I’m excited to share that my paper has been accepted for presentation at the Koinonia Forum at Princeton Theological Seminary, taking place Friday–Saturday, March 6–7, 2026. The forum’s theme this year is “Tech, Faithfully,” and I’ll be delivering an oral presentation titled “Tech Beyond Its Maker: AI, Idolatry, and the Inversion of Human Agency.”
This paper examines how artificial intelligence increasingly reshapes human agency, perception, and desire. It argues that contemporary AI enacts an “instrumental inversion,” where creators of technological systems risk becoming instruments of their own creations. Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas on instrumental causality, Heidegger’s concept of Gestell (enframing), and Levinas’s ethics of the face-to-face encounter, the analysis shows how algorithmic structures reduce persons to functions, overshadow moral encounter and reconfiguring freedom itself.
A biblical theology of idolatry, combined with Jean-Luc Marion’s idol–icon distinction and Augustine’s ordo amoris, frames transhumanist ambitions as a modern form of eidolon—an image cut off from its divine source, where simulation supplants worship and self-extension displaces grace. In response, the imago Dei serves as an ontological boundary and gift, echoing global relational frameworks like Ubuntu and fitra. These perspectives redirect causality toward covenantal dependence and responsibility toward the vulnerable Other.
The paper concludes with a constructive theological ethic calling faith communities to discernment, embodied care, and the redirection of technological power toward genuine human flourishing. In this vision, AI serves rather than rules, and the sacred image reclaims its primacy.
The Koinonia Forum offers a vital space for emerging scholars to engage interdisciplinary questions at the intersection of technology and faithful theology. I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute and look forward to the conversations ahead!