Science for Seminaries Event

april, 2021

29apr6:00 pm7:30 pmScience for Seminaries EventWith Guest Speaker Dr. Philip Butler6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Event Details

Join Drs. Ringer and Terrell in an event culminating from their work with the Science for Seminaries grant. Guest speaker. Dr. Philip Butler, Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems at Iliff School of Theology will be featured. The keynote is titled: “Decolonizing AI: From Panopticon Dystopias to Liberative Possibilities.”

Dr. Butler will be joined after his lecture by respondents Sylvester Johnson and Elonda Clay.

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As an academic, Dr. Butler brings an excellent teaching resume and cutting-edge scholarship that combines Black liberation theologies, neuroscience, spirituality and technology, particularly artificial intelligence. He is also the founder of The Seekr Project, which is a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities, combining machine learning and psychotherapeutic systems. In addition to his publications in the field of theology, philosophy, and science, Dr. Butler is also the author of Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality (Bloomsbury, 2019) in which he investigates what might happen when Black people utilize technological advancements to enhance both Black spiritualities and Black bodies in the struggle of materializing liberating realities.

Check out a video on the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence focusing on mental health, co-founded by Dr. Butler.

Elonda Clay is the Director of the Library at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She is also a scholar of religion and PhD candidate in Theology and Religious Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her work has been supported by the American Society for Human Genetics, the Forum for Theological Education, the John Templeton Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the United Methodist Women of Color, GreenFaith Coalition for the Environment, and Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover (Research Institute for Philosophy Hannover, Germany).

Sylvester A. Johnson is Assistant Vice Provost for the Humanities and Executive Director of the “Tech for Humanity” initiative at Virginia Tech. He is the founding director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities, which is supporting human-centered research and humanistic approaches to the guidance of technology. Sylvester’s research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and race governance. In addition to co-facilitating a national working group on religion and US empire, Johnson led an Artificial Intelligence project that developed a successful proof-of-concept machine learning application to ingest and analyze a humanities text. He is the author of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (Palgrave 2004), a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award.

This event is AAAS Grant-funded.

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(Thursday) 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

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