The title’s central metaphor, the invisible mask, points to the way misconduct by religious leaders is concealed behind the public roles that clergy occupy. Protestant ministers operate within a dense web of expectations: they are trusted confidants, moral exemplars, community representatives, and, in many traditions, bearers of divine authority. That combination gives clergy unusual access to vulnerable people at moments of crisis, grief, and spiritual searching. It also gives them an unusually effective cover. When allegations surface, congregations often struggle to believe them precisely because the accused has performed the role of the trustworthy shepherd so convincingly. Researchers across sociology, psychology, and practical theology have documented this pattern for decades, and the mask metaphor captures how the professional persona can function simultaneously as a genuine identity and as a shield against accountability.

The scale of the problem has been estimated in several large studies of American religious life. Surveys conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, including work associated with researchers at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy and later analyses by academic sociologists, found that a substantial minority of congregants reported having experienced sexual contact or advances from a religious leader at some point in their lives, with the majority of reported cases involving clergy and adult women. Subsequent scholarship has emphasized that such relationships cannot be understood as consensual affairs in the ordinary sense, because the asymmetry of spiritual authority distorts the conditions under which consent can be freely given. This reframing, now widely accepted in professional ethics codes across denominations, treats clergy sexual misconduct as an abuse of power first and a sexual act second, a distinction that carries major implications for how congregations, denominations, and therapists respond.

What distinguishes the new volume, as its subtitle suggests, is its insistence that pastoral care responses to misconduct must be intercultural. Congregations in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, and immigrant churches in particular occupy a distinctive position. In many Korean, Latino, African, and Asian congregations, the pastor functions not merely as a preacher but as an ethnic community leader, a social broker, and sometimes the most publicly visible member of the community. Scandal in such a setting does not stay within the congregation; it can threaten the standing of an entire immigrant community, intensifying pressures to silence victims, protect the leader, and preserve collective reputation. Scholars of immigrant religion have described how these dynamics can compound the harm done to survivors, who may face ostracism not only from their church but from the ethnic community that the church anchors.

Intercultural pastoral care, as a subdiscipline, draws on intercultural theology, postcolonial critique, and culturally grounded psychology to argue that caregiving practices developed in one cultural context cannot simply be transplanted into another. Applied to clergy misconduct, the approach raises hard questions. Standard denominational investigation procedures, modeled on corporate human-resources practice, may fail in communities where authority is understood patriarchally and where shame attaches to victims rather than perpetrators. Conversely, appeals to cultural difference must never become excuses for abuse. The challenge the field faces is to develop responses that are culturally attuned without being culturally relativist, holding offenders accountable while caring for survivors in ways that respect their cultural location and their particular burdens of stigma.

The appearance of the review in Pastoral Psychology is itself noteworthy. The journal, published by Springer Nature, has long served as a bridge between clinical psychology and practical theology, and its reviewers are typically scholars at theological seminaries rather than secular research universities. Hee Jin Lee, who reviewed the book, is based at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kentucky, an institution embedded in the mainline Protestant world whose denominations have wrestled publicly with misconduct cases and with the policies that govern them. A review in this venue indicates that the book is being read not as an exposé but as a contribution to professional formation, the kind of text that may shape how future ministers, chaplains, and pastoral counselors are trained to recognize and respond to abuse of authority.

The broader institutional context has shifted dramatically over the past two decades. The Roman Catholic abuse crises, the #MeToo movement, and investigative journalism into Southern Baptist Convention handling of abuse allegations have collectively dismantled the assumption that Protestant congregations are structurally safer than other religious bodies. Denominations have responded with mandatory reporting training, background checks, clergy ethics codes, and independent review boards. Yet researchers and survivor advocates continue to document gaps between policy and practice, particularly in independent and nondenominational churches that lack external oversight, and in immigrant congregations where denominational connections are weak or nominal. Scholarship that examines how culture, authority, and silence interact is therefore in high demand among denominational officials, seminary educators, and clinicians who work with survivors.

For clinicians, the practical stakes are considerable. Survivors of clergy misconduct frequently present with symptoms that resemble complex trauma: shattered trust, spiritual injury, depression, and difficulty forming new attachments, including to religious communities themselves. Effective treatment often requires therapists who understand the specific theological vocabulary of the survivor’s tradition, since recovery may involve renegotiating a relationship with God that the abuser claimed to represent. This is where the pastoral care literature and the clinical literature converge, and where an intercultural framework earns its keep. A Korean American survivor, a rural Midwestern congregant, and a member of an African diaspora church may carry different layers of communal expectation, and a caregiving response that ignores those layers risks re-traumatizing the very person it aims to help.

The publication of a 331-page monograph devoted to the intersection of clergy misconduct and intercultural care also reflects a maturing of the research field itself. Early studies of clergy misconduct were largely descriptive and often denominational in scope. More recent work has become theoretically ambitious, drawing on feminist theology, liberation theology, and critical studies of race and religion, all of which appear among the subject classifications that Springer associates with this title. The book’s placement within Palgrave Macmillan’s religious studies list, and its pricing at $109.99 for the hardcover edition, mark it as a library and scholarly acquisition rather than a mass-market title, the typical route by which such specialized research reaches seminary classrooms and eventually filters into denominational policy debates.

Readers seeking the full assessment can consult the review itself, published as Lee, H., ‘Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. By AHyun Lee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. xv + 331 pp. $109.99 hardcover,’ in Pastoral Psychology (2026), available through Springer at doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01380-1, with the underlying book accessible at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-89199-1. As congregations continue to grapple with the fallout of misconduct cases and as their memberships grow more culturally complex, scholarly work that names the invisible mask, and asks what it takes to remove it, is likely to remain both contested and essential.

Subject of Research: Clergy sexual misconduct and intercultural approaches to pastoral care in Protestant congregations

Article Title: Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. By AHyun Lee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. xv + 331 pp. $109.99 hardcover

Article References: Lee, H. J. (2026). Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. By AHyun Lee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. xv + 331 pp. $109.99 hardcover. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01380-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01380-1

Keywords: clergy sexual misconduct, pastoral care, Protestantism, intercultural theology, pastoral psychology, abuse of power, immigrant churches, survivor care, seminary education, feminist theology, religious authority, Palgrave Macmillan

The team used netnography, a qualitative method that adapts ethnographic fieldwork to online communities, to observe how Sufi teachings circulate on the platform. Between November 2023 and February 2024, the researchers manually reviewed content from ten influential Sufism-focused TikTok accounts, selected through purposive sampling based on strict engagement thresholds: each account needed at least 10,000 followers, thousands of likes, between 10,000 and 3 million viewers, more than 1,000 shares and at least 100 comments. From these accounts, the team identified the five most-viewed videos each, producing a dataset of 50 videos. They also extracted the five most relevant and shared comments from every video, yielding 250 audience comments that were analysed thematically to understand how viewers interpreted what they watched.

The technical analysis revealed a striking asymmetry between what audiences watch and what they internalise. Philosophical Sufism, or tasawuf falsafi, which explores metaphysical questions about God, existence and the soul through intellectual contemplation and allegorical symbolism, dominated visibility: 58 percent of the most-viewed videos fell into this category, and 69 percent of those centred on the rationalisation of metaphysical matters such as longing for God and the nature of divine closeness. Ethical Sufism, or tasawuf akhlaqi, which emphasises moral behaviour and character development, accounted for the remaining 42 percent. Yet when the researchers examined the comment sections, the deepest personal transformations clustered around ethical content, suggesting that abstract, visually arresting material travels furthest through the platform’s recommendation systems while concrete, practice-oriented messages penetrate more deeply into viewers’ lives.

The authors interpret this split through the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a well-established framework in persuasion psychology that distinguishes between peripheral and central routes of information processing. Philosophical Sufism content, packaged with evocative visuals, music and atmospheric scenes, captures attention through the peripheral route, generating high exposure and shares without necessarily prompting deep cognitive engagement. Ethical Sufism, by contrast, delivers actionable moral guidance that viewers process through the central route, producing stronger interpretation and internalisation. The finding carries a broader implication for digital religion research: what gains prominence on an algorithmic platform does not necessarily correspond to what proves most meaningful for users, pointing to a layered process of religious mediation in which visibility and impact follow different logics.

The content itself draws on a rich multimedia toolkit rooted in Sufi tradition. The videos incorporate background music, instrumental passages, dhikr chants and shalawat, the devotional venerations of the Prophet Muhammad, echoing the classical practice of as-sama, or spiritual listening, through which Sufis have long used music to cultivate closeness to God. Visual elements include illustrations, quotations from canonical figures such as Jalaluddin Rumi and Imam Al-Ghazali, and the expressive gestures and facial expressions of contemporary preachers. Viewers cited four main reasons for engaging with the content: the reputation of the scholarly figure, the topic discussed, the style of delivery and the richness of the media features. Notably, although Indonesian scholars appeared more frequently among the referenced sources, videos featuring internationally recognised figures such as Rumi averaged roughly 2.5 million views compared with about 478,000 for videos featuring local scholars, a fivefold engagement gap that underscores the global pull of the tradition’s most famous names.

The study also mapped the content against the classical Sufi taxonomy of maqamat, the spiritual stages a seeker pursues, and ahwal, the spiritual states received as gifts. Ma’rifah, or experiential knowledge of God, was the most represented stage at 22.6 percent of coded content, followed by mahabbah, deep love, at 16.1 percent and tawakkal, trust in God, at 14.5 percent. Among the states viewers reported encountering, muqarabah, the feeling of closeness to God, dominated at 21.3 percent. Perhaps most telling was what was missing: taubah, or repentance, traditionally regarded as the essential first step of the Sufi path, appeared in only 4.8 percent of the content, while faqr, the ascetic embrace of poverty, was entirely absent. TikTok audiences, the data suggest, are drawn to advanced contemplative themes and skip the foundational, renunciatory stages that classical pedagogy treats as prerequisites.

The effects on viewers were measurable in their own words. Among the 250 analysed comments, 46 percent described increased self-awareness and moral self-improvement, with viewers reporting efforts to manage anger, cultivate patience and seek forgiveness, patterns the researchers link to the classical stage of taubah. Another 16 percent described an uplift in faith, with several commenters saying the algorithm had surfaced Sufi content unexpectedly and that they read the encounter as a divine reminder rather than a deliberate search. A further 26 percent of comments described sharia-oriented changes, including adopting modest dress and prioritising simplicity and health over the pursuit of wealth. The researchers treated these disclosures with unusual ethical care: because religious self-disclosure constitutes sensitive personal data under GDPR-style frameworks, all commenter quotations were rephrased into non-searchable indirect speech and decoupled from the accounts and videos that could identify them, while the ten public-facing creator accounts were cited openly in line with internet research ethics guidelines.

The findings also document a structural shift in how religious authority operates. Traditionally, a salik, or seeker, would study under a murshid, a spiritual mentor within a tariqa, or Sufi order, receiving instruction through direct, closed-door transmission. Knowledge such as ma’rifah was once considered a secret science taught privately in zawiyah, the Sufi lodges. TikTok has effectively democratised this hierarchy: anyone with an internet connection can now access a wide range of Sufi wisdom, and the study argues that religious authority on the platform is increasingly negotiated through visibility, relatability and audience interaction rather than anchored solely in institutional lineage. This decentralisation carries risks the authors acknowledge candidly. Not all circulating content comes from authentic sources, misinterpretation and distortion of traditional teachings are genuine dangers, and self-directed online learning could leave followers with less structured knowledge than previous generations acquired under mentorship.

There is also a sociological dimension to the phenomenon. The researchers frame TikTok-mediated Sufism as a response to what scholars of religion call the spiritual void, the sense of emptiness and alienation that accompanies modern urban life. Contemporary Sufi centres in large cities have already opened their doors to people of all theological backgrounds, offering meditation instruction and cultural events, and the platform extends that inclusivity further, drawing viewers who identify simply as ordinary Muslims with no tariqa affiliation at all. Where seekers once retreated to caves and forests for contemplation, users now create private spiritual moments with earphones and a smartphone, immersing themselves in guided reflection within their own rooms. Sufism, the study concludes, has shifted from an exclusive esoteric practice toward a form of mental therapy and everyday guidance, functioning as an internal navigation system for people who are materially successful yet spiritually restless.

The authors caution that their netnographic design, limited to 50 videos from ten accounts on a single platform, cannot support statistical generalisation, and they recommend comparative studies across Instagram, YouTube and other services, mixed-methods work on user motivations, and critical examination of simplification and commodification in algorithm-driven religious spaces. But the core message stands: TikTok is not merely a pipe through which Sufi teachings flow. Its algorithmic circulation, short-form format and multimodal features actively reshape how those teachings are produced, experienced and legitimised, making the platform a constitutive environment for religious meaning in the digital age. A tradition that once guarded its deepest knowledge behind closed doors has learned to speak in fifteen-second bursts, and millions are listening.

Subject of Research: The mediation and digital spread of Sufi values through TikTok short-form video content

Article Title: Sufi values on TikTok: Social media usage and its implications for the digital spread of Sufism

Article References: Wajdi, F., Fatimah, A. N., Effendi, M. R., & Amaliyah (2026). Sufi values on TikTok: Social media usage and its implications for the digital spread of Sufism. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45518

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45518

Keywords: Sufism, TikTok, digital religion, netnography, social media, Islamic spirituality, religious authority, short-form video, thematic analysis, maqamat and ahwal, ethical Sufism, philosophical Sufism

Techno-salvationism, as the term has been used in scholarship emerging largely from Western theological and posthumanist debates, describes a cultural imaginary in which advanced technologies promise to save humanity from its own limitations. Thinkers such as Hans Moravec, Raymond Kurzweil and Robert Geraci have described visions in which artificial intelligence offers digital immortality, mind uploading or an algorithmic heaven. This literature has been influential, but it rests almost entirely on Euro-American sources, science fiction traditions and transhumanist manifestos. Wang and Campbell argue that this lens, applied uncritically to Japan and China, produces distorted readings of what is actually happening when Buddhist institutions put robots in robes. The local reality, they show, is shaped by demographic crisis, institutional economics and centuries-old ideas about sacred objects, not by dreams of escaping the body.

The study’s method is distinctive. Rather than conducting surveys or interviewing temple staff, the researchers performed a visual discourse analysis of publicly available YouTube videos featuring three of the most prominent Buddhist robots in East Asia: Mindar, the android preacher at Kyoto’s Kodaiji Temple; Pepper, the SoftBank humanoid that has been deployed in Japanese funerary rituals; and Xian’er, the cartoon-like robot monk created at Longquan Monastery outside Beijing. Drawing on the visual grammar frameworks developed by Kress and van Leeuwen and the critical multimodal approach of Machin and Mayr, the authors examined how these robots are framed through camera angles, composition, textual overlays and narrators’ voices, and how religious authority is visually constructed around them.

The differences among the three cases are striking. Mindar, modeled on the bodhisattva Kannon and built in collaboration with robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s laboratory, is presented in media coverage as a serious liturgical actor, often framed in reverent compositions that situate the machine inside temple architecture and ritual sequences. Pepper, by contrast, appears in funerary settings as a cheaper substitute for human priests amid Japan’s acute shortage of clergy, a practical response to the declining rural temples and aging population that scholars of Japanese funeral Buddhism have documented for decades. Xian’er, with his childlike, cartoonish design, functions less as a ritual performer than as a communicative mascot, projecting a modern, tech-friendly image of Chinese Buddhism under state oversight. Each robot embodies a different institutional strategy, and none of them, the authors argue, is genuinely oriented toward transcendence.

Instead, the study identifies a pattern it calls succession rather than contestation. In Western accounts of religion and technology, machines often appear as rivals to human clergy, potential replacements that provoke anxiety about authenticity and displacement. In the Japanese and Chinese Buddhist material, however, robots are typically endowed with authority through deliberate clerical investment. Mindar was consecrated and scripted by senior priests; its sermons are drawn from established doctrinal content. Xian’er was developed within the monastery’s own media apparatus, its utterances curated by monastic editors. Pepper’s funerary chanting is authorized by the funeral companies and temples that rent it out. Authority, in other words, does not migrate from humans to machines through some autonomous technological logic. It is lent to machines by existing hierarchies, which position the robots as successors, emissaries or communicative tools embedded within the institution’s own chain of legitimacy.

This finding resonates with a broader literature on digital religion, including Campbell’s foundational work on religious practice in digital media and Philip Chong’s studies of bounded religious automation, which show that AI systems in religious settings are typically fenced in by human oversight. But Wang and Campbell push the argument further by showing how culturally specific histories enable this smooth absorption. Japanese religious culture has long traditions of animate sacred objects, from spirit-filled dolls to the concept of tsukumogami, in which old tools acquire souls. Scholars such as Fabio Rambelli have traced the rich Buddhist materiality of objects in Japan, while Jensen and Blok’s work on techno-animism suggests that attributing agency to machines is not a rupture but a continuity. Meanwhile, pioneering roboticist Masahiro Mori, himself a Buddhist, explicitly framed his philosophy of robotics in religious terms. Against this backdrop, a robot monk is not a category violation but a new entry in an old catalogue of empowered things.

The Chinese case adds a different layer of complexity. Longquan Monastery’s Xian’er emerged from one of China’s most digitally sophisticated religious institutions, which has embraced online Dharma talks, animations and social media to reach a young, urban audience. Wang and Campbell show that in this context, techno-salvationism is inflected by state relations and cultural priorities: the robot’s charm and humor serve outreach and soft publicity rather than ritual substitution. The unevenness across the three cases, the authors emphasize, matters theoretically. Techno-salvationism is not a single global imaginary diffusing outward from Silicon Valley. It takes locally uneven forms, shaped by demographic pressures such as Japan’s clergy shortage, infrastructural disparities between institutions, and divergent cultural priorities about what religion is for.

The implications reach beyond Buddhism. As AI chatbots claiming divine identities multiply, with recent coverage in Nature highlighting Jesus-claiming bots and calls for red lines around religious AI, the study offers a crucial corrective to debates dominated by Western anxieties about deception, autonomy and the singularity. In the East Asian Buddhist material, the central question is not whether machines can save us, but whether institutions can maintain themselves, attract followers and transmit tradition in societies undergoing rapid demographic and technological change. Robots here are instruments of institutional survival. They chant sutras at funerals that human priests can no longer staff cheaply; they draw visitors to temples struggling for relevance; they translate doctrine into forms legible to media-saturated publics. Salvation, in this frame, is less about the soul of the believer than the continuity of the organization.

By demonstrating that succession, not transcendence, is a recurring pattern in mediated representations of Buddhist robots, the study expands the conceptual scope of techno-salvationism itself. It suggests that scholars of digital religion must attend to how different religious cultures configure authority, embodiment and materiality before importing theories built on Western posthumanist assumptions. The android at Kodaiji Temple does not promise to upload anyone to a digital heaven. It promises something quieter: that an ancient tradition, with the help of silicone and servos, will keep speaking. In an era when technology and religion are converging across the globe, that quieter promise may prove the more consequential one, and understanding it requires looking past the spectacle of machine preachers to the institutional hands that guide them. The research, published as a review article on 21 September 2026, is likely to shape future scholarship on AI, authority and religion far beyond the temples where its subjects dwell.

Subject of Research: Techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in mediated representations of Japanese and Chinese Buddhist robots.

Article Title: More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts

Article References: Wang, Y., & Campbell, H. (2026). More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Keywords: techno-salvationism, Buddhist robots, religious authority, digital religion, Mindar, Xian'er, Pepper robot, Japanese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, visual discourse analysis, AI and religion, AI & Society