The 3 big things in Spirit Tech this week

48% of practicing US Christians say they'd trust AI with their spiritual growth, and the Vatican noticed

Barna Group and Gloo's May 20 study found that a third of practicing Christians consider AI's spiritual guidance as trustworthy as a pastor's, with the number climbing to 44% among Millennials. Two days earlier, Pope Leo XIV announced Magnifica humanitas, the first papal encyclical on AI and human dignity, to be co-presented May 25 with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. The demand data and the institutional response landing in the same week is not coincidence: the Pope's framing, "the challenge is not technological, but anthropological," reads as a direct answer to numbers like these. Faith-tech platforms like Gloo now have quantitative backing to build AI-guided spiritual growth features; the Vatican is trying to set the terms before the market does.

A 128-channel EEG study pinpointed when meditation rewires the brain: two minutes in, peaking at seven

Published in Mindfulness (Springer Nature), the study tracked 103 participants across three experience levels during breath-watching meditation. Brainwave shifts (increases in theta and alpha power alongside delta decreases) emerged at two to three minutes and intensified between seven and ten, regardless of whether the meditator was a beginner or a decades-long practitioner. The same week, Keisuke Suzuki published a computational framework (C×G×D) in Frontiers in Psychology that models three distinct types of altered-state experience from specific parameter configurations within deep neural networks. Week 19's HB0 defined the minimum consciousness threshold; week 20's Emergent Flow Theory mapped temporal architecture; this week's pair gives product teams actionable numbers: how long a session needs to be, and which computational dimensions correspond to which states.

Oura filed for an IPO at $11 billion, while Garmin built breathwork into its next wearable

Oura's confidential S-1 filing, projecting close to $2 billion in 2026 revenue from 5.5 million rings, tests whether the market values inward-facing biometric data at public-market scale. The company's embedded Headspace partnership is the contemplative bridge: the IPO pricing will implicitly value contemplative-feature engagement alongside sleep and readiness metrics. The same week, Garmin Connect 5.25 added structured breathwork and meditation sessions with guided prompts and animation assets, tied to its upcoming screenless CIRQA wearable, a device designed for presence without a display. Nexalin also closed its $1.3 million acquisition of the AI-integrated platform behind its HALO Clarity neurostimulation headset, vertical-integrating software and hardware ahead of a 160-participant FDA pivotal trial for insomnia at UCSD.