News
Golems, Angels and AI: What non-humans teach us about humanity
By Tori Lee | January 9, 2026
Students in a new University of Chicago Divinity School course “Golems, Angels, and AI” meet in Swift Hall to break down monster theory and religious themes in popular sci-fi.Photo by Jean Lachat
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.
On Halloween, a new University of Chicago class mulled over the “Frankenstein complex.”
The term, coined by famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, refers to the idea that creators of intelligent beings—robots, artificial intelligence, reanimated corpses—are doomed to be destroyed by their creations.
“Why do we have so many stories like this?” posed Russell Johnson, an assistant instructional professor at UChicago’s Divinity School and course co-instructor.
After a short breakout session, students began sharing hypotheses. Perhaps it’s punishment for playing God. Maybe they spring from a fear of being replaced. It’s Oedipal—or, wait, Freudian.
The discussion wove back to the featured non-human of the day, the golem. Though the being from Jewish folklore made from reanimated clay appeared centuries before actor Jacob Elordi’s recent turn as Frankenstein’s monster, both grapple with identity, love and the anguish of creation.
In “Golems, Angels, and AI,” a new course offered by the Divinity School, students compared all manner of non-humans—from biblical angels to Blade Runner (1982) replicants to the Mission Impossible digital villain The Entity—all in service of answering a key question: What can depictions of non-humans tell us about what it means to be human?
“What we're trying to do is say, hey, people have thought through this before,” said Johnson, who co-taught the course with Divinity School Dean James T. Robinson. “Do their insights help us face seemingly new technologies? What does it say that humans have been grappling with these questions for a long time?”
Read the full story at UChicago News: news.uchicago.edu/story/golems-angels-and-ai-what-non-humans-teach-us-about-humanity