Making Meaning with Sophia
In a world increasingly shaped by screens, social media, and AI, more people are struggling to feel a sense of meaning, purpose, and personhood in their daily lives. Making Meaning with Sophia equips the people who guide others through these struggles — faith leaders, chaplains, and spiritual care providers — with practical tools to alleviate digital distress and existential trauma, and to reclaim personal agency in the digital age.
The program offers two evidence-based learning tracks. Both tracks are hosted in partnership with The School of Global Citizenry.
Track 1: Finding Your Way for Faith Leaders
A CEU-certified, 10-week hybrid program for faith leaders across denominations and traditions. Faith leaders learn to:
Realign their relationship with screened devices and social media.
Build a personal ethical framework for navigating AI — a "Personal Moral Compass."
Discover meaning-making practices they can embed into daily life.
Embed these practices within their communities of faith.
As a capstone, each participant develops an analogue spiritual digital wellness toolkit designed for use within their own congregation.
Track 2: Finding Your Way for Chaplains
and Spiritual Care Providers
Also a CEU-certified, 10-week hybrid program, Track 2 equips chaplains and spiritual care providers to recognize and address the existential strain and sense of disconnection that can accompany AI's rapid spread through daily life.
A signature part of this track is an in-person, travel-funded, 10-day intensive at Sophia Seminary's farm community. There, participants explore spiritual reintegration through hands-on, embodied practice: growing and harvesting food, making things by hand, storytelling, and play — building daily rhythms of connection to food, craft, and community. During this intensive, participants are introduced to Rev. Dr. Marian Edmonds-Allen's Personal Moral Compass framework for AI, which is integrated throughout the curriculum alongside the teachings in Rev. Mary Andreolli's book, Finding Your Way Back to You: Making Meaning in a Screen-Filled World.
As their capstone, participants design a replicable analogue spiritual digital wellness toolkit for their own communities.
Building Communities That Last
Our goal reaches beyond the 10-week programs themselves. Both tracks are designed to cultivate lasting communities of practice — participants stay connected and supported well after each program ends, reporting on how their toolkits are working in their own communities for a full year afterward.
Grounded in Research
Making Meaning with Sophia is a field-tested, evidence-based initiative. We're studying how spiritual digital wellness frameworks help people reclaim personal agency and rebuild meaning in an AI-saturated world — and whether a defined ethical framework like the Personal Moral Compass can ease the existential trauma so many are feeling in the midst of rapid technological change.
Field data from both tracks is analyzed in collaboration with Rev. Dr. Marian Edmonds-Allen and the Neurospirituality Lab of Harvard Divinity School. What we learn shapes the program itself — we adapt our frameworks based on real-world results, so that Making Meaning with Sophia keeps growing into a lasting, high-impact program for the people who guide others through meaning, faith, and community.