Where are the lines between artificial intelligence and almighty intelligence? The 2024 SBL/AAR annual meeting has scheduled four sessions with scholars in religion and biblical studies, theologians, philosophers, and ethicists examining relationships between large language models, God’s word, and human wisdom.

“AI can write a generic three-point sermon, but it cannot replace an authentic encounter between humans and the divine,” write the authors of AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Baker Academic, Mar. 2025). In the book, Sean O’Callaghan, an associate professor of religious and theological studies and coordinator of the AI Initiative at Salve Regina University, and Paul A. Hoffman, a pastor who teaches preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, explore how AI might affect ministry and teaching.

The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge Univ., out now) assesses longstanding views on what the publisher calls “the relationship between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’—technology and science.” The book is edited by anthropologist Beth Singler, assistant professor in digital religions at the University of Zurich, and psychologist Fraser Watts, former director of the psychology and research group at Cambridge and past president of the International Society for Science and Religion. It examines AI’s potential to affect established religions and whether AI might indeed simulate religion.

Some scholars are less sanguine. “There’s serious angst about the ethical traps hidden in what we can’t see and don’t know” about AI technology’s potential damage, says Fortress editor Carey C. Newman. For example, ethicist Levi Checketts, an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University, argues that AI harms marginalized groups in society in his book Poor Technology: Artificial Intelligence and the Experience of Poverty (Fortress, out now). Checketts concludes the book with a warning: “Recognizing computers as intelligent,” he writes, “within a culture that correlates intelligence with humanity, functions to strip the human poor of their moral status while bestowing it upon the inhuman computer.”