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“Ilia Delio draws with refreshing originality on post-humanism, the work of AI visionaries, and the deep theological insight of Teilhard de Chardin. The result is a summons from the future, a winsome, readable, and urgent call for a new humanity and a new spirituality . . . . Profound and poetic!”—Ron Cole-Turner Pittsburgh Theological Center
In this bold new work, scientist and theologian Ilia Delio takes up the challenge of devising a rapprochement between science and religion, with particular attention to the role of Artificial Intelligence, or AI. If the “first axial age” gave rise to the great religions, she sees us now on the cusp of a “second axial age,” in which AI, oriented by new religious sensibilities, can bring about an ecological re-enchantment of the earth.
As she asks in her introduction, “Can technology and religion work together to form a new religion of the earth? Can AI develop toward the deepening of love? These are ultimate questions. Otherwise, super-intelligent AI life may do no more than polarize and alienate us, while sea levels continue to rise and violent weather patterns destroy life and consume the poor. Only love and compassion can bring us to a new level of cosmic life. How to reclaim a new religious spirit of the earth in a technological age, a posthuman love, is our task and our future.”
Ilia Delio, OSF, a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, is Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University and founder of the Center for Christogenesis Her many books include Christ in Evolution, The Emergent Christ, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, and Birth of a Dancing Star: My Journey from Cradle Catholic to Cyborg Christian. She is editor of the Orbis Books series Catholicity in an Evolving Universe.
