The Assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Last updated on: March 6, 2025 at 10:53 am By James F. McGrath

That someone who looks more and more like the caricature of the antichrist every day would launch an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion is not surprising. That’s what antichrists are supposed to do. However, I have seen more and more conservative Christians not merely falling in line behind him but repeating his lies. As an example, take T. Michael W. Halcomb’s recent Substack piece. He claims that what diversity, equity, and inclusion mean for Christians and for everyone else... Read more

John’s Adoptionist Christology? Limits of AI Lit Reviews

Last updated on: March 2, 2025 at 5:43 pm By James F. McGrath

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At a recent gathering of local New Testament scholars here in Indianapolis, the question of whether the Gospel of John’s Christology might be adoptionist came up. In my own work on the Gospel of John, I looked closely at the few and often neglected academic studies of this topic, and found myself persuaded that the Gospel of John can be plausibly interpreted in this way. My very first academic publication, in Princeton’s journal of graduate research Koinonia Journal, addressed this... Read more

Artificial Intelligence and Plagiarism

Last updated on: March 1, 2025 at 4:05 pm By James F. McGrath

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Some people immediately associate artificial intelligence and plagiarism, going so far as to call LLM chatbots “plagiarism machines.” I have pushed back on that in the past, but some new evidence has me rethinking this. Artifically Intelligently Designed Let’s assume you are an educator, and students are supposed to explain what Intelligent Design is. If you got these two answers, would you consider them too similar to be coincidental? Conceptual Foundations of Intelligent Design Intelligent Design is defined by... Read more

Calls for Papers and Butler University Day of Giving

Last updated on: February 27, 2025 at 9:24 am By James F. McGrath

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I will start with a call for papers for the American Academy of Religion’s Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity program unit and the Society of Biblical Literature’s John the Baptist program unit, but even if those do not interest you, please keep reading because I end with something important and urgent, Butler University’s Day of Giving! First, the American Academy of Religion just announced “We are extending the deadline for the CFP until Monday, March 10 at 11:59pm ET.” Here... Read more

Religious Experience and Psychedelics

Last updated on: February 24, 2025 at 9:53 pm By James F. McGrath

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There’s a story behind how we ended up hosting a public lecture at Butler University on “Religious Experience and Psychedelics” and this is it. I was interviewed by Butler University’s student newspaper, The Butler Collegian, about this upcoming public lecture and thought it might be of interest for me to include the entirety of what I provided to the journalist. Each year Butler University has this Series on Religion and Society which brings four speakers to campus to share their expertise... Read more

Severance, Jesus, and the Soul: A Sci-Fi Thought Experiment

Last updated on: February 24, 2025 at 11:29 am By James F. McGrath

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Led To Severance By Jesus I did not expect the latest episode of Severance to feature a character saying that he had been led to severance by Jesus. I have been watching Severance avidly since it first aired. Such an interesting concept, not unlike that explored by Daniel Dennett in his short story philosophical thought experiment “Where Am I?” I’m teaching a course on religion and the mind, and so the show also connects somewhat with that. There had been... Read more

Were the Gospels Anonymous?

Last updated on: February 14, 2025 at 3:04 pm By James F. McGrath

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Someone asked the question on Reddit of whether the New Testament Gospels were anonymous. Here is the answer I provided. My own view is that they were anonymous in the same way that most ancient works were originally and in most copies. In Judaism the biblical texts were known by their first words and not separate titles. In antiquity in general authorship circulated as paratextual information rather than as something written within the text. The custom of listing the author... Read more

AI, Riddles, and the Jesus Seminar

Last updated on: January 30, 2025 at 11:05 am By James F. McGrath

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I read an article that sounded like more of the hype that has surrounded AI from the outset, claiming that AGI is just around the corner. AGI, as a reminder, stands for Artificial General Intelligence. It claimed that AI was already demonstrating superior skill to humans on certain metrics. Skeptical, I looked for details, and one of them was genuinely striking. It involves an LLM solving riddles, which would indeed seem to involve reasoning. If you have read my past... Read more

Motorbikes Don’t Have Windows (A Conversation With ChatGPT)

Last updated on: January 29, 2025 at 10:47 am By James F. McGrath

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I think the best way for me to help my fellow human beings understand what LLMs are and do, and what they are not and cannot be, is to engage in interaction with them in ways that hopefully make this clear. It is crucial to not just listen to what it says as though it is a rational human conversation partner, but what it is doing and how it functions. In the process, I alluded or referred to biblical texts... Read more

Understanding LLMs: Conversations With Claude

Last updated on: January 21, 2025 at 7:55 am By James F. McGrath

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It is urgent that people across all fields and disciplines respond to the appearance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the chatbot interfaces with which humans can interact with them, but before there can be an appropriate response to LLMs, understanding LLMs must happen first. There is instead widespread misunderstanding, and this article seeks to address that. The most famous LLM is of course ChatGPT, and I have written about it more than once. Lately I have been experimenting with... Read more

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