2025

General Schedule for 2025: We believe that the presence of God with us is critical to the body of Christ as we navigate the "year of AGI". As such, we host weekly and monthly prayer meetings and will have bi-monthly talks

• May 2025: Brain-machine interfaces: uses and abuses. A Christian perspective. Current state of the science of direct brain-machine interfaces (BMI’s) in which recording/stimulating electrodes are surgically placed in the brain for therapeutic or research purposes is well a Christian framework. More ‘imaginative’ applications, aimed at augmenting natural human capabilities, may raise serious ethical and spiritual concerns for Christians. Bill Newsome is the Harman Family Professor of Neurobiology and founding director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University.

• April 2025: Prayer for Christians in AI and meetup Missional AI and ICLR 2025

• March 2025: The FaithTech Redemptive AI Course: Leading the Church Through the Wisdom Gap. We find ourselves in what I call a profound AI moment - one that is creating an unanticipated existential crisis across the globe. But here's the profound truth: this very crisis of human identity represents our greatest opportunity to advance the Great Commission. The Wisdom Gap isn't merely about understanding technology—it's about proclaiming the profound truth of Jesus coming in the flesh, redeeming humans, and soon to return again. Dr K is an AI consultant for FaithTech, where she helps to shape the intersection and integration of biblical theology and emerging technology, such as AI. With a distinguished career spanning AI governance in the US intelligence community, higher Christian education, and thought leadership, Dr. K has served as a professor for over 20 years and authored 14 books and 30+ articles on AI ethics, theology, philosophy, and discipleship.

• February 2025: Prayer for Christians in AI

• January 2025: ASA Winter Symposium on AI and Christianity. Hear Joanna Ng and Roz Picard in conversation on AI and Christianity, with Derek Schuurman of Calvin University guiding the discussion. All three speakers are leaders in AI and machine learning who are also deeply rooted in faith in Christ. 

2024

• December 2024: Neurips social with AI and Faith

• November 2024: Safety by Design for Generative AI: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse. Creating content at scale is easier now than ever before. In the same way that offline and online sexual harms against children have been accelerated by the internet, misuse of generative AI has profound implications for child safety, across victim identification, victimization, prevention and abuse proliferation. This misuse, and its associated downstream harm, is already occurring, and warrants collective action, today. The need is clear: we must mitigate the misuse of generative AI technologies to perpetrate, proliferate, and further sexual harms against children. This moment requires a proactive response. Dr. Rebecca Portnoff is Vice President of Data Science at Thorn. She holds a B.S.E. from Princeton and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, both in Computer Science, and has been working in the intersection of ML/AI and child safety for over a decade.

• October 2024: Prayer for Christians in AI and Portfolio Jam!

• September 2024: CEIDS Network: Equipping, Evaluating, and Inspiring the Relief and Development Arms of the Global Church. In this talk, I will introduce the CEIDS network and provide a few examples of our research partnerships with NGOs. I'll then provide a few thoughts on how AI tools and methods could be incorporated in this work. Finally, I'll open up a conversation about collaborations between CEIDS researchers and folks from the CHAI network. Jeff Bloem is a Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). He is also a Research Affiliate of the Ford Program within the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  

• August 2024: Prayer for Christians in AI

• July 2024: Cultivating Thinking with AI Writing Tools. Contemporary AI writing tools often generate text that people can directly use without critical evaluation on how it aligns with their purposes or serves their readers' needs. To foster writer agency, our research explores alternative interaction designs and AI tasks aimed at cultivating writers' own thinking instead of supplanting it. We'll share preliminary insights from writers using our tool that offers external perspectives on their written work, as well as early findings from a study offering non-actionable suggestions. Ken Arnold is an assistant professor of computer science and data science at Calvin University. 

    In person meetings: 

• • • ICML 2024 [Vienna, Austria]: Christians in AI Lunch (PoC: Richard, Thurs July 25th) 

    • Generating Wisdom [DC]: AI and Faith workshop at the Museum of the Bible (PoC: Mark Graves, Thurs/Fri July 25-26th)

    • ASA 2024 [DC]: ASA conference and AI workshop (PoC: Hannah Eagleson, Fri-Mo

• June 2024: Prayer for Christians in AI

• May 2024: Natural Language Inference for Measuring Religious Biases in LLMs. Effectively aligning large language models (LLMs) with the values and objectives of an organization is an ongoing challenge. Using a natural language inference (NLI) approach, we tackle this religious values alignment problem by considering how the responses of an LLM correspond to premises associated with particular religious traditions, including Christianity and Islam. The talk is given by Marcus Schwarting, a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Chicago and senior editor for AI and Faith. His work primarily focuses on applying ML/AI to problems in chemistry, materials science, and solid-state physics.

• April 2024: Prayer for Christians in AI. 

• March 2024: (Computer) Vision for Christ: Researching 3D Generative Models. As a Christian, and as a graduate researcher studying 3D generative models, I will discuss the current state of 2D and 3D generative models along brief explanation of my research, and share my testimony as living as Christian in the field of Computer Vision - living to discern what is Christ's vision in this place He has sent me. Matthew Kwak is an Integrated MS/PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University.

• February 2024: Prayer for Christians in AI. 

• January 2024: Practicing Your Faith in the Technological World. What does it mean to live in a world of technology for Christians? What responsibilities do we have to each other, to the development of technology, to our communities? What does this mean for our daily experience of faith and what might this mean for the future? In this talk, Dr. John Slattery, Director of the Grefenstette Center for Ethics at Duquesne University, will bring his personal and scholarly experience to bear in discussing ideas of faith, technology, and the future of AI. 

2023

• December 2023 (Upcoming): We had a Faith and AI social at Neurips, the first ever Faith and AI social at a major AI conference.

• November 2023: Rhythms and Algorithms: The God of Words and the Importance of Imago Dei in the Age of Generative AI. As Generative AI reshapes our creative landscape, discerning the boundaries between machine ingenuity and human touch becomes increasingly nuanced. Join us to explore the interplay between AI and human creativity with Micah Voraritskul, founder of VerifiedHuman™, a company focused on AI-human differentiation in creative media.

• October 2023: Debrief + Talk: Divine Wisdom > Artificial Intelligence In July we had a lunch social at ICML 2023 and held the ASA AI workshop: "Christians in Artificial Intelligence: Incubating Research & Interdisciplinary Community". Richard and Hannah will go over some of the works presented at each conference and discuss some future plans, such as the Neurips 2023 social. The main talk is given by Joanna Ng, CEO of Devarim and had a seven-year tenure as the Head of Research and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies, IBM Canada Lab; and accredited as an IBM Master Inventor. 

• September 2023: Some folks from CHAI were featured in an Christianity Today article: AI Will Shape Your Soul.

• July 2023: We had a Christians in AI social at ICML 2023 and a Christians in AI workshop at ASA 2023.

• May 2023: AI and the Biblical Story Many believe that AI could lead us toward some sort of paradise. A rival postmodern story suggests that the future doesn’t need us and that AI will ultimately threaten humanity. This talk will explore a vision for AI informed by the Biblical story and how it can guide us toward more responsible technology. This talk is given by Derek C. Schuurman, who is currently professor of computer science at Calvin University. 

• April 2023: Global Missional AI Summit What does it mean for the Global Church to practice Radical Data Generosity? What kind of Data Cooperation might God be calling us to as individual members of a united Body of Christ? How can we intentionally form, build, and grow relationships and partnerships that foster Kingdom-minded Data Collaboration. This year’s theme of Innovation Through Data Collaboration is calling on attendees to not only ask these questions but to seek God’s guidance as we gather for 3 days at the Wycliffe Headquarters in Orlando, Florida.

• March 2023: There is a call for poster abstracts for the ASA AI workshop: "Christians in Artificial Intelligence: Incubating Research & Interdisciplinary Community", which ask for only 150 words and are meant to be preliminary (so if this is new to you, that's ok!) This workshop aims to bring together a diversity of perspectives and ideas and to launch new directions in Christianity and AI, and we invite poster abstracts presenting both new ideas for future research and completed research. Topics may include but are not limited to the following:

  • • Ethical AI (Data Ethics, Ethical Algorithm Design)

    • Explainable AI and AI Safety

    • ML Fairness and Bias in Language and Other Models

    • Responsible AI and AI for Social Good

    • Bible translation and faith-based AI applications

• March 2023: Redeeming the Parrots: Using Language Models Responsibly. Generative AIs are mimics, and they nudge us to mimic too. But we can repurpose these technologies to be redemptive tools instead of parrots. In this talk, I’ll share some kinds of tools I’ve been working on from a faith-based perspective and welcome your thoughts on this evolving technology. This talk is given by Ken Arnold, an assistant professor of computer science and data science at Calvin University. 

• November 2022: Passion Talks AI Workshop. Are you someone who researches or implements AI-related technology, wanting to grow your knowledge of related ethics & theology? Or are you a scholar of AI ethics and theology, working to translate your knowledge for applied technical settings? Passion Talks offers a shared space to explore these crucial questions in community. Join us for our main event, an online poster session and conversation. And we would love to hear from you and your expertise! You’ll connect with other professionals in related areas, and get a chance to grow your public engagement skills.

• September 2022: AI Ethics and Christianity. What is AI ethics? How can Christians support work in technology ethics and AI ethics? This talk will give an overview of the fields of technology ethics and AI ethics, then talk about ways that Christians might positively engage this contemporary movement, ultimately helping us fulfill the Divine commandments to love God and neighbor. The talk was given by Brian Green, who is the director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

• August 2022: Ethics in the Age of AI: Navigating Emerging Technologies with Biblical Wisdom. The talk was given by Jason Thacker, who serves as chair of research in technology ethics and director of the research institute at The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.