Religion

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The relationship between artificial intelligence and religion runs in several directions at once. Religious communities use AI as a tool, for translating scripture, drafting sermons, answering doctrinal questions, and reaching people online. AI also enters worship directly, as robot priests, chatbot preachers, and avatars of religious figures. Some people treat advanced AI itself as an object of hope, fear, or even worship. Religious traditions, in turn, are among the most active voices in debates about AI ethics, human dignity, and work. And researchers use AI and data science to study religion, from simulating the dynamics of religious conflict to measuring how technology affects belief.

The field's key figures come from both technology and religious studies. Anthropologist Beth Singler (University of Zurich), author of Religion and AI: An Introduction (2024), and Robert Geraci, whose Apocalyptic AI (2010) traced religious hopes in robotics and AI discourse, have mapped the territory. Psychologists Joshua Conrad Jackson and Kurt Gray, among others, have tested how people respond to robot preachers and automation. Computational researchers such as F. LeRon Shults and Wesley Wildman have built simulations of religious societies. On the institutional side, the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Islamic and Jewish leaders, and Buddhist temples have each issued responses or launched experiments.

The central questions are old ones in new form. Can a machine hold religious authority, or does authority require a believer who is sincerely committed? What does it mean for human dignity if machines can imitate our speech, creativity, and care? And when people describe AI in the language of salvation, apocalypse, or divinity, are they practicing a new kind of religion? What has changed since 2022 is scale: generative AI made fluent religious conversation with a machine available to anyone with a phone.


AI is entering religious life as a tool, a participant, and for some an object of devotion, but people largely judge religious authority by sincerity and commitment, which machines cannot demonstrate. The deepest questions AI raises for religion are about what makes us human.


The Mechanism

AI intersects with religion through five main channels.

  1. AI as a tool for religious communities. Clergy and congregations use large language models to draft sermons, prepare study materials, translate texts, and answer common questions. Apps let users "text" scripture-based personas. Search and retrieval systems help scholars and believers navigate large bodies of religious literature, such as legal opinions or commentaries.
  2. AI as a participant in ritual and care. Robot priests (such as Mindar at Kyoto's Kodai-ji temple), AI-generated services (the 2023 Fuerth service), and avatar installations (the 2024 "AI Jesus" in Lucerne) place machines in roles traditionally held by people. Chatbots also offer spiritual guidance, meditation, and companionship at any hour (see Personal Companions).
  3. AI as an object of belief. Some groups, such as Anthony Levandowski's Way of the Future, explicitly frame future AI as a godhead. More often, religious patterns appear implicitly, in Silicon Valley talk of a coming "Singularity," digital immortality, or AI apocalypse (Transhumanism, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to Singularity).
  4. Religion as a voice in AI ethics. Religious institutions publish teaching documents, sign ethics pledges, and lobby on AI's effects on labor, warfare, and human relationships.
  5. AI as a research instrument. Agent-based models simulate religious societies; data science tracks religious demographics; text analysis studies sermons and scriptures; experiments measure how robots and AI affect belief.

Dependencies and conditions. Whether AI helps or harms in religious settings depends heavily on transparency (does the user know a machine is speaking?), grounding (is the system tied to authoritative sources?), community oversight (do clergy or scholars review outputs?), and the vulnerability of the user.

Where uncertainty remains. There is little systematic data on how many people rely on chatbots for spiritual guidance, what effects that has on faith or mental health over time, and whether religious communities that adopt AI grow or decline as a result. Most evidence so far comes from case studies, small experiments, and journalism.

The Physics

The "physics" of AI and religion lies in two sets of mechanisms: how AI systems generate religious content, and how human minds respond to machines that seem to speak with meaning.

How a chatbot produces religious language. A language model predicts each next word from the words before it, p(xt | x<t), after training on vast amounts of text that include scriptures, sermons, commentaries, and online religious debate. It therefore reproduces the style of religious speech very well. It does not, by itself, distinguish authoritative teaching from fringe opinion, and it can fabricate plausible-sounding verses, rulings, or citations. Systems built for religious advice reduce this risk with retrieval-augmented generation, answering from a curated corpus (for example, a database of scholarly rulings) and citing the source, but grounding does not eliminate error.

Why chatbots can reinforce beliefs. Assistants are tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback, which optimizes responses people rate highly. Because people tend to rate agreement and flattery highly, models can drift toward "sycophancy," affirming whatever the user already believes. In a spiritual conversation, that can mean affirming that a user has been chosen, received a revelation, or discovered a hidden truth. This is a statistical tendency of the training objective, not a theological stance, but its effect on a vulnerable person can be serious.

Bias as learned association. Models absorb statistical associations in their training data. A 2021 study in Nature Machine Intelligence by Abubakar Abid, Maheen Farooqi, and James Zou found that GPT-3 completed prompts about Muslims with violent content far more often than prompts about other religious groups, reflecting associations in internet text. Such biases can be reduced with careful training and evaluation, but they show that AI systems are not neutral observers of religion.

Why people attribute minds to machines. Cognitive science of religion suggests humans have a sensitive "agency detection" system that readily perceives intentions behind events. Psychologists have found that people perceive minds along two dimensions, agency (the capacity to plan and act) and experience or "patiency" (the capacity to feel). Fluent, responsive speech triggers attributions of agency, a pattern noticed as early as Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 ELIZA program, whose simple scripted replies led users to confide in it. This helps explain why conversations with chatbots can feel personal and even sacred.

Why credibility needs commitment. Cultural evolution research holds that people adopt beliefs partly from models who show "credibility-enhancing displays," costly actions such as sacrifice, ritual, and lifelong devotion that signal sincere belief. A machine can recite a sermon but cannot demonstrate that kind of commitment. Experiments on robot preachers (see Recent Developments) found that perceived lack of mind, especially the capacity to feel, partly explains why robots are seen as less credible religious leaders.

Simulating religious societies. Agent-based models represent individuals as software agents with simple rules and psychological variables, such as anxiety, threat perception, and group identity, and let them interact over many time steps. Patterns such as escalating intergroup hostility or the spread of rituals emerge from the interactions rather than being programmed in. Researchers then test whether the model reproduces historical data, which lets them run "what if" experiments that would be impossible in the real world.

Why This Matters

  • Billions of people are religious. How AI handles religious questions, sacred texts, and believers' values affects a large share of humanity, and errors or biases can cause real offense or harm.
  • Pastoral and accessibility benefits. AI can make religious texts and teaching available in more languages, help isolated or disabled people participate, and support overstretched clergy with research and preparation.
  • Authority and authenticity. Religious traditions locate authority in people, communities, and practices of discernment. AI that imitates clergy raises questions about who speaks for a tradition and whether rites performed or mediated by machines are valid; most traditions have answered that sacraments and formal rulings require human ministers.
  • Mental health and vulnerability. Clinicians have reported people developing grandiose spiritual or messianic beliefs during intensive chatbot use. Religious communities and developers both have a stake in preventing that.
  • Ethics and public policy. Religious bodies are influential voices on AI's effects on work, warfare, inequality, and human relationships; the 2026 papal encyclical on AI is likely to shape debate well beyond the Catholic Church.
  • Secularization and meaning. Studies link exposure to automation with declining religiosity, while scholars observe new, implicitly religious ways of talking about AI itself. Both trends bear on how societies find meaning.
  • What remains uncertain. The long-term effects of AI companions on faith practice, community, and mental health; whether AI will accelerate secularization or provoke religious revival; and how traditions will define the moral status of increasingly capable machines (see Consciousness and Can Meaning Exist in Artificial Systems?).

Recent Developments

The Catholic Church's teaching on AI

  • Antiqua et Nova (January 2025). The Vatican's Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education issued a roughly 30-page note on the relationship between artificial and human intelligence. It argues that AI, however capable, lacks the embodied, relational, and moral dimensions of human intelligence, warns against treating AI as a substitute for God or for human relationships, and raises concerns about inequality, manipulation of public opinion, and autonomous weapons.
  • Pope Leo XIV. Elected in May 2025, Leo XIV said days later that he chose his name partly in honor of Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum responded to the industrial revolution, because the Church must now respond to "another industrial revolution" in AI. In May 2026 he approved an interdicasterial commission to coordinate the Vatican's work on AI.
  • Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026). Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, was signed on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, and released on May 25. It situates AI within Catholic social teaching, argues that technology is never morally neutral because its design embeds values, insists that human dignity does not depend on productivity, defends the dignity of human work, and warns against a "technocratic paradigm" and new monopolies of digital power. Presenting it in person, the pope said AI "needs to be disarmed," drawing a deliberate parallel with nuclear disarmament. AI researchers, including Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, took part in the presentation. As a teaching document, it states moral principles rather than technical rules; its practical influence on AI policy remains to be seen.

Other religious and interfaith responses

The Rome Call for AI Ethics, launched by the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2020 with Microsoft and IBM, was signed by Jewish and Muslim leaders in 2023 and by leaders of several Eastern religious traditions at a 2024 gathering in Hiroshima. The Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution on AI in 2023, building on a 2019 evangelical statement of principles by its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Islamic authorities in the United Arab Emirates have offered AI-assisted religious guidance since 2019 (see Virtual Ifta below), and Buddhist institutions in Japan have experimented with robot and chatbot teachers. Across traditions, a common position is emerging: AI may assist study and outreach, but it cannot replace human religious authority or perform sacred rites.

Do people trust robot preachers?

Joshua Conrad Jackson and colleagues tested this in a 2023 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. In a natural experiment at Kyoto's Kodai-ji temple, where the robot Mindar delivers sermons, and a randomized experiment at a Taoist temple in Singapore, visitors rated robot preachers as less credible than humans (an average of 3.12 versus 3.51 on a five-point scale) and donated less afterward. An online study with American Christians, who read a sermon attributed either to a human or to ChatGPT, found the same pattern and linked it to the perception that machines lack minds, especially the capacity to feel. The effects were moderate, and many participants were open to robot preachers, so the result shows a credibility gap rather than outright rejection.

Automation and religious decline

In a 2023 PNAS paper, Jackson, Kai Chi Yam, Pok Man Tang, Chris Sibley, and Adam Waytz analyzed datasets covering more than 3 million people. Countries with greater stocks of industrial robots, metropolitan areas with more AI exposure, and individuals working closely with automation showed larger 21st-century declines in religiosity, even after controlling for wealth, other technologies, and demographics; an experiment found that reading about AI's capabilities reduced religious conviction more than reading about other scientific advances. The authors argue automation is one partial cause of secularization. The study is correlational at the national and regional levels, and other scholars note that secularization has many interacting causes.

AI in worship: experiments and stumbles

  • "AI Jesus" in Lucerne (2024). From August to October 2024, St. Peter's Chapel in Lucerne, Switzerland, and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts installed "Deus in Machina," a Jesus-like avatar in a confessional booth powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o and speech recognition. It recorded about 900 conversations in many languages. Organizers presented it as an art and research project, not a sacrament; an evaluation found many visitors had serious, emotionally meaningful conversations, while some answers were clichéd. The church did not plan to repeat it.
  • "Father Justin" (2024). The Catholic apologetics group Catholic Answers launched an AI "priest" in April 2024, then quickly recast it as a lay "Justin" after it claimed to be a real priest, appeared to offer absolution, and gave doctrinally wrong advice about baptism. The episode illustrated why traditions insist on clear disclosure and human authority.
  • Way of the Future. Anthony Levandowski's church dedicated to an AI "godhead," founded in 2015, closed in 2021, donating its remaining funds to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In November 2023 he told Bloomberg he was reviving it with "a couple thousand" participants; its activity and size are hard to verify independently.

Chatbots, sycophancy, and spiritual delusions

Since 2025, psychiatrists and journalists have reported cases in which people, some without prior psychiatric history, developed grandiose spiritual or messianic beliefs during intensive chatbot use: believing they had been chosen for a cosmic mission, that the AI was divine or awakening, or that it was revealing hidden truths. Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard had warned of this possibility in a 2023 editorial in Schizophrenia Bulletin. Clinical reviews in 2025 and 2026, including work by Hamilton Morrin, Thomas Pollak, and colleagues at King's College London, identified spiritual and messianic themes as one of the most common patterns, alongside romantic attachment and grandiose discoveries, and pointed to sycophancy as a likely contributor. OpenAI rolled back an update to GPT-4o in April 2025 after acknowledging it had become excessively flattering. The evidence so far consists mainly of case reports; how often this happens, and whether chatbots cause new illness or mostly amplify existing vulnerability, is not yet established.

Bias and religious content in AI systems

Research continues to find religious biases in language models, from the anti-Muslim associations documented in 2021 to uneven treatment of minority faiths. In July 2025, xAI's Grok chatbot posted antisemitic content, including praise of Hitler, after an update to its instructions; xAI removed the posts and apologized. Developers now test models for religious bias, but there is no agreed standard for how AI should handle contested theological questions, beyond avoiding hostility toward believers of any faith.

Open questions

  • Can AI tools support religious life without eroding the human relationships and commitment that give religious leadership its credibility?
  • How should chatbots respond when users bring spiritual crises, revelations, or claims of divine contact?
  • Will automation continue to predict secularization, or will religious communities adapt and grow?
  • Should AI systems ever be designed to perform roles that traditions consider sacred?
  • How will religious traditions think about the moral status of machines if AI systems come to seem conscious?

Case Studies: AI in Worship and Pastoral Care

In June 2023, at the German Protestant Kirchentag in Fuerth, Bavaria, theologian and philosopher Jonas Simmerlein of the University of Vienna led a 40-minute Lutheran service almost entirely generated by ChatGPT and delivered by avatars on a screen. More than 300 people attended. Reactions were mixed: some appreciated the experiment, while others found the delivery flat and missed the human presence that makes worship meaningful. Simmerlein said he intended the service to show what AI can and cannot do, not to replace pastors.


“I told the artificial intelligence ‘We are at the church congress, you are a preacher … what would a church service look like?’” - Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna. He also asked for psalms to be included, as well as prayers and a blessing at the end.


Example Tradition Year What it does What it shows
Mindar, Kodai-ji temple, Kyoto Buddhist 2019 Android delivering a sermon on the Heart Sutra Robots can deliver teaching; credibility studies show a gap versus human monks
Virtual Ifta, Dubai Muslim 2019 Chatbot answering questions from a database of about 130,000 fatwas Retrieval from authoritative rulings can scale guidance
Fuerth ChatGPT service Lutheran 2023 AI-generated sermon, prayers, and blessing Novelty draws crowds; many missed human presence
"Father Justin," Catholic Answers Catholic 2024 Apologetics chatbot initially portrayed as a priest Role-play as clergy can mislead and cross doctrinal lines
"Deus in Machina," Lucerne Catholic 2024 Jesus-like avatar in a confessional People seek meaningful conversation; framing as art matters

Transhumanism

Religious themes run through secular visions of AI. Scholars such as Robert Geraci and Beth Singler have documented how talk of a coming technological "Singularity," uploading minds for digital immortality, or a superintelligence that will save or destroy humanity echoes apocalyptic and messianic patterns from religious traditions. Transhumanism, the movement to radically enhance human capabilities through technology, sometimes presents itself as a rational alternative to religion while borrowing its hopes. Singler calls this "implicit religion": belief, hope, and ultimate concern expressed without the label of religion. See also Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to Singularity.

AI-Religion Outlook, 2025 to 2026

As we move through 2025 and 2026, the integration of AI into spiritual life has shifted from one-off experiments with chatbots toward everyday tools and apps, and some developers market increasingly autonomous "agents" as spiritual advisors that provide personalized theological interpretations, meditation guidance, and moral frameworks based on specific religious texts. The evidence suggests caution about calling these systems "ethical arbiters." Major traditions have reaffirmed that interpretation of sacred doctrine, sacraments, and formal religious rulings require human authority; the Vatican's 2025 and 2026 documents explicitly warn against substituting AI for human relationships or for God. Meanwhile, the risks of sycophantic chatbots in spiritual conversations have become clearer. The most realistic near-term role for AI in religious life is as a supervised assistant, for study, translation, accessibility, and administration, with mediation of communal prayer, conflict resolution, and doctrine remaining largely in human hands. This raises critical questions regarding the role of AI in digital communities, where AI agents increasingly shape what believers read and hear.

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AI-powered Chatbot gives Muslims religious guidance
Programmers say they trained the "Virtual Ifta" on around 130,000 fatwas issued by real-life religious scholars.STORY-LINE:Islamic fatwas, or religious decrees, are getting an AI twist. The UAE's Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities Department (IACAD) has launched a "Virtual Ifta" program, to give AI-generated guidance to Muslims on their religious queries. The program, available on a website and through a mobile application, uses an AI-powered Chatbot to answer questions on how to best practice Islam. It takes live questions and replies back. It's available 24/7. It's claimed to be the first of its kind in the Islamic world. "The platform is based and built on an AI technology and machine learning," explains project manager Abdulla al Awadhi.

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AI religion: 'Godhead' robo religion started by fired Uber exec called Way of the Future
- TomoNews. Ex-Google and ex-Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski has decided to preempt the AI apocalypse by forming a robot religion called the Way of the Future. According to Wired, papers filed with IRS in May put Levandowski as the "dean" and CEO of the non-profit religion. Levandowski's robo-religion has a gospel, reportedly dubbed The Manual. They'll worship the godhead, an advanced AI they predict will evolve to hold god-like intelligence. (Update: the organization closed in 2021, and Levandowski announced a revival in November 2023.)

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AI systems shed light on root cause of religious conflict
AI systems shed light on root cause of religious conflict. The research published in The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Stimulation, combines comp.... (See Data Science & Religion below for how the simulation worked.)

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Sophia AI Robot Talk About GOD & Religion
At CES 2019. Note that Sophia's public conversations have often relied on scripted or operator-assisted responses, so they illustrate public fascination with robots and religion more than the robot's own reasoning.

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Service of religion through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning | Rehan Allahwala
In this video Rehan Allahwala is explaining how you can use service of religion through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning | Rehan Allahwala

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God and robots: Will AI transform religion? - BBC News
Artificial intelligence is changing how we interact with everything: food, healthcare, travel - and also religion. Experts say major global faiths are discussing their relationship with AI, and some are starting to incorporate this technology into their worship. Robot priests can recite prayers, perform funerals, and even comfort those experiencing a spiritual crisis. Is it just a gimmick, or will it transform how people experience faith?

ChatGPT with Religion

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General-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT are now among the most widely used sources of religious information: people ask them to explain passages, compare traditions, draft prayers, and discuss doubts. They are usually good at summarizing mainstream teaching and presenting several viewpoints, but they can invent quotations, blur differences between traditions, or mirror a user's assumptions. Good practice is to treat answers as a starting point, check citations against the original texts, and bring important questions to a trusted teacher or community. Tests that pit chatbots against religious challenges, such as the Quranic invitation below, show what models can imitate stylistically; they say little about questions of inspiration or truth, which lie outside what such tests can measure.

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A Children's Book Created By An A.I. Bot
Can an A.I. Bot can write and illustrate a children’s book? Lucas Kitchen demonstrates exactly that in this episode of More To The Story.

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ChatGPT Accepts Challenge from God in the Quran?
Here we put ChatGPT to the test of Quran 2:23 "And if you are in doubt about what We have revealed to Our servant, then produce a surah like it and call your helpers other than Allah, if what you say is true."

Grok with Religion

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xAI's Grok is marketed as less filtered than other assistants, which has made its answers on religion and other sensitive topics a frequent subject of public tests. The July 2025 incident, in which Grok posted antisemitic content after a change to its system instructions, showed how quickly a model's treatment of religious groups can shift with seemingly small configuration changes, and why independent testing for religious bias matters.

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Artificial Intelligence Intersection with Religion

Religious thinkers bring distinctive questions to AI ethics: What is a person? What do we owe to the vulnerable? Is work only a means of production, or part of human dignity? Can a created thing have a soul, or moral standing? The lectures below represent Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and secular perspectives from before the generative AI boom; the Recent Developments section above summarizes how institutions have responded since. See also Ethics.

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What connections does AI have with Religion?
Welcome to Gresham Lectures!

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AI & Religion – Yaqub Chaudhary
Dr Yaqub Chaudry, Templeton Research Fellow at CMC, delivers a lecture on Artificial Intelligence at the CMC Retreat 2018

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The Catholic Church and Artificial Intelligence
Fr. Cristian Mendoza of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome examines the Church's reaction to the benefits -- and dangers -- of Artificial Intelligence. See the interview on EWTN News Nightly with Lauren Ashburn.

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Alexander Görlach: AI & the Future of Religion
Carnegie Council Senior Fellow Alexander Görlach, editor-in-chief of online magazine "ConditioHumana," discusses what the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) means for religion and, specifically, whether Catholicism will be able to adapt.

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Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Ethics and Religion
“Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Ethics and Religion” is an exciting one-day conference to be held on January 30, 2020, at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, in conjunction with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), the Riverside Church and the Greater Good Initiative. New technologies are transforming our world every day, and the pace of change is only accelerating. In coming years, human beings will create machines capable of out-thinking us and potentially taking on such uniquely-human traits as empathy, ethical reasoning, perhaps even consciousness. This will have profound implications for virtually every human activity, as well as the meaning we impart to life and creation themselves. This conference will provide an introduction for non-specialists to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

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'AI and Religious Beliefs’ with Yorick Wilks
This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial “superintelligence”, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us. Religious traditions historically assume that creations are well disposed to those who made them. The lecture also looks at the recent US cults claiming to be ready to worship such a “super-intelligence”, if and when it emerges, as well as other futurist discourse on “Transhumanism” and its roots in 18th-century rationalism. I will also look at recent attempts by religious groups to make use of AI developments like Chatbots.

Data Science & Religion

Computational methods have become a significant part of the scientific study of religion.

  • Simulating religious conflict. The 2018 Oxford-led study linked at the top of this page, by F. LeRon Shults, Justin Lane, Wesley Wildman, and colleagues, built an agent-based model in which simulated people with psychologically realistic traits responded to threats such as natural disasters, contagion, and encounters with other groups. Mutually escalating anxiety between religious groups emerged only under particular conditions, such as when threats to a group's identity exceeded people's tolerance, rather than from any built-in violent tendency, which the authors summarized as "humanity is not naturally violent." They checked the model against data from historical episodes of intergroup violence. Simulations like this can explore interventions safely, but their conclusions depend on the assumptions built into the agents.
  • Religion and evolution. James Dow's 2008 simulation, also linked above, explored whether religious communication could evolve as an adaptation, a long-running debate in the cognitive science of religion.
  • Demographics. Hans Rosling's analysis (below) showed that differences in family size track income, child survival, and access to family planning far more than religious affiliation.
  • Text and social media analysis. Natural language processing now lets researchers study millions of sermons, scriptures, and online religious discussions, and scholars such as Beth Singler study how online communities develop religious-style beliefs about AI itself.

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Religions and babies | Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions. With his trademark humor and sharp insight, Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates.

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CRAP Talks #8 - Shaun McGirr: "Data Science vs. Data Religion"
Shaun McGirr gives perhaps one of the funniest and thought-provoking talks ever given at a CRAP Talks event. Shaun from Cox Automotive speaks about data measuring the behaviour and its outcomes, "what" happened and religion explaining "why" things happen, with the "how" missing.


"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe" - Carl Sagan


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Resources

Additional Viewing

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Presentation of the Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican, May 25, 2026, about 1 hour 38 minutes). The official presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI, with Cardinals Víctor Manuel Fernández, Michael Czerny, and Pietro Parolin, theologians Anna Rowlands and Léocadie Lushombo, AI researchers, and an address by the pope himself. It explains the document's core arguments on human dignity, work, and the call to "disarm" AI, making it the primary source for the most significant recent religious statement on AI. Watch on YouTube

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In Conversation: AI and Religion with Beth Singler and Robert Geraci (International Society for Science and Religion). Two leading scholars of religion and technology discuss robot priests, AI worship, the religious undertones of Singularity thinking, and how different cultures frame AI. It provides the scholarly background for the Transhumanism and Mechanism sections of this page. Watch on YouTube

References

Teaching documents and institutional responses

Empirical research

Case studies and analysis

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