115k+
sermons gathered
Somewhere a sermon is being preached right now — in a storefront church, a cathedral, a living room over a webcam. Most will be heard once and never again. Divining is listening to all of them at once.
Every week, tens of thousands of sermons are preached across the country and posted quietly to podcast feeds, church websites, and video channels. They are a vast, largely unsearchable record of what communities believe, fear, mourn, and hope for — and almost no one can find their way through it.
Divining gathers those sermons, transcribes every word, and looks for what they share: the themes, the turning points, the shifts of feeling that connect a Baptist pulpit in Alabama to a Unitarian meeting house in Oregon. It is a search engine, an archive, and a set of listening tools for a body of spoken thought that has never had one.
Here is how a single sermon becomes something you can find.
Divining breaks every sermon into segments — passages that hold a single subject — and asks a simple question of each one: what is this about? The answers are not chosen from a fixed list. They are allowed to emerge.
Divining reads the whole archive and looks for subjects that many different churches, in many different traditions, keep returning to independently. A theme that shows up once is noise. A theme corroborated by dozens of unrelated congregations is a real, shared preoccupation — and it earns a place on the map.
Topics aren't imposed on the sermons. They're grown from them.
There are many ways to explore, no one-size-fits-all use-case for a collection of inspiring, religious content. Beliefs intersect, and the ways people broach those ideas is what makes this search unique.
Most people go their whole lives never setting foot in any other church beyond the one of their birth. Instead, this offers inspiration as a shared human experience, where we build meaning and seek our own understanding.
Divining scores the sentiment of every segment and traces its rise and fall across the sermon. The shape of that line — how far the feeling travels — turns out to matter more than any single moment.
A sermon that holds one steady note and a sermon that climbs from lament to release are doing very different things, even on the same text. Divining measures the range of feeling across a sermon — its emotional arc — and treats that as one of the strongest signals of a sermon worth hearing.
The text tells it where the peaks are. For the moments that look most charged, Divining goes back to the audio — the actual voice, its warmth and strain — to confirm what the words only suggested. Read everything; listen closely only where it counts.
The surprising result of growing topics from the sermons themselves is how few of them belong to any one tradition. The same concerns — justice, grief, prayer, belonging — surface in congregations that agree on almost nothing else. The map below is a simplified view: traditions on the left, shared themes in the middle, and the threads that tie them together.
Zoom out and the whole archive looks like this: every topic a bubble, colored by the tradition that preaches it most. Single-tradition topics drift to the edges; the closer to the center, the more denominations share them. The threads trace how small, specific topics ladder up into the few large themes that every tradition returns to.