Spiritual Formation at Global Scale, with Gary Haugen and Kevin Jenkins
Conversing with Mark Labberton
How can a Christian humanitarian organization keep Christ at the center of its mission while working in the world’s most difficult places, with thousands of staff spread across dozens of countries and cultures? Gary Haugen, founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, and Kevin Jenkins, former president and CEO of World Vision International, both understand their organizations to be foundationally Christian. But even in ministries where you would expect spiritual formation to be at the center, it takes work to help large global teams live up to their mission. Speaking with Mark...
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Permanent Questions: Celebrating Ten Years of Conversing, with David Brooks
Conversing with Mark Labberton
What if the deepest problems in American life were pre-political? It’s often said that “culture is upstream from politics”—meaning that what we see in political news, speeches, ads, debates, and elections is symptomatic of a deeper cause. The conflicts, troubles, injustices, and sufferings that many people experience as political are more likely rooted in moral and spiritual crises. This week’s episode marks ten years of Conversing, which launched on October 8, 2016. To celebrate, Mark Labberton is joined by David Brooks, a staff writer at The Atlantic and presidential fellow...
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A Ukrainian Pastor on Faith, Hope, and the Terror of War, with Fyodor Raichynets
Conversing with Mark Labberton
War has wracked Ukraine for 1,678 days—outlasting both World Wars. In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Fyodor Raichynets—a theologian at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, pastor of a church in Bucha, and a military chaplain serving on the front lines in Kyiv—explains what it is like to be under near-constant drone and ballistic attack and how that has affected his faith, memory, and experience of time. War has reshaped the way he loves, forgives, and serves; it has induced a fear even to hope. Together, they discuss trauma as a national condition and the temptation...
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Attention, Agency, and Power, with David French
Conversing with Mark Labberton
In a country splitting apart over so much, three words point toward a better way to live: attention, agency, and power. David French returns to Conversing to take up all three. A New York Times opinion writer since January 2023, French writes from a conservative theological background about law, culture, religion, and armed conflict, and has found himself writing directly into the middle of divided hostilities. French comments on how attention, agency, and power took shape in him, and how each gets distorted by partisan fundamentalisms (on both the right and left) built to shut conversation...
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Reclaiming Civic Agency, with Michael Wear
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Underneath all the political polarization, rage-baiting, punditry, and aggression, there is a crisis of civic agency. American citizens feel politically disempowered and undermined. And the effect, over time, will be that we lose our ability to self-govern. What is needed is a path between belligerence and withdrawal. In this episode, Michael Wear (Center for Christianity and Public Life, author of The Spirit of Our Politics) joins Mark Labberton to discuss provocation and political effectiveness; the value of gentleness in public life; concrete signs of hope in local political action; the...
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Loud Justice, with Sharon Cohn Wu
Conversing with Mark Labberton
“It is not just that God has a heart for justice,” says Sharon Cohn Wu (International Justice Mission), “it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive.” Sharon Cohn Wu has served for more than twenty years with IJM, where she is now regional president of North America. A lawyer (JD, Harvard Law), she has spent her career calling for “loud justice”—that is, visible, swift, community-wide accountability—using the criminal justice system and political will to help IJM achieve...
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Win or Lose, Run for Something, with Jeanelle Austin
Conversing with Mark Labberton
In February 2026, Jeanelle Austin filed for Minnesota Senate District 62. She started canvassing her district during a polar vortex, and persisted through triple-digit summer heat. And in August she lost in the Democratic Primary. In this episode, she sits down with Mark Labberton to reflect on what this experience has taught her about power, democracy, and what citizenship and neighbor-love means in the South Minneapolis neighborhood where she grew up. The executive director of Rise & Remember—the nonprofit that preserves the memorial at George Floyd Square—Austin followed a...
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Women, Misogyny, and the Bible, with Beth Moore
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Growing up, Beth Moore was taught that 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 were the whole of what scripture had to say about women: submissive and silent. The founder of Living Proof Ministries and one of the most widely read Bible teachers in America, Moore objects to a hermeneutic limited to those passages. In this episode, Mark Labberton revisits his 2018 conversation with Beth Moore, recorded in the months following her viral open letter, “A Letter to My Brothers.” Almost 10 years later, debates over women in leadership and whether women are free to use their full gifts in the full...
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The Human Heart, with David Anderson
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Our hearts are restless, says Saint Augustine, until they find their rest in God. The biological science and the spiritual metaphor are in agreement here. Over the course of billions of beats, our hearts never stop to rest. Your magnificent heart exchanges or pumps your entire blood volume, just over a gallon, every single minute. (Athlete hearts can pump up to 10 gallons per minute!) In this episode, Mark Labberton discusses matters of the heart with his close friend Dr. David Anderson, a cardiologist of four decades who trained at Johns Hopkins and helped launch one of the first...
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The God of the Unfinished, with Walter Brueggemann
Conversing with Mark Labberton
The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann said, is an old text that simply refuses to stay old. “It reads like it was written yesterday.” For him, God offers no artificial closure, but is active in the meantime, and at peace with the “unfinished.” Walter Brueggemann died on June 5, 2025, at the age of ninety-two, and his own influence is unfinished. This episode is from the Conversing archives: a conversation Mark Labberton hosted with Brueggemann at Fuller Seminary for the 2015 Fuller Forum “Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God.” Brueggemann was an Old Testament scholar for...
info_outlineWe might be living through the most consequential technological moment in human history. In this episode, Greg Cootsona—theologian, pastor, and executive director of AI and Faith—joins Mark Labberton reflect on a lifetime's convergence of work in faith, science, and ethics now fully engaged at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
"AI is not simply a technical project. It is an expression of human hopes and fears, our longings for power, our craving for convenience, and our hunger for transcendence and meaning. In that sense, every AI model carries an implicit anthropology and an embedded moral vision."
Together they discuss why religious wisdom belongs in the room where AI is shaped, the ethical stakes of human dignity and representation in AI systems, and the strategic power of interfaith collaboration with leading tech companies. Together they also explore how individual users can exercise genuine agency over AI, the risks of AI-mediated relationships, and what it would mean to make AI truly for us—in the deepest theological sense of that phrase.
Episode Highlights
"You among mortals are chosen to solve every problem effectively and efficiently."—on Silicon Valley's unspoken gospel
"The gospel is not fragile and it grows best in situations that are not ideal and conditions that are not ideal."
"AI is not simply a technical project. It is an expression of human hopes and fears, our longings for power, our craving for convenience, and our hunger for transcendence and meaning. In that sense, every AI model carries an implicit anthropology and an embedded moral vision. Whether or not its designers name it."
"A third of teenagers say they prefer to have a relationship with a chatbot."
"I think hope is taking steps today for a vision of tomorrow that you want to see occur. And that is what makes positive change in us as human beings and positive change in the world around us."
About Greg Cootsona
Greg Cootsona (PhD, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley) is the executive director of AI and Faith, a global interfaith organization bringing religious wisdom to the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence. He is a lecturer in comparative religion and humanities at California State University, Chico, and an ordained Presbyterian Church (USA) minister. Cootsona co-founded Science for the Church, directed multiple Templeton Foundation–funded projects connecting science and religious communities, and is a recognized specialist in C.S. Lewis, theology, and science. He has authored nine books, including Science and Religions in America: A New Look (Routledge, 2023) and Mere Science and Christian Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2018). He has appeared on The Today Show, CNN, NPR, BBC, and in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Helpful Links and Resources
AI and Faith https://aiandfaith.org
Greg Cootsona's website https://www.gregcootsona.com
Forthcoming book—An AI Made for Us https://www.gregcootsona.com/books/
AI and Faith Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-and-faith/id1726277555
Science for the Church https://scienceforthechurch.org
Mere Science and Christian Faith https://www.ivpress.com/mere-science-and-christian-faith
Science and Religions in America: A New Look https://www.routledge.com/Science-and-Religions-in-America-A-New-Look/Cootsona/p/book/9781032102122
AI and Faith on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/aiandfaith
AI and Faith on X/Twitter https://twitter.com/AIandFaith
Show Notes
- Greg Cootsona's background: grew up in Menlo Park, California—Silicon Valley before it had that name
- His engineer father modeled a problem-solving worldview; transcendence not required
- "You among mortals are chosen to solve every problem effectively and efficiently."—the unspoken gospel of Silicon Valley
- Grew up in a non-religious, even "anti-religious" household
- Became a Christian his first year at UC Berkeley—a conversion he describes with a laugh as the obvious outlier
- C.S. Lewis's writings on meaning and love: too reasonable, too wise to dismiss
- Earl Palmer at First Presbyterian Berkeley: preaching that gave confidence amid secular challenge
- "The gospel is not fragile and it grows best in situations that are not ideal."
- Princeton Seminary for biblical studies; study years in Tübingen and Heidelberg
- PhD dissertation at GTU: Karl Barth (theology from above) in dialogue with Alfred North Whitehead (science from below)
- Advisors Robert John Russell (PhD in quantum physics) and Ted Peters at the Graduate Theological Union
- Pastoral ministry at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, New York City, then Bidwell Presbyterian, Chico
- Began working with Templeton Foundation through early exposure to science-faith dialogue during the Human Genome Initiative years
- Two $2 million Templeton projects: Scientists in Congregations and Science and Theology for Emerging Adult Ministries (STEAM)
- Bidwell Presbyterian received what may have been the first Templeton Foundation grant ever given directly to a local church
- AI and Faith founded by Thomas Osborne and David Brenner in Seattle—building near Amazon and Microsoft, they saw the need early
- Cootsona became the organization's first executive director on October 1, 2025
- The network: 220 experts in 20 countries, partnering with 34 organizations
- "AI is not simply a technical project. It is an expression of human hopes and fears, our longings for power, our craving for convenience, and our hunger for transcendence and meaning."
- Interfaith strategy: shared ethical ground across traditions is broader than divisions—and tech companies respond better to a multi-religious voice
- Currently invited to provide Anthropic feedback on the Claude Constitution—because of AI and Faith's interfaith structure
- Human dignity at stake: between 2 and 2.5 billion people not on the internet are absent from AI training data
- Only 0.06 percent of AI models are trained on Arabic-language sources—600 million speakers
- AI data centres consume potable water and enormous energy to cool GPU processors
- Senior tech leaders at a major company admitted to Labberton: "None of us has any training in ethics"—a real and witnessed crisis
- "A third of teenagers say they prefer to have a relationship with a chatbot."
- Three publics: AI industry experts, religious congregations, and the broader public—AI and Faith works across all three
- Forthcoming book: An AI Made for Us—riffing on Jesus's Sabbath words: the Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath
- Users have more agency than they think: we can set limits, log off, choose not to be defined by our AI engagement
- Harvard Human Flourishing Project: in-person worship is the highest correlate with religious flourishing—embodied community cannot be replaced
- Community—not the individual—is the right unit of moral accountability for navigating AI
- "I think hope is taking steps today for a vision of tomorrow that you want to see occur."
- AI's genuine promise: accelerating medicine for rare diseases; recalibrating cosmological understanding; reducing human suffering at scale
- Five to one: more people fear AI than welcome it—AI and Faith works to change that ratio with grounded, religious wisdom
#AIandFaith #ArtificialIntelligence #FaithAndTechnology #AIEthics #HumanFlourishing #ScienceAndFaith #ChristianFaith #TechAndReligion #AIandHumanity #GregCootsona
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.