
The Futures We Must Shape is a narrative-driven brief about paths to preferred futures—documents meant to endure, guiding decision‑makers across long arcs of history, not just the news cycle. It focuses on how things play out with more explanatory power in areas of investigation that depend on ideation and research, vision and insight, that no AI has training data on, since it requires entirely novel ideas of what the future should be, given the unprecedented powers released by technology and the still unknown choices that human collective intelligence will deliberate together, through thought and action, governance and change.
Cognitive Widget AI
Making visible the metaphysical assumptions embedded in different philosophical, scientific, and theological/spiritual positions.
Cognitive widgets are the actual machinery through which reality gets constructed in human experience. When spiritual traditions clash, when scientific paradigms become incommensurable, when political discourse breaks down, it's typically because different cognitive widgets are creating fundamentally different worlds of meaning that can't interface with each other. Even more important, most human suffering comes from mistaking our mental models for reality itself.
We are developing an AI application that recognizes cognitive widgets in real-time within texts, conversations, and individual thought processes. Rather than simply processing language at a surface level, the system identifies the deeper interaction metaphors and conceptual structures that organize meaning-making itself.
We utilize the Cognitive Widget AI to make visible the metaphysical assumptions embedded in various philosophical, scientific, and theological and spiritual positions. Rather than getting lost in surface-level doctrinal differences, students and scholars can examine the cognitive widgets that generate those differences, leading to more sophisticated and novel dialogue.
Our goal is for the system to enable a genuine movement from conformist to authentic thinking by helping individuals distinguish between inherited "linguistic norms" and frameworks that emerge from their own lived experience. The Cognitive Widget AI will identify when someone is operating from socially conditioned cognitive biases and guide them to develop increasingly original perspectives, making authentic progress in consequential dialogue, debate, and decision-making.
Originals
Bonnitta Roy is gathering a community to explore possible futures that only a few people are talking about.
Bonnitta Roy is gathering a community to explore possible futures that only a few people are talking about. Her work calls for leaders to develop clarity, discernment, and right intention, and to come together to realize the best of these futures.
Designed as a one-to-one interview, delivered as a community watch party.
Originals starts with a one-to-one recorded interview with a special guest. But the goal is not just to produce original content. Rather the recording is released as a live event where the interview can be expanded into a much larger conversation. In these live, “Community Watch Parties” Bonnitta selects key moments that are especially significant or challenging to digest, which she highlights to seed generative dialogue among the participants. Her approach grounds dialogue in insight practices, which draw on the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self— the source of the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition, and insight emerges.