Ilia Delio

Ilia Delio is a Franciscan sister and one of the most prominent theologians working at the intersection of science and religion. Holder of the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, she earned doctorates in both pharmacology and historical theology, and founded the Center for Christogenesis to carry forward the evolutionary theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Why AI needs religion

Her 2020 book “Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion” makes an argument almost no other religious thinker was making: that AI is not a threat to be resisted but a continuation of evolution itself — “technology and evolution always belong together” — and that humanity is already shifting from Homo sapiens to what she calls “techno sapiens.” Rather than urging the church to retreat, she argues religion must be reconstructed for a world of complexity, giving AI the orientation toward love and transformation it cannot supply itself.

Delio is no naive booster. She insists technology is never neutral — “the coders are shaping our lives” — and presses the question of whose values get encoded. When Pope Leo XIV devoted his first encyclical to AI in 2026, she welcomed the church’s engagement while dismissing hopes of slowing the technology down: “Not a single thing will change. The train left the station quite a while ago.”

Within Catholic thought her position is genuinely contested — critics see too much accommodation of Silicon Valley eschatology in her Teilhardian optimism. But for a growing audience of believers unsettled by AI, Delio offers the rare theological framework in which the technology is neither idol nor demon, but raw material for a more connected creation.