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How Doomed Are We? 
A Philosophical/Theological Consideration of 
AI/ChatGPT in Relation to Theological Libraries 
and Theological Education
Brady Alan Beard, Ph.D. (he/him), Reference and Instruction Librarian, Pitts 
Theology Library, Candler School of Theology 
Allison Graham, Reference and Research Librarian, Princeton Theological 
Seminary
Emily Peterson (she/her), Director of Public Services, John Bulow Campbell 
Library, Columbia Theological Seminary
David Schmersal, Access and Instruction Librarian, Austin Presbyterian 
Theological Seminary

ABSTR ACT: How should theological librarians think about and respond 
to the advent of AI in theological education? What role(s) might theo-
logical librarians have in this brave new world? How is AI similar to, 
and different from, other information technology revolutions (writing, 
printing, the internet)? Should institutions of theological education 
consider pursuing a kind of new monasticism, leaving the decadent 
dystopia into which we seem to be heading for the purity of quill and 
parchment? While we may be unable to provide definite answers, this 
session offers a forum for raising, considering, and discussing these 
and related questions.

This panel explores the challenges raised by AI in theological educa-
tion by considering four key questions, each addressed in turn by 
a member of the panel: 

1) “How is AI similar to, and different from, other information 
technology revolutions (writing, printing, the internet)?” 
(David Schmersal)

2) “How should theological librarians think about and 
respond to the advent of AI in theological education?”  
(Allison Graham)

3) “What role(s) might theological librarians have in this 
brave new world?” (Brady Beard)



84    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

4) “Should institutions of theological education consider pur-
suing a kind of new monasticism, leaving the decadent 
dystopia into which we seem to be heading for the purity of 
quill and parchment? Why or why not?” (Emily)

WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

We start by defining a few key terms which are central to the discus-
sion: artificial intelligence and GPT.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines artificial intelligence (AI) as 
“the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot 
to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings” 
(Copeland, 2024). This seems clear enough, yet as Williams asserts, 
“The very term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ contains assumptions about the 
nature of intelligence (or consciousness), and who or what can have 
it—assumptions with no agreed-upon criteria, and a not uncontro-
versial history of application” (Williams 2023a, 106). As McGilchrist 
suggests, a more accurate term for AI may be “artificial information 
processing” (McGilchrist 2024). To illustrate the distinction using an 
analogy: A calculator can tell you that you owe $7,000 in taxes; an 
accountant can understand why this might be unsettling. 

Moreover, as Hanegan and Rosser helpfully elucidate, AI is not 
monolithic, but may be classified as Analytical, which leverage 
incredible amounts of data for dynamic circumstances and real-
time decision-making (e.g., recommendation engines like Amazon, 
auto-complete/auto-correct, Optical Character Recognition), and 
Generative, which can respond to crafted prompts and create content 
in various modalities (text, audio, video, images, code, etc.) that did 
not previously exist (Hanegan and Rosser 2023).

On perhaps somewhat more familiar ground, Herzfeld notes 
parallels between the three development paradigms of AI and three 
approaches to defining Imago Dei: substantial, functional, and rela-
tional. Just as the Imago Dei can be defined as a property humans 
have (reason), as a task we perform (exercise of dominion), or on 
the basis of relationality (grounded in the Trinity), so also the three 



Panel Presentations    85

developmental paradigms of AI may be defined as Substantive (clas-
sic or symbolic AI), seeking to replicate human reason; Functional, 
seeking to augment humans through actions such as accomplishing 
tasks and solving problems; and Relational, seeking to pass the Turing 
Test, to be indistinguishable from a human being in “conversation” 
(Herzfeld 2002, 303–310).

GPT

The GPT in ChatGPT stands for “generative pretrained transformer.” 
Its name describes a system of interoperable algorithms that weigh, 
arrange, and create associative distributions of text. They’re built 
on large language models . . . developed over the past five years or 
so, with datasets millions, billions, and now even trillions of words 
in size. LLMs are trained through deep learning—multiple layers of 
machine learning operating on and refining one another” (Williams 
2023b). As Williams goes on to observe, “It is much easier to see 
through the mystique of ChatGPT and other AI applications once you 
understand exactly what they are and what they do. The truth about 
such algorithms is that they’re literally just sets of instructions. You 
have a set of standardized operations within which particular weights 
and measures can be adjusted . . . The recipe for any food—just as 
for anything you have to make—is an algorithm, too. My favorite 
algorithm is pumpkin pie” (Williams, 2023b).

WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS HERE AND NOW? 

Before turning to the four questions around which our discussion 
is organized, it is fitting to briefly consider why theological librar-
ians are addressing these questions, and why we are doing so now.

Although few of us have technical expertise in AI technologies, it 
is appropriate for theological librarians to address this topic because 
the social, technological and economic developments that have made 
AI possible have theological roots. As Lynn White observes, “tech-
nology is at least partly to be explained as an occidental, voluntarist 
realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence over 
nature . . . Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the 
remedy must also be essentially religious” (White 1967).



86    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

And why are we talking about this now? Because the potential 
ramifications of AI for our libraries, our institutions, and our faith 
communities are tremendous. As Sigler asserts, the scale of potential 
social changes instigated by AI will outstrip theologies based on cur-
rent social conditions, such as liberation theologies (Singler 2017, 
221). To paraphrase Space Balls, this is happening now.

QUESTION 1. HOW IS AI SIMILAR TO, AND DIFFERENT FROM, OTHER 
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTIONS (WRITING, PRINTING, 
THE INTERNET)? 

David Schmersal
While many of the technologies that underlie the latest iterations of 
AI seem relatively new, the questions they raise echo debates that 
have been going on for quite some time. At the heart of such debates 
is the question of whether a “new” technology that seems to promise 
an external aid to memory or a shortcut to knowledge ultimately 
proves more beneficial or harmful.  As Gay rightly observes: “pru-
dence requires us to at least ask whether our technologies are now 
enabling us to become more of ourselves; whether they are facilitating 
deeper and more meaningful human relationships; whether they 
are enabling us to be more dynamically engaged with the world. 
One suspects that they are not” (Gay 2018, 25).

While it may be somewhat ironic for librarians to say so, one of 
the earliest forms of technology at the heart of these debates was 
writing. For librarians, especially theological librarians serving 
institutions affiliated with “peoples of the book,” the sanctity of the 
written word is a fundamental value and unquestioned assumption. 
Yet, as we will see, this has not always been the case, even for figures 
and books that are pillars of the Western “canon.” 

In his critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates relates an 
Egyptian myth in which the god “Theuth (Thoth) claims that writing 
is a study (μάθημα) that will make the Egyptians wiser and better 
in memory. Thamus (Ammon) argues that on the contrary, writing 
will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who rely on it . . . 
because those who trust in writing will be relying on (something 
outside of themselves)” (Werner 2012, 285–286).



Panel Presentations    87

Eusebius (HE 3.39.4) offers a similar example from church his-
tory, noting Papias’s estimation of the oral testimony of the apostles 
over the written record. Papias (c. 60–130 CE) perhaps offers a more 
nuanced assessment of writing as an information technology; he 
is, after all, known to have written works himself. It is not so much 
that he considers oral testimony good and written words bad but 
recognizes the advantage of hearing “the living and surviving voice” 
(Eusebius 1926, 293). How many New Testament scholars wish they 
could sit down with Paul and ask what exactly he meant by some of 
the things he wrote that we find puzzling?

Moving forward in time over a millennium after Papias, the next 
major development in information technology, the printing press, 
further illustrates that all such technologies have both benefits and 
costs, such as the widespread distribution of mass-produced errone-
ous texts. (For example, consider Francesco Dal Pozzo’s inaccurate 
editio princeps of Ovid.1) This also offers a clear example of the fact 
that technology is not neutral, that “it can be directed toward good or 
evil,” and that all such technologies have unintended consequences 
(Schuurman 2019, 170). As much as the advent of printing is widely, 
and rightly, celebrated as a catalyst in the spread of knowledge, one 
wonders if Luther, presented with foreknowledge of the violence 
of the peasants’ revolt, the carnage of religious wars, and the con-
sequent spread of skepticism, might have preferred that his ideas 
for reform were not publicized quite so widely.

The democratization and spread of knowledge that the printing 
press enabled has been exponentially enhanced—or exacerbated—by 
the great development in information technology of our own time: 
networked computers. Again, while the ubiquity of information 
may be seen as largely positive, it does have profound, unintended, 
and largely negative consequences, such as creating dependency 
and consequent loss of skill. (How many of us rely on GPS to find 
our way anywhere?) One clear example of this in our own context 
is Bible software. As much as I love and regularly use Accordance 
and appreciate how easy it is to quickly look up a word or check 
parsing, it also makes it all too easy to rely on the software without 
really wrestling with the text—thereby circumventing the struggle 
that can lead to insight and understanding. 



88    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

While in some respects AI may be seen as merely the latest iteration 
of technologies that seem to replicate, or threaten to replace, aspects 
of the human mind, there does seems to be a fundamental differ-
ence. Whereas books may allow us to store our memory externally 
(so we need not hold all we know inside ourselves), and computers 
and the internet facilitate access to vast stores of information, AI 
seems to circumvent the process of thinking itself by processing the 
information for us and spitting out something useful.

Moreover, as suggested by McGilchrist in his insightful tome The 
Master and His Emissary, the information processing carried on by 
AI replicates a left-hemisphere perspective of the world, which seeks 
to reduce the world to that which can be grasped, mastered, compre-
hended, and controlled (McGilchrist 2019). This way of perceiving and 
of being in the world facilitated both the scientific method and the 
industrial revolution. Just as the industrial revolution reduced man 
to a machine and the earth to natural resources, so the information 
revolution that has brought AI equates personhood with intelligence 
and reduces intelligence to computation. If, as McGilchrist rightly 
observes, we and our culture have privileged this perspective and 
this has molded our worldview, then we have not so much created 
AI in our image as we have created AI based on a partial and dis-
torted vision of ourselves and of reality. This of course has profound 
implications for theology in particular. AI represents not so much 
(or at least not merely) a tool that we may adopt and use as it does 
an expression of a worldview based on incomplete—and therefore 
erroneous and potentially hazardous—understanding of human 
beings, of the reality of the world we inhabit, and of being itself. 

QUESTION 2. HOW SHOULD THEOLOGICAL LIBRARIANS THINK ABOUT 
AND RESPOND TO THE ADVENT OF AI IN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION?

Allison Graham
This question is undoubtedly one that we all feel the need to address, 
whether out of our own interest, perplexity, enthusiasm, or worry—
or because administrators or faculty at our institutions have told us 
that we need to have a plan for AI.  

First, although it may seem obvious, thinking about AI and its 
role in theological education is important to avoid more extreme 



Panel Presentations    89

knee-jerk reactions. On the one hand, there is the call to “keep up 
with the times,” that libraries and theological institutions need to 
embrace AI or risk falling behind—although it is unclear what the 
goal of this great rush is. If I sound dismissive of this approach, it 
is because my tendency is toward the other extreme, of refusing to 
engage with AI because it seems to pose so many risks and down-
sides, and surely it would be better if we could just ignore it. But 
this refusal to engage does a disservice to our students and faculty 
who are using or encountering AI regularly and need to find ways 
to approach these tools in light of the goals and values of theological 
education. Additionally, not exploring AI risks overlooking genuinely 
useful AI tools. What I think we need instead is a thoughtful middle 
way that considers how AI tools can or cannot be used in the service 
of our theological narratives and institutional values. 

In preparing for this presentation, I kept thinking of a quote from 
Wendell Berry about his approach to technology, “Do I wish to keep 
up with the times? No. My wish simply is to live my life as fully as 
I can” (Berry 1990, 90).  Given that Berry eschews much of modern 
technology, including computers and modern farming equipment, I 
have no doubt that he is very much on the side of refusing to use AI. 
Nevertheless, I think that his prioritization of living a full life—or, 
on a communal level, human flourishing—is the right approach to 
take and can serve as a basic measure for evaluating the uses of 
technology, even for those of us who use AI and numerous other 
technologies far more than Berry does.  

As my mention of human flourishing and a “middle way” alludes 
to, I take a virtue ethics approach to AI issues. In my context, work-
ing at a Christian seminary, this means that the focus is on living 
out the Christian story and any engagement with AI should be in 
the service of this larger purpose. For theological librarians and 
other theological educators, we also need to consider our role in 
student formation: How can students develop AI habits that they 
will maintain and share with the communities that they live in and 
serve, both during their studies and after graduation?

To help develop these habits, there are several methods for 
thinking about AI (and technology more broadly) that I find useful. 
I will present four of these frameworks briefly and then conclude by 



90    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

considering how these approaches could be applied in the context 
of theological libraries. 

I begin with the most tech-focused of these frameworks, which was 
written by the twentieth-century Canadian philosopher and media 
theorist Marshall McLuhan. His tetrad of media effects proposes 
four questions to consider about media or technology: 

1) What does it enhance? 
2) What does it make obsolete? 
3) What does it retrieve? 
4) What characteristics does it reverse, when pushed to its lim-

its?  (McLuhan 1977) 

Although these questions seem simple, they require us to think 
critically about positive and negative effects of technologies. I find 
the question of what AI retrieves particularly intriguing, though I 
have not found a satisfying answer to it yet. These questions can 
help us think about the effects of technology, and librarians could 
use them to help students and faculty understand what AI is, and 
how it is similar and different to other technologies. However, these 
questions are not aimed at addressing how we should respond to 
those effects and use technology. 

Before turning to the question of response, I want to consider 
the work of Noreen Herzfeld, a contemporary scholar of religion 
and technology. In The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human 
Relationship in a Robotic Age, Herzfeld draws on the work of Martin 
Buber and Karl Barth to discuss the importance of relationality and 
what makes an authentic I-Thou encounter, which entails looking 
the other in the eye, speaking and hearing each other, giving mutual 
assistance, and doing so freely (Herzfeld 2023a). This approach 
foregrounds values of relational personhood that most of our insti-
tutions likely share, and it applies those values to assess uses of AI.  

AI and other digital technologies can easily weaken human rela-
tionality, so we must make sure that these values remain central and 
are prioritized over efficiency, cost, novelty, or other factors that are 
used to sell AI. Librarians should make sure that theological libraries 
remain spaces for human engagement and connection. I know that 
students with whom I have a relationship (through library outreach 
or other involvement on campus) are more likely to come and ask 



Panel Presentations    91

me reference questions. Seeking out opportunities to build those 
relationships will be increasingly important as students find it easy 
to use AI research tools on their own. This can be beneficial, but it 
can also mean that they might not be using these tools effectively or 
might assume that these tools are more comprehensive than they are. 

Having looked at Herzfeld’s relationality-based framework, and 
McLuhan’s tech-focused one, I turn now to a couple of approaches 
that combine these methods by encouraging us to think about 
individual and societal uses and impacts of AI. Michael Sacasas is 
a Christian thinker and author of The Convivial Society newsletter 
about technology and society. In one of his newsletters, he poses 
41 questions to ask about technology, including questions such as:  

• What sort of person will the use of this technology 
make me? 

• What practices will the use of this technology 
cultivate? 

• What feelings does the use of this technology gener-
ate in me towards others? 

• Could the resources used to acquire and use this 
technology be better deployed? 

• How does the use of this technology shape my vision 
of a good life? 

• What assumptions about the world does this tech-
nology tacitly encourage? 

• What would the world be like if everyone used this 
technology exactly as I use it? (Sacasas 2021) 

The questions encourage thinking about the impact of a particular 
technology on oneself, one’s relationship with others, and the world 
more broadly. (And this need not be exclusive to digital technolo-
gies.) Like McLuhan’s tetrad, they prompt consideration of positive 
and negative effects, but they are more focused on helping us think 
about how to respond to the impact that technology has.  

Although I have not tried this yet, librarians could bring these 
questions to AI workshops that they lead and give students time to 
think through and discuss at least some of this list. Doing so could 
help students see AI issues as relevant to their education and min-
istries and lead them to develop personal philosophies about AI 
use. Thinking through these questions could also assist faculty and 



92    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

administrators to develop policies about AI. While the answer to some 
of these questions might be the same for all types of AI tools, other 
questions will likely elicit different answers for different products. 
Thinking through these questions for a variety of AI tools can help 
ensure that policies reflect the different types of AI and the range 
of products available.

While Sacasas’s questions address communal and global impacts 
of technology, the questions themselves are directed at individuals. 
A more societal perspective for thinking about AI can be found in 
Catholic Social Teaching. This is the approach that the participants in 
the AI Research Group at the Dicastery for Culture and Education’s 
Centre for Digital Culture propose in their new book Encountering 
Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations. Just 
as modern Catholic Social Teaching developed in response to the 
Industrial Revolution, so it should be applied to the AI revolution. 
The principles of Catholic Social Teaching, which include upholding 
human dignity, valuing community, justice, solidarity, and care for 
God’s creation, can provide a strong framework for approaching AI. 
Librarians at Catholic institutions in particular could host book clubs 
about this book with faculty and students to encourage campus-wide 
discussions about AI and its uses. 

As the authors of Encountering Artificial Intelligence write, “the 
most important aspect of an ethical engagement with AI is what the 
user does while off-line” (AI Research Group 2024, 229–30). People 
who are striving to live lives of love, service, prayer, contemplation, 
and learning will find areas in which AI tools can help them without 
compromising their values and identity. But people who do not work 
on these habits will find it easy to offload their efforts onto AI tools, 
thus making it even harder to develop these skills. 

In the library context, we need to address AI, but in our excitement 
or panic about doing so, we should not lose focus on the ongoing 
importance of helping students develop information literacy, research, 
and writing skills, especially when the changing demographics of 
seminary students can mean that many students are admitted who 
have not developed some of these skills before. 

So, how should theological librarians think about and respond to 
AI? As the work of McLuhan, Herzfeld, Sacasas, and the Vatican’s AI 
Research Group demonstrate, there are many useful frameworks for 



Panel Presentations    93

thinking through the use and impact of AI. My hope is that as I learn 
more about different AI tools, I can apply these frameworks to think 
through using AI in light of my theological commitments and my 
institution’s values. Doing so alongside faculty and students can help 
bring a range of perspectives and develop a cohesive understanding 
of AI and its effects in the context of a community.  

Given how quickly AI is developing and how many different 
products there are, policies about AI are unlikely to address the full 
range of AI uses and tools. This does not mean that policies about 
AI should not be written, but they should be viewed as a general 
framework, not something that can account for every possible use 
of AI. Rather than focusing on creating a comprehensive policy, 
theological librarians can address AI by helping students develop 
research and writing habits that strengthen their skills, even while 
using some AI tools. There can be cases in which using generative 
AI is useful, but we should work to ensure that students are using AI 
intentionally, rather than feeling that they need to outsource their 
work to generative AI due to a lack of skill, resources, or support. 
Helping students form these habits and skills will assist them in 
their studies and as leaders in their communities, which will also 
have to grapple with the impact of AI. 

QUESTION 3. WHAT ROLE(S) MIGHT THEOLOGICAL LIBRARIANS HAVE 
IN THIS BRAVE NEW WORLD? 

Brady Beard
In the brave new world of artificial intelligence, librarians may be 
tempted to take on many new roles, but they should focus their 
energy on playing the role they are trained for: librarian. In many 
of our institutions there is pressure to perform tasks in addition to 
our responsibilities as knowledge laborers; we often extol the work 
that librarians do as technology wizzes, pastoral counselors, assign-
ment interpreter, and campus representative. To be sure, many of 
these roles are in fact important to librarianship, but without critical 
reflection, they can easily replace what many of us have trained to 
do: to collect, organize, preserve, navigate, synthesize, understand, 
and distribute information in many different forms. When it comes 
to AI and theological education, the temptation to go beyond our 
professional responsibilities is especially strong. This is due in part 



94    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

to our positionality with respect to information. We can easily see 
from the cataloging office or reference desk that no one else seems 
to be working on a topic or issue, or at least they aren’t working on 
it as quickly as we would like, so we feel that we must mitigate the 
negative and highlight the positive effects. As librarians, we can 
respond to artificial intelligence by building on our professional 
strengths through the four roles of guide, connector, supporter, and 
revealer. 

Before we get to that, however, I’d like to discuss one role that I 
don’t think most of us are equipped to play. Librarians may feel pres-
sure to engage AI as technical experts. This pressure may be formal 
or informal at any given institution. Often the library is on the front 
lines of institutional and educational technology. Additionally, AI tools 
are being integrated into search products and therefore disrupting 
information systems and information-seeking behavior. Naturally 
then, librarians may be expected to guide their institutions through 
the confounding literature and opinion pieces about AI, machine 
learning, and everything else. In addition to being on the tech 
frontline, librarians are often deeply involved in student academic 
support. Because many in higher education have hyper-fixated on 
GenAI as it relates to intellectual honesty and academic integrity, it 
makes sense that libraries would be asked to provide guidance on 
how/when/if students should be permitted to utilize GenAI. 

The focus on technology and academic integrity can pressure 
librarians to function as their institution’s AI technician. Unless they 
have some serious skills in computer science, it’s likely not worth 
engaging on GenAI in a technical aspect beyond what they are already 
equipped to do. As information workers, librarians regularly deal 
with data management, computer-human interface, and complex 
front-end systems. Most librarians don’t have the technical back-end 
skills to dissect Copilot, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Because of the speed 
at which technology changes, understanding the technical aspects 
is likely not a good use of time. Instead, librarians should approach 
the topic from a place of our professional strengths to help usher 
our users into the brave new world.



Panel Presentations    95

GUIDE

Librarians often guide others in new systems, tools, and subject areas. 
In this regard, librarians can act from a point of strength when it 
comes to AI. AI research seems to change day to day and the speed 
at which new technologies develop only seems to be increasing. As 
overwhelming as such advances are to librarians, it must be even 
more so for faculty and students in theological institutions. Many 
librarians simply aren’t equipped to stay up to date on developments 
in AI research, but they do know how to find the most recent and 
relevant research. Guiding researchers and providing high-level 
evaluation, providing user support, and engaging critically will be 
time well spent. To borrow an example from the reference desk, I 
am often asked to help users navigate a tool like The Perseus Digital 
Library. My Greek is not as strong as it once was, and my Latin is 
virtually non-existent. As an expert in those specific areas of evalua-
tion and research, I’m probably not the best resource for students or 
faculty, but as a guide who can help them navigate the big picture, 
I can provide a service that they likely will not be able to get from 
colleagues. I think the same is true for conversations around GenAI: 
I do not need to know exactly how a neural network functions, but I 
can understand enough of it to be able to navigate a tool and begin 
to evaluate the outputs based on what I might know of the general 
behavior of the product.  

CONNECTOR

I tell students regularly that my favorite part of being a librarian is 
getting to do research with them and not have to provide a graded 
evaluation to them at the end of our time together. And that’s true. 
When it comes to the role that librarians can play in AI discussions, 
I think we can also be a point for connection and collaboration 
that doesn’t necessarily adhere to the strictures of a more formal 
academic space. To illustrate this point, last year at my institution 
I convened a small conversation group, “Speaking of the Divine in 
the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An ALC on Theology and AI,” with 
a $2,000 internal grant that I was awarded from the AIAI Network. 
The purpose of the grant was to gather scholars, librarians, students, 
and staff from Atlanta area theological schools to hold theologically 
informed discussions about AI (AIAI Network, n.d.). In total, ten or 



96    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

so folks gathered from two institutions. Nearly all the participants 
were staff who joined for a lunch-time conversation on Zoom, once 
every three weeks or so. The bulk of the funds went to sponsoring a 
public lecture on campus. The rest of the funds went to purchasing 
books for the participants.

When we started, I was surprised that there was as much interest 
from staff at my school as there was, and then I started listening to 
their interests. One participant was an assistant in the dean’s office 
who had a certificate in business analytics and uses AI to help with 
her daily workflow. Another was our director of career services who 
wanted to integrate AI into her services to students, and to better 
understand the space that students would be going into. Each par-
ticipant brought a wealth of experience, knowledge, and questions 
that were new to me and were raised outside of library-land. It was 
a really refreshing way to connect with folks and find common cause 
in our day-to-day. The type of space that we were able to create was 
unique and fostered genuine engagement with the possibilities of 
AI while still addressing the harms that may result from AI. 

SUPPORTER

You don’t have to look far in higher education to find blogs, articles, 
op-eds, etc., about the crisis that AI is causing in academic integrity. 
A recent study of highschoolers, however, found that the use of AI 
has had little, if any, impact on how students cheat. In fact, some of 
the findings simply confirmed the fact that using AI to cheat well 
(i.e., to cheat without the possibility of getting caught) is difficult and 
there are lots of other easier ways to cheat (Lee et al. 2023). Instead, 
students were interested in finding ways to incorporate gen AI into 
their workflows. This brings us to the third role, that of supporter.

Because we often provide non-evaluative instruction, as librar-
ians we play a special role in the education process of a student’s 
life. The focus on plagiarism and academic integrity gets in the 
way of that. GenAI is an opportunity for us to provide information 
literacy instruction, apply professional and personal ethics, and to 
think creatively with our students about how the subjects of their 
study engage the real world.



Panel Presentations    97

REVEALER

Finally, we can be revealers. Part of our work as librarians is to 
organize and structure the information around us, but part of our 
task is to also be open about the very human (and sometimes not-so-
arbitrary) reasons that our information landscape looks the way it 
does. Just as we might teach students how to navigate subject head-
ings and to recognize the implicit biases and ethical dilemmas in our 
collections, we can also help reveal to students the structures that 
make up the world of AI. As people who think hard about data and 
its use, we can reveal the ethical and dubious ways that data of all 
kinds is gathered, structured, and deployed. With our professional 
expertise in information systems, we can rely on our strengths at 
critiquing black-box algorithms, systems that seem natural but aren’t, 
and show how the data impacts our communities. We can do all of 
this without having to become technicians who build programs or 
train models.

AI feels overwhelming, and the need to keep up seems unfair and 
biased toward the over-resourced, but if we apply our strengths to 
the question, we can offer our institutions something they might 
not otherwise get.

QUESTION 4. SHOULD INSTITUTIONS OF THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION 
CONSIDER PURSUING A KIND OF NEW MONASTICISM, LEAVING THE 
DECADENT DYSTOPIA INTO WHICH WE SEEM TO BE HEADING FOR THE 
PURITY OF QUILL AND PARCHMENT? WHY OR WHY NOT? 

Emily Peterson
While AI is not something I have naturally gravitated towards as a 
user, I have found it to be a fascinating topic of research and conversa-
tion because of the ways it draws out other important conversations 
about mission, values, and practice. That is why I found this ques-
tion about a new monasticism especially interesting—it begs other 
essential questions that underpin the lives of our institutions. The 
appeal of the “new monasticism” response in the face of the risks 
of AI is also powerful, and it demands a direct treatment.

Each institution must determine its own mission-driven response 
to AI, yet I would argue that the most productive answer to this 



98    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

question holds across the field: “no, but. . . ” The “no” is not a whole-
sale embrace of AI, but rather a rejection of a fear-driven wholesale 
rejection that can have unconsidered consequences. Nuance and 
context are essential to expanding on that “no,” with particular 
attention to pedagogy, content, and practical applications.

At the heart of the matter of pedagogy is the question, How do 
we teach? And how does that affect how we do or do not integrate 
artificial intelligence into theological education? As much as librar-
ies have often been at the forefront of adopting new technology, 
academic libraries in particular are often also a focus of academic 
fantasies that cast them as sacred and hushed intellectual sanctuar-
ies, a vision that is underpinned in many ways by libraries’ historical 
relationship to monastic communities. The idea of the “purity of 
the quill and parchment” posed by the above question reflects this 
vision and comes with assumptions of certain pedagogical practices, 
particularly handwritten in-class exams and papers. I have heard 
multiple students and instructors suggest that blue books (a more 
“modern” iteration of “quill and parchment”) may be the best way 
to respond to the pedagogical threats of AI.

Yet I think it’s important to ask why we largely do not rely on blue 
books anymore. Are these “quill and parchment” methods actually 
“pure,” as our question implies? Were they ever clean, unadulter-
ated assessments of learning? After all, people have been capable of 
plagiarism and cheating and shortcutting long before we even had 
typewriters, let alone computers. To set forth any single method as 
“pure” is fantasy, not reality.

Our understanding of effective and inclusive teaching methods 
has evolved over time, not only in response to the availability of 
new technologies, but also as those new technologies have helped 
to solve identified problems in the methods we were using—not to 
mention as we learned more about the diversities in how we learn. 
We have adopted new methods of teaching and assessment (both 
product- and process-based) because we have confronted convinc-
ing reasons for change. Those reasons have not disappeared just 
because AI has arisen as a new challenge. Simply reverting to older 
methods of teaching and assessment, then, is not a responsible way 
of coping with the advent of AI.



Panel Presentations    99

It is important to ask ourselves why we romanticize that fantasti-
cal academy of the past when confronted with a difficult new chal-
lenge—and whether we should. History has much to teach us, but 
it cannot be our unchanging model for how things should be done 
now and in the future. Nostalgia for a pre-AI era cannot solve the 
challenges of the AI age. To practice fearful avoidance that idealizes 
the past poses the risk of moving us backwards into old problems in 
the interest of avoiding new ones, cheating our students out of an 
education that builds on everything we have learned about effective, 
inclusive, transformative, and accessible teaching.

Therefore, I propose that we adopt this question for thinking about 
pedagogy in response to AI: How can we use the toolkit of methods 
we have already developed as a field (including some of those “quill 
and parchment” methods), combined with new advances and think-
ing, to creatively address the pedagogical challenge AI poses in theo-
logical education? One idea that has emerged in conversations with 
colleagues at my institution has been leaning more into scaffolded 
project-based assignments so that instructors can peek “behind the 
curtain” of students’ processes in a more structured way. Or, if we 
want to actively integrate AI into pedagogical methods, we can take 
cues from the creativity of our students; for example, some students 
at CTS are having generative AI argue against their thesis statements 
to help them improve their arguments. This is a constructive use of 
generative AI that can help reinforce learning goals.

In addition to impacting how we teach, technology also impacts 
what we teach, and that is an essential consideration in relationship 
to AI, too. Our theological institutions seek to teach content that is 
applicable to the contexts and realities in which our students might 
find themselves either during their studies or once they graduate. 
We want their education to be relevant to the work they do, to help 
equip and prepare them for it. To that end, then, it’s not just about 
content knowledge—theology or church history or Bible. Our institu-
tions also seek to teach skills, frameworks, and methods for meeting 
future challenges in the field. While some theological degrees live 
mostly in the theoretical realm, most of us are focused on teaching 
practitioners. These students are not preparing to live and work in 
a monastic setting after graduation. They are preparing for life and 
work in the larger world.



100    ATL A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

It is worthwhile to pause this discussion momentarily to acknowl-
edge that I see value in monastic retreat, including for real-world 
practitioners. Many of us know firsthand the value to be found in 
the rest, discipline, and reflection found in such settings. To build 
our degree programs around such retreats, however, for people 
who are preparing to do difficult and immersive work in the real 
world is ultimately a practice of avoidance. If we seek to avoid 
engaging with AI by adopting a withdraw-and-seclude approach, 
we are failing to prepare our students for the world in which they 
will live and work when they graduate. This is not to say that all 
“new monastic” practices should be discarded in light of AI; rather, 
that our institutions’ engagement with those practices should be 
because of their benefits rather than, again, the fearful avoidance 
of new technologies.

The essential feature here is decision-making. To so strictly control 
a learning environment for people who are to become leaders of 
communities saturated in the technology, media, and culture of the 
modern world is to deprive them of the opportunity to reflect on 
how to make faithful and ethical decisions. A strong consideration 
of ethics has always been important in theological education, and it 
needs to be an area of equal or greater emphasis moving forward, 
particularly in relationship to AI.

To offer another counter-question, then: How can we help our 
students to develop more dynamic and critically-reflective theologi-
cal frameworks for understanding this inevitably changing world 
and making faithful decisions within it—in this case, choices related 
to AI? The frameworks Allison presented above are helpful to this 
end, particularly the questions from Sacasas. This is also a place 
where Brady’s reflections about the role of theological librarians 
becomes especially pertinent. Librarians are already in the busi-
ness of helping students make critically reflective choices about 
what is reliable, ethical, and scholarly. We can do the same with AI. 
Whatever our students may individually choose to do with their use 
of technology, they ought to understand why and be able to reason 
through the ethics of it themselves. Our libraries can be an essential 
partner in this process.

Lastly, institutions of theological education must consider what 
is realistic functionally beyond the curriculum itself, for those of us 



Panel Presentations    101

doing the day-to-day work of our institutions. AI (or at least genera-
tive AI) seems so new to us because it really only entered the popular 
conversation as something real, not hypothetical, with the public 
release of ChatGPT in November 2022; however, as Brady mentioned 
above, AI has existed long enough that it is firmly rooted in some of 
the technologies we already use, and its footprint is growing—not 
just in standalone products like ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, but 
also as integrated functionalities of other common technologies like 
Grammarly or various search interfaces. Companies tend to trumpet 
the addition of AI capabilities as a selling point, but in some cases, 
AI integration may happen more quietly without us even knowing 
it is there. If we choose to limit ourselves only to AI-free tools and 
technologies, we will find ourselves with slimmer and slimmer 
options over time.

In short, total avoidance of AI is more difficult than it seems and 
is ultimately unrealistic. Putting aside how issues of user agency and 
data privacy and usage make it nearly impossible to fully opt out of 
participating in AI anyway, attempting to do so would likely involve 
sacrificing many of the useful and untroubling tools we have come 
to depend on. Some of those AI enhancements can help make our 
tools more useful and efficient, our data more accurate.

A key final question related to realistic practical applications, 
especially when it comes to generative AI, is related to terms of 
enforcement and accountability. Many faculty and administrators 
want to be able to rely on tools like AI checkers to catch use of AI 
where it is not permitted, whether that is in applications for admis-
sion, in academic assignments, or elsewhere. But we know those 
tools are notoriously unreliable and will likely always be at least 
one step behind the exponential advancement of AI technologies. 
A wholesale ban on AI use is therefore exceedingly hard to enforce, 
at least with the tools and tech available to us right now.

Rather than attempting a complete opt-out, then, I invite us to 
consider—much like in our question about what we teach—how to 
ethically engage with AI. What decisions can we make institution-
ally to practice, model, and foster responsible use of AI? This is the 
kind of approach that helps to support critical thinking, effective 
leadership, and creative ministry. 



102    AT L A 2024 PROCEEDINGS

So, then, should institutions of theological education consider 
pursuing a kind of new monasticism, leaving the decadent dystopia 
into which we seem to be heading for the purity of the quill and 
parchment? It may be an attractive route, but I argue no. We live in 
a complex world, and we are continuously learning from the reali-
ties that we’ve faced in the past and are facing today. Turning back 
to the past to solve our problems for us disregards the constructive 
learning that has allowed us to more faithfully and effectively fulfill 
our educational mission to prepare our students for the world in 
which they live.

Instead, I invite us to get creative with our pedagogy by combining 
our toolkit of established methods with new advances and thinking, 
to help our students develop more dynamic and critically-reflective 
theological frameworks for making faithful decisions related to AI, 
and to practice, model, and foster responsible use of AI institution-
wide. It will take significant effort, collaboration, and imagination, 
especially given the pace at which AI is evolving. However, I believe 
these questions that AI is prompting us to ask can—if we receive 
them as an opportunity rather than as a threat—help us become 
more resilient and foster more resilience in our students as we all 
face the future together.

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ENDNOTES

1  Francesco Dal Pozzo (Puteolanus, d. 1490) printed a “spectacularly inaccurate” 
edition of Ovid’s works in Bologna that unfortunately, because it was the first 
such edition (editio princeps) of the poet’s works, largely overshadowed a more 
accurate edition published in Rome a few months later (Lee 2022).




