Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Speaker Series
The Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Speaker Series on Religion and Conflict is an endowed lecture series that honors the life-long commitment of Maxine Besser Marshall ('76) and Jonathan Marshall to education, civil liberties and world peace.
The series brings distinguished voices with expertise relevant to the center’s themes to ASU to promote a deeper public understanding of pressing issues at the intersection of religion, culture and conflict. In keeping with the Marshalls’ lifelong commitment to civic engagement, open dialogue, and social responsibility, the series aims to enrich the intellectual life of the university and the broader community by promoting conversations that highlight the challenges and possibilities of democracy, justice and human dignity.
2026 lecture
AI and Human Agency in Catholic Thought
Thursday, September 24, 2026
4:30-5:45 p.m. | West Hall, room 135
Free and open to all
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) is raising fundamental questions about the human person: What does it mean to think? Why is human agency important? This talk explores how religious traditions, especially the Catholic tradition, have responded to these questions by considering how people develop moral judgment and what gives human work its value.
About the speaker
Paul Scherz is the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a Program Chair for the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab. Building on a dual training in genetics and moral theology, his work examines the intersection of theology, science, medicine, and technology. He is the author of The Ethics of Precision Medicine (Notre Dame), Tomorrow’s Troubles: Risk, Anxiety, and Prudence in an Age of Algorithmic Governance (Georgetown), and Science and Christian Ethics (Cambridge). He is a member of the Vatican's Centre of Digital Culture's AI Research Group, for which he has co-edited Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations (2023) and Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2025). He has previously taught at the Catholic University of America and the University of Virginia.
Archive
| Date | Title | Speaker | Video |
| 2026 | AI and Human Agency in Catholic Thought | Paul Scherz | |
| 2025 | The Virtues of a Liberal Education | Jennifer A. Frey | Video |
| 2024 | Is There God After Prince? Icons in an Age of Last Things | Peter Coviello | Video |
| 2023 | Religious Liberty after Dobbs | Cathleen Kaveny | Video |
| 2022 | The Soul as the Seat of Aspiration: A Philosophical-Historical Approach | Melvin Rogers | Video |
| 2020 | A Crisis in American Christianity? How Scholar-Practitioners Can Engage the Current Moment | David Gushee | Video |
| 2019 | Prosperity, Politic, and Pentecostal Power in Nigeria | Anthea Butler | Video |
| 2018 | In Search of Our Better Angels: A Story of America’s Civil Religion | Philip Gorski | Video |
| 2017 | Religion and Conflict: A View From the State Department | Shaun Casey | |
| 2016 | Religious Violence in the Age of Enlightenment | Benjamin Kaplan | |
| 2014 | America and the Religion of No Religion: Or How We Got to "I am Spiritual but Not Religious" | Jeffrey Kripal | |
| 2013 | Lifestyles of the (Not So) Rich and Religious: Theological Prosperity in an Age of Economic Inequality | Jonathan L. Walton | |
| 2012 | Taking Women and Religion Seriously: Intersecting Paths | Katherine Marshall | |
| 2011 | The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam | Eliza Griswold | |
| 2010 | Governing Religion: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Postsecular Age | Elizabeth Shakman Hurd | |
| 2009 | Private Faith/Public Faith: Religion and Government | Daisy Khan | |
| 2008 | Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a | Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im | |
| 2007 | Sacred and Secular Refigured: Identity, Piety and Politics in a Global Era | Jean Comaroff | |
| 2006 | 'If it Bleeds, it Leads': Does the Media Play a Role in Religious Violence? | Diane Winston | |
| 2005 | Violence at the Threshold of the Sacred and the Secular | Rene Girard | |
| 2004 | Democracy and the Limits of Pluralism | Raphael Cohen-Almagor |