The Society of Biblical Literature and The American Academy of Religion (SBL/AAR) host their annual conferences together every year the week before Thanksgiving in the United States. This is the largest gathering of religious scholars from around the world boasting thousands of attendees, over one thousand sessions and events, and more than 130 publishers. The days immediately preceding SBL/AAR every year, the Evangelical Theological Society and Evangelical Philosophical Society (ETS) host their annual joint conference. ETS is confessionally Christian and many attendees of ETS stay for SBL/AAR.
ETS does not have a session dedicated to technology, though a few AI and Faith experts are ETS members and public leaders in religious reflection on AI. This year featured 3 presentations explicitly on AI, in units on systematic theology and philosophy. The topics presented included practical reasoning, love of neighbor, and C.S. Lewis. These talks generated high-quality discussion from scholars and church leaders with questions and comments about understanding and communicating the continuities and distinctives of AI functioning in common life.
SBL has a Digital Humanities unit and AAR has a unit dedicated to AI as well as units that frequently feature AI topics, including Human Enhancement and Transhumanism, Science, Technology and Religion, and Bioethics. This year, the Teaching Biblical Studies, Religion, Media, and Culture, Christian Spirituality, and Ethics units and the academic journal The Bible Translator also hosted sessions dedicated to AI topics. In total there were 7 sessions dedicated to AI, plus 31 papers, and a pre-conference workshop on The Humanities and Technology. Members of AI and Faith presented all throughout these units and gathered together for dinner and at the Science, Technology, and Religion reception, making for a tremendously successful and enjoyable annual conference.
The overarching theme of SBL/AAR this year was “Violence”, and many talks accordingly addressed the role of AI in war, ecological destruction, social injustice, and national/international (un)cooperation. To offer a few examples, F. LeRon Shults presented “Simulating Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding through Multi-Agent Artificial Intelligence Modeling,” Fred Glennon presented “Comparing Existential Threats: Nuclear Weapons vs. Artificial Intelligence through the Lens of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism,” and Rosanne Liebermann presented “The Human, the Dehumanizing, and the Post-human in the Psalms of Lament.” These titles reflect the range of scholarly engagements from specific projects and specific thinkers to broad socio-political impacts and frames of ethical reasoning/practice.
The prevalence of ChatGPT in titles and talks (Jonathan Robie’s “Using GPT for Scenes, Imagery, Focal Points, and Emotional Flow,” Claire Kennedy’s “Snts – Exploring the Use of GPTs for Spiritual Conversation in Catholicism” or Rikard Roitto and Frida Mannerfelt’s “Using AI-Chats for Biblical Text Comprehension and Creativity in Sermon Preparations”) perhaps accounts for the explosive growth in AI talks at SBL/AAR. Popular academic religious reflection on AI has in the past decades focused on the sentience of AI and the rise of robots. Now, the relevance of AI for personal and social formation, political elections, and global justice is much more obvious as AI has become more ubiquitous. This ubiquity demands scholarship on how to best use, teach, and advise on AI issues—public familiarity, after all, does not equate to public competence.
Other themes included AI in gaming as culture development, AI as a former of agency and responsibility, the uniqueness of AI as a communicator, iconography, the automated workplace, and pedagogy. Religions represented included Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and indigenous African traditions, among others.
Presenters ranged from undergraduate students to emeritus scholars, from technical project reports to special topics to large-scale theological reflections. There is an audience at SBL/AAR for every kind and level of paper—session attendees include experts and casual participants looking to ask questions and see what comes up in academic conversation about AI. If you are interested in participating next year, there will be a place and good company for you!
Please reach out to Melanie Dzugan here if you would like more information on specific presenters or presentations.
