This panel examines the theological implications of artificial intelligence through Catholic and Anglican frameworks. From Augustinian philosophy to Vatican teachings and Anglican theological traditions, presenters explore how established religious perspectives can illuminate our understanding of increasingly autonomous AI systems. Key themes include 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. The panel investigates how AI is reshaping religious authority and spiritual practice while critically assessing its limitations compared to human consciousness and relationships. Throughout, Catholic and Anglican traditions provide distinctive lenses for addressing fundamental questions about what it means to be human in an era where our relationships with each other, creation, and God, and Technology are questions with which scholars must wrestle.
As educators and community leaders increasingly utilize generative AI to create interactive educational activities, understanding the nuances of human-AI conversations becomes essential. Religious dialogues, rich with existential and factual inquiries, provide a unique lens for examining these interactions. This study analyzes over 85,000 messages from more than 10,000 conversations with "Ask Cathy," a chatbot designed to answer questions about the Episcopal Church using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques. Our research team, comprising experts in linguistics and computer science, employed various methods—including topic and sentiment analysis validated against human-assessor baselines—to assess user engagement and evidence of learning. Preliminary findings reveal distinct patterns in human-AI religious dialogues, offering insights into designing effective chatbots for education and faith formation. These results hold significant implications for educators, technologists, and faith leaders seeking to foster meaningful interactions through AI-driven platforms.
Society’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence, along with rapidly improving AI autonomy and decision-making abilities, raises theological and ethical questions concerning agency and accountability. The recent Vatican document Antiqua et Nova, a Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, examines the anthropological and ethical challenges AI introduces regarding human and artificial intelligence, freedom, and agency. Antiqua et Nova then proposes the concept of relational intelligence, a holistic framework that acknowledges AI technological capabilities as well as humanity’s communal nature. By combining AI and human strengths, relational intelligence encourages cooperative, collaborative human-AI relationships that respect human dignity and contribute to the common good. Hence, Antiqua et Nova and relational intelligence provide theological perspectives on artificial and human intelligence, augment secular ethical views with religious notions of human freedom, and clarify the notion of moral agency within an increasingly technological world.
The recent proliferation of ‘Generative AI’ has raised a significant question: can AI generate legitimate art? I attempt to answer this question through Augustine’s theory of numbers and imagination. In his De Musica, numbers name the fundamental principle of beauty, and imagination is the faculty that (re)orders the numbers in one's memory to produce images of beauty. There are significant analogies between this theory of imagination and the operation of the ML algorithm here. However, for Augustine, the problem of our limited sensibilities and perspectives is critical. Our imagination is bound by our desires, and only transcendent love can free one's imagination. I argue that the simulated imagination of the AI is always bound by its limited architecture and the finite desires of its designers and users. Thus, it cannot but generate false phantasms and 'hallucinate.' I conclude by suggesting some practical and ethical implications of this analysis.
This paper will review the contributions of official Catholic teaching on AI within the context of Catholic Social Teaching. Using these contributions, as well as the work of Roman Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley and theologian JB Metz, the paper will ask what AI can show us in relief about what it means to be human. It will offer the thesis that it is our relationships with one another and creation that open the horizon of being human and in relationship with God.
This paper investigates the theological implications of AI-generated spiritual discourse, exploring how AI chatbots, particularly the Episcopal Church’s AskCathy, are reshaping religious authority and spiritual practice. Employing the CASA framework and practical theological methodologies, it argues that user interactions with AI reflect implicit theological affirmations of algorithmic discourse as genuinely theologically authoritative. Grounded within the Liberal Catholic Anglican tradition, the paper positions technology as integral to creation, asserting the Spirit’s dynamic activity within AI-generated discourse. Ultimately, it proposes a new theological paradigm where algorithmically mediated spirituality meaningfully extends historical Anglican engagements with technological and cultural innovation.