Today’s digital technology, particularly artificial intelligence, can significantly impact nearly all aspects of society—spirituality, ethics, justice, love, faith, work—and religion scholars are front and center in addressing its uses and ramifications.
This year’s AAR/SBL annual meeting devotes more than a dozen sessions to technology, with scholars addressing AI, ChatGPT, and large language models, because, according to AAR president Leela Parsad, they are “relevant and important developments in how knowledge is produced, circulated, taught, and accessed.”
On Friday, Randall Reed, professor of religious studies at Appalachian State University, and Tracy J. Trothen, professor of ethics in the School of Religion at Queen’s University in Canada, will be leading a daylong technology and humanities skill-building preconference workshop for scholars titled THATCamp (9 a.m.–4 p.m., HCC 209, second level). “Our perceptions of AI are deeply intertwined with age-old human impulses to define the extraordinary,” Reed and Trothen write in their recent book, Understanding Religion and Artificial Intelligence: Meaning-Making in the Digital Age.
Reed and Trothen, who cochair the annual meeting’s program unit on AI and religion, composed a call for relevant papers, stating, “As A.I. technology advances, it is increasingly likely that it will have a significant impact on religion, theologies, and religious studies.” This will, in turn, affect religious practices, beliefs, and communities. If AI can steer cars, answer phones, or pilot killer drones, Reed and Trothen assert, the technology raises questions about moral responsibility, freedom, and what it means to be human.
One conference session that addresses those questions is “AI Experiments: Balancing Innovation, Bias, and Agency in AI-Driven Religious Studies” (Sunday, 5–6:30 p.m., HCC 105, plaza level), which, according to the program, will address “the necessity of human oversight in mitigating AI biases, particularly in amplifying marginalized voices (e.g., women in religious history, womanist visual culture) and preserving theological nuance in cross-cultural translation.”
In another session, “Encountering the Boundaries of Islamic Tradition: Approaches Through Technology, Racialization, Sensory Experience, and Literature” (Saturday, 12:30–2:30 p.m., HCC 110, plaza level), Yunus Dogan Telliel, an anthropology professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, will present a paper titled “AI-ification of the Qur’an: KuranGPT, or Translatability in an Age of LLMs.” According to the program, it “explores how artificial intelligence, when applied to the task of Qur’an translation, has implications for how revelation is understood.”
At a session titled “Catholic AI: Catholic and Anglican Approaches and Experiments with AI” (Sunday, 9–11 a.m., HCC 203, second level), participants from both religions will, according to the program, consider “human-AI interactions in faith contexts, theological questions of agency and freedom, and the concept of ‘relational intelligence’ that respects both technological capabilities and human dignity.” And—taking the discussion of God and technology to another level entirely—at “Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Learning and Teaching” (Sunday, 1-3 p.m., HCC 111, plaza level), Seung Heon (Hosea) Sheen, a doctoral student in theology at University of Oxford, will present a paper titled “Do Androids Dream of God?”
“The response to these technologies at this time should be cautious, skeptical, curious, and thoughtful,” SBL executive director Steed Veryl Davidson says. “You will see a mixture of these responses, if not in the presentations, certainly in the response from members at this meeting. We are happy to provide a space for this type of exploration because we do not want to be caught empty-handed if the ground shifts from underneath us. While ready adoption, especially uncritical adoption that follows the hype, is not what we are doing currently, we would be happy to absorb these innovations in keeping with the need to be relevant and thrive in new contexts.”
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A version of this article appeared in the 11/10/2025 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Cautious Amen to AI
