Computer technology has connected us around the earth, but our planetary spirit is fractured and adrift. Religion is a form-giving energy of transcendence, fundamental to evolution itself. However, its institutions are struggling to keep pace with the rapid rise of technology, the politicization of religion and the impact of globalization on both personhood and society.
Computer technology has connected us around the earth, but our planetary spirit is fractured and adrift.
Religion is a form-giving energy of transcendence, fundamental to evolution itself.
However, its institutions are struggling to keep pace with the rapid rise of technology, the politicization of religion and the impact of globalization on both personhood and society.
What is the future of our planetary spirit? What is our role in the religion of the future?
The World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture is dedicated to the integration of science, religion, and culture in service of a world in evolutionary transition. Through scholarship, education, formation, and interreligious dialogue, the Institute seeks to catalyze this evolutionary unfolding.
Quick Links
Latest Blog Post: A Body in Transition: From Center to Institute
Most Recent Podcast: Apocalyptic AI and the Stories Technology Tells with Robert Geraci
Latest Update: Ilia Delio on The Sacred Everywhere with Dr. Sheri Kling
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Featured Events
WISR offers live virtual webinars, online courses, and conferences featuring our founder, Ilia Delio, alongside leading voices in science, theology, and culture. Together with our partner organizations, we explore the questions shaping our evolutionary moment—weaving new stories of humanity, Earth, and the cosmic whole. Join us as we think, learn, and imagine together at the frontier where science, religion, and culture converge.
Join us for our 10-year anniversary conference
November 9–11 at Villanova University, we will be holding our annual conference: Love, Conflict, and an Unfolding Universe.
We invite you to gather with us in person and online. Early bird registration is now available! Visit the conference page to learn more and register.
The Vision Behind WISR
At the heart of WISR's vision is a Teilhardian conviction: that matter, life, and consciousness are moving toward greater unity, complexity, and love, and that science, religion, and culture must think together if humanity is to understand and participate in this movement. Teilhard traced this trajectory through cosmogenesis, biogenesis, and noogenesis—the successive emergence of cosmos, life, and mind, each threshold giving rise to something more than what preceded it. We now stand within the noosphere, the planetary sphere of thought, where evolution proceeds increasingly through consciousness itself, drawn toward what Teilhard called Omega: the fullness of love as the ground and goal of all things.
To live at the level of the noosphere is to recognize that evolution is not behind us but within us. It shapes not only how we think but what we believe and how we act. Yet our institutions—especially in the humanities—remain tethered to static categories and a narrowly defined concept of the human person, ill-suited to a world of dynamic change, planetary entanglement, and accelerating technological intelligence. WISR exists to address this gap. We seek to cultivate a new way of knowing for an AI age and a new ethics grounded in complexity and evolution—forming persons not as fixed selves but as dynamic components of a world in becoming, with holistic thought as its leading edge.
Religion, in this vision, is not an isolated phenomenon but the depth dimension of evolving cosmic life. Religious language carries a complex inheritance. For some it conjures real wounds—of institution, history, and family. For others it has come to sound metaphysically tired, entangled with politics, or out of step with a scientific age. Yet its power, despite its misuses and its weariness, arises from the wisdom of those who sought to express the ineffable with awe and wonder. Every great tradition has reached, in its own idiom, toward the same horizon: the incomprehensible ground of being toward which all life strains. WISR stands in the space where these trajectories meet—not to dissolve their differences, but to discover what they illuminate together.
The Christian tradition has long intuited this convergent movement: a power within creation drawing it toward something more, a deepening communion in which the divine, the cosmos, and the human are woven into a new and expanding form of personhood grounded in love. Other traditions name this differently, but the underlying intuition recurs across the world's wisdom. From this lineage WISR emerges and carries its insight forward into a wider field: the formation of minds and hearts capable of the evolutionary moment now upon us.
Christ shares existence with each and everything, with rocks, and plants, and animals, and humans and angels.
St. Bonaventure
Latest Articles
Read exclusive essays by Ilia Delio, with occasional contributions from fellow thinkers in our circle. Sign up for our newsletter to receive updates on new writing, events, and news.
Latest Links & Videos
Our founder, Ilia Delio, is invited to share in many spaces of thoughtful dialogue and reflection. Here are some of her most recent appearances, along with other public content produced by WISR.
Hunger for Wholeness Podcast
Story matters. Our lives are shaped around immersive, powerful stories that thrive at the heart of our religious traditions, scientific inquiries, and cultural landscapes.
We cannot envision a new world without changing the way we think. In a world saturated with bits of information, we need to reclaim loving at the heart of thinking.
Thinking is integral to loving.
