Blessed Are They Who Mourn: Christian Perspectives on Griefbots

Griefbots promise mourners either help to deal with their grief or an ongoing connection to the deceased. By providing a technological mediation of the relationship to death, these technologies threaten to come into conflict with religious practices of mourning. This article examines a similar conflict in which early Christians sought to transform Greco-Roman mourning practices. Christians demanded an affective transformation of grief into feelings of longing and a shift in graveside feasts into an opportunity for prayer and alms. This older encounter between cultural and religious practices can inform an analysis of the concerns and opportunities contemporary Christians might discern in new technologies of mourning.