We Banned the Soul from the Building: On AI, Spiritual Life, and Sustainable Practices for Writing

“AI will improve, but it will never develop the capacity for genuine longing, grief.”

The literary world is finally asking a question it has dodged for years: What can a human writer do that artificial intelligence cannot? The answers tend to circle around technical and personal aspects of writing, like voice, lived experience, and emotional nuance.

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But underneath all of the conversations taking place sits a word contemporary literary culture has carefully avoided: soul. AI can ingest every book in a library and spit our syntax back out to us. It cannot long for something it cannot name or grieve a father it has not loved and lost. It cannot sit inside silence until the quiet solitude transforms from boredom to meaning. That is the soul’s domain. In the age of AI, the writer’s soul is the only thing that cannot be replicated, and we haven’t built the necessary infrastructure to tend it. Most people aren’t even comfortable acknowledging or talking about it.

They use language to enter spaces where mystery lingers and invite others to join them there.

A few brave books and journals have begun to say this out loud, arguing that the writer’s inner life is not a luxury but the source of any article’s depth and essay’s originality. Still, there’s a difference between having a handful of books and a small stack of journals on a shelf and having robust structures that actually support the souls of working writers. We don’t leave craft to chance; we build MFA programs, conferences, grants, and residencies around it. We don’t leave career development to chance; we organize panels on publishing, money, and marketing. When it comes to the inner lives of writers; however, we mostly look away and hope people figure it out on their own. During a daylong gathering of more than 120 writers from the South I attended in Birmingham, Alabama last May to discuss “what writers need,” not one presentation or session or panel discussion mentioned anything connected to the soul.

It’s understandable that many avoid conversations about spiritual life. Religion has harmed many; people fear proselytizing; soul language can sound fuzzy or exclusionary; literary culture prizes the secular and intellectual. And while Christian publishing and conferences sometimes talk openly about the writer’s soul, those spaces are built around particular beliefs and are not designed for the Buddhist poet, the agnostic novelist, or the writer who left the church but not the longing. Secular spaces have banned the soul from the building. Religious ones have shrunk the size of each room.

Poets and novelists—I’m thinking of Toni Morrison, Adam Zagajewski, Kaveh Akbar, and Jamie Quatro, among others—who wade in the deeper waters of the soul don’t require their readers to sign off on any specific creeds or a checklist of beliefs to engage meaningfully with their poems and stories. They use language to enter spaces where mystery lingers and invite others to join them there. But when it’s time for a writer to examine their own soul and their spiritual uncertainties about the impact of AI, they are often left with nowhere to turn.

The need has existed and continues to grow while institutional and industry support keep turning away. I’m a spiritual director who operates within a Christian framework who meets regularly with Buddhists and agnostics because they have nowhere else to go. Most of my writing and publishing also exist within the Christian market, and making room for writers of any or no faith is, for me, a deeply Christian act. But I am not arguing for religious programming in secular spaces. I believe every writer has an inner life worth tending, and this is a human need, not a denominational or doctrinal one.

AI will improve, but it will never develop the capacity for genuine longing, grief, or ethical self-interrogation.

At the very moment AI is forcing us to ask what only a human writer can do, Americans are getting more interested in the inner life. Recent surveys show that about four in ten adults say they have become more spiritual, even as far fewer say they have become more religious. Younger adults are drifting away from organized religion while holding tightly to practices like meditation, prayer, and time in nature while a large share who identify as “Nones” still engage in explicitly spiritual activities. The numbers of Americans who say religion is a crucial component of their lives and that they regularly pray and attend religious services have remained steady since 2020. This data comes after a decades-long period of religious decline nationwide. These findings suggest that the audience for conversations about the soul is not shrinking, but shifting away from organized religion and toward more personal, improvisational forms of seeking.

While all of this is happening, most writers are not talking about the soul in their workshops, conferences, or editorial meetings. The result is fragmentation: the spiritual life of writers stays hidden as they submit pitches, meet deadlines, and build their platforms during work hours and struggle to fall asleep at night due to increased anxiety about AI and dwindling opportunities to be paid for their art.

On the surface, the writing may appear fine, but people in the literary arts often feel split–spiritually curious in private, professionally secular in public. That split is not neutral. It wears the soul down and makes creative work feel less authentic over time. The opposite of fragmentation is integration. When writers bring their whole inner life into the light and the broader conversation, it doesn’t just feel better; it changes the quality and depth of their work. Their writing begins to sound like it comes from one whole person instead of several competing selves.

Practical solutions could include literary conferences adding sessions on the inner life and sustainable creative practices, MFA programs offering optional courses on contemplation and artistic identity, and residencies honoring time away as soul-tending, not just productivity and word counts. I’m not calling for a replacement of the current craft or career infrastructure. I am asking for soulful add-ons.

AI will improve, but it will never develop the capacity for genuine longing, grief, or ethical self-interrogation. Those traits belong to human writers with souls that won’t flourish when left unattended. If we want writing that only humans can make, we have to act as if the inner lives of writers matter as much as their output.

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Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life by Charlotte Donlon is available from Here Below Books.