AI, Faith, and What It Means to Be Human

AI, Faith, and What It Means to Be Human

Tuesday, December 8th | Noon – 1:00 PM ET

Artificial intelligence is advancing at a remarkable pace, bringing with it opportunities that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago. But alongside questions about what AI can do are deeper questions about what its development means for us. How might AI reshape our understanding of work, relationships, creativity, agency, and human dignity? And what resources does the Christian tradition offer as we seek to navigate these changes wisely?

Meghan Sullivan, Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame, has been at the center of Notre Dame’s growing work on these questions. In December 2025, Lilly Endowment awarded Notre Dame a $50.8 million grant, the largest private foundation grant in the university’s history, to support the DELTA Network and expand its work on faith based ethical formation in an age of increasingly powerful AI.

Central to this work is Notre Dame’s DELTA framework, which focuses attention on five dimensions of human life that take on particular significance in an age of AI: Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency. Meghan will introduce this framework and share some of what Notre Dame is learning as it brings together scholars, religious leaders, technologists, educators, and others to think about how AI is shaping human life and how Christian faith might inform our response.

The conversation will also engage Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Released in May 2026, the encyclical places AI within the Church’s broader social teaching and considers its implications for human dignity, freedom, relationships, work, responsibility, power, and the common good. Pope Leo emphasizes that AI should not be equated with human intelligence and calls for technological development to remain ordered toward the dignity of the human person and integral human development.

Together, these developments provide an opportunity to step back from the rapidly changing tools themselves and consider some of the larger questions underneath them. What is distinctive about human beings in a world where machines can increasingly replicate activities once associated with human intelligence? What aspects of human life should we be especially attentive to preserving and cultivating? And what might faithful Christian engagement with AI look like as its influence continues to grow?

For those of us in philanthropy, these questions have implications beyond our own use of AI. The organizations and leaders we support are navigating the same technological changes, and philanthropy will increasingly face decisions about where and how AI should be embraced, where caution is warranted, and what values should guide those choices. This session offers an opportunity to think at a higher level about the technological changes underway and what Christian faith and reflection might contribute to the way we engage them.

About Meghan Sullivan

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. She is a leading scholar working at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, religion, and questions about the good life, and is helping lead Notre Dame’s DELTA initiative on human formation in the age of AI. 

Presenter

Meghan Sullivan

Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute for Ethics and the Common Good
University of Notre Dame