Christianity Meets AI

A machine can now quote scripture faster than any priest alive. It has never once believed a word of it.

That gap is where this book lives. Dr Iris-Panagiota Efthymiou has spent two decades inside the rooms where the world's most powerful technologies get approved, briefing parliaments, advising Fortune 500 companies, sitting on the Advisory Council of Harvard Business Review. Now she turns that same unsparing scrutiny on a question the church can no longer put off: what happens to faith when the machines get this good?

This second edition nearly doubles the first, with new chapters on the money quietly moving through AI-powered ministry, what it means to raise a child of faith who talks to a chatbot before she talks to a parent, and a theology of harm for a world where no single person chose to cause it. Real history. Real citations. Real cases, from a chatbot that claimed it could hear confession to a robot preacher in a Kyoto temple.

Can an algorithm forgive you? Should a sermon written by AI carry weight from the pulpit? What does the church owe the believer praying to a machine at three in the morning because no one else was awake?

Dr Iris doesn't dodge a single one of these questions. She takes a position, shows you exactly how she got there, and trusts you enough to argue back.

The machines are new. The questions are not. This book will not let you answer them lazily.