In this session, we will explore why and how to cultivate a growing awareness of and capacity for doing basic natural language processing (NLP) tasks in religious studies. Based on an ongoing workgroup in the Learning Lab at Iliff School of Theology, we will give a quick and basic introduction to NLP via python programming language and the natural language toolkit. After a basic introduction, we will use some simple exercises from the nltk book to encourage participants to play with text using the tools offered by the nltk.  As we code together, we will share ideas and experiments that these tools might stimulate and we will question the problems and possibilities of the assumptions built into these technological frameworks.