J.D. · M.Div. · D.Min.
Attorney. Army Chaplain. Theologian. Educator. Builder of Systems That Serve People.
Scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of theology, applied ethics, and interdisciplinary public engagement. Trained in pastoral theology, legal reasoning, and ministry formation; shaped by two decades of practice across the United States Army, the courts, the church, and the community.
"The credential is what you get when this is over. The formation is what you carry."
I teach theology as a formative discipline, not an informational one. Students can read a book on their own. What they cannot do on their own is learn to think theologically under pressure — to hold Scripture, tradition, reason, and lived experience in the same hand while a real decision waits on the other side.
I open with a case, a text, or a question that has weight. I close with something students can take into an actual context — a sermon, a policy brief, a pastoral conversation, a family meeting. In between, I ask questions the tradition has already asked, and I make students find their way into them rather than around them.
This is not a room for polite avoidance. Race, poverty, institutional power, war, sexuality, technological harm, theological disagreement — these belong in a Christian ethics classroom, not despite the tradition but because of it. Rigor and respect are not in tension. Students will be challenged. Students will also be heard.
My students should know Augustine, Aquinas, Wesley, Bonhoeffer, Cone, Copeland, Townes, Weil, Merton, Niebuhr, and Hauerwas. They should also know how those voices help them counsel a grieving widow, respond to a member's crisis of faith, or preach at a Juneteenth service. If scholarship does not reach the room where it is needed, it has failed.
"The question is not whether machines can imitate us. The question is whether we still know what we were."
My research program takes seriously that the twenty-first-century church is being formed — for good and for ill — by systems it did not build, does not fully understand, and has been slow to critique theologically. My work asks what Christian theology, and specifically the resources of the Black Church tradition and the broader stream of costly discipleship, contribute to a moment in which artificial intelligence is already reshaping how human beings work, relate, worship, and know themselves.
Drawing on Bonhoeffer's account of cheap grace and Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, this stream names a distinctive contemporary form of Christian failure: compliance discipleship — the substitution of the appearance of formation for its substance. My current book-in-progress, Cheap Discipleship, develops this argument across nine chapters. Central claim: if a machine can imitate our discipleship convincingly, we should ask what our discipleship has become.
Christian ethics has under-served the majority of its formation targets: the ninety-plus percent of the baptized who spend their working lives in institutions the pulpit rarely names. This stream includes work on marketplace theology, military ministry, moral injury, and public theology as prophetic responsibility in civic space.
Represented by the essay "The Discipline of Attention" (under review at Practical Theology, Taylor & Francis), this stream argues that the digital attention economy constitutes a pastoral harm. The Black Church tradition — which has always understood that what look like economic or technological problems are, at their root, theological ones — is the tradition the field most needs right now.
The courses listed below reflect subjects prepared to teach — with existing syllabi, extensive reading, and applied experience.
"This is a Christian ethics course. Artificial intelligence is the lens through which we do the ethics — not the reverse."
The tradition of Christian moral reasoning has been asking the questions AI now forces on the culture for two thousand years. Students will learn to reason as Christian ethicists — then apply that reasoning to real AI deployments in criminal justice, health care, hiring, ministry practice, and pastoral care, and construct prophetic responses adequate to what they find.
| Wk | Topic | Primary Readings |
|---|---|---|
| Unit I — The Grammar of Christian Ethics (Weeks 1–4) | ||
| 1 | What Is Christian Ethics?Sources, frameworks, what makes a question Christian | Wells & Quash, Chs. 1–2; Micah 6:8; Matthew 5–7 |
| 2 | Virtue, Character, and the Formed LifeAristotle, Aquinas, Hauerwas | Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, Chs. 1–3 |
| 3 | Law, Duty, and ConsequenceNatural law; deontology; consequentialism | Wells & Quash, Chs. 3–5; Augustine, City of God XIX |
| 4 | Liberation, Womanist, and Black Theological EthicsA source, not an appendix | Cone, Chs. 1–2; Townes, Introduction and Ch. 1 |
| Unit II — The Machine and the Neighbor (Weeks 5–8) | ||
| 5 | What AI Is Actually DoingMachine learning basics; the myth of objectivity | Zuboff, Chs. 1–3; ProPublica, "Machine Bias" |
| 6 | Made in Whose Image?Imago Dei; personhood; moral agency | Genesis 1–2; Bonhoeffer, Chs. 1–4 |
| 7 | Algorithms and the VulnerablePredictive policing; hiring screens; COMPAS | Benjamin, Chs. 1–3; Noble, Chs. 1–3 |
| 8 | Attention, Formation, and Digital LifeThe attention economy as a pastoral problem | Andrews, "The Discipline of Attention" |
| Unit III — The Church in the Algorithmic Age (Weeks 9–11) | ||
| 9 | Cheap DiscipleshipWhen formation becomes performable by a machine | Bonhoeffer, Chs. 5–8; Andrews, Cheap Discipleship (draft) |
| 10 | AI-Assisted Ministry: Practice and Its LimitsWorkshop session | Anthropic, "Constitutional AI"; USCCB document |
| 11 | The Church, the Data, and the CongregationDigital discipleship; protecting the sheep from the platform | Noble, Ch. 6; guest practitioner session |
| Unit IV — Prophetic Response and the Vocation of the Ethicist (Weeks 12–15) | ||
| 12 | The Christian Ethicist as Public VoiceKing, Bonhoeffer, Day, Cone in tech debates | Cone, Chs. 6–7; King, Letter from Birmingham Jail |
| 13 | Constructing a FrameworkStudent framework workshopping | No new readings — full class workshop |
| 14 | Prophetic Response PresentationsStudent capstone presentations | No new readings — full session |
| 15 | Synthesis and CommissionWhere do you go from here? | Student final reflections; class synthesis |
Engagement is not a technique. It is a covenant. My commitment to students is that if they show up prepared — having read, thought, and arrived with something to say — I will meet them with the same standard of preparation, and the class will be worth the cost of their time.
Weekly reading responses (250–400 words) are due before class. In class, paired analysis and structured disagreement ensure the quietest student's thinking gets the same weight as the fluent one's.
Drawn from actual court decisions, congregational conflicts, military ethics dilemmas, and AI deployments. Legal training taught me that a good case is a better teacher than a good lecture.
Assignments produce work with audiences beyond the professor: a policy brief addressed to a real institution, a sermon series preachable in a real congregation, a curriculum a real nonprofit could use.
Students may use AI tools for research and exploration. They may not use them to generate the arguments or written content they submit. Formation requires the friction of the student's own thinking.
If AI can increasingly imitate Christian language, sermons, prayers, and discipleship, how will the Church distinguish genuine transformation from well-trained imitation?
ReHuman argues that this question is not primarily about machines. It is about us.
The Problem. A large language model can now write a sermon that quotes Scripture correctly, follows the arc of biblical theology, sounds pastorally warm, and lands with a passable altar call. None of it is discipleship. All of it is imitation. And most of the church does not yet have a language for the difference.
The Argument. ReHuman argues that the disturbing question is not whether AI can imitate Christian discipleship convincingly. The disturbing question is what that imitation reveals about the discipleship it is imitating. Building on Bonhoeffer's account of cheap grace and Cone's account of the cross as the site where God takes sides with the suffering, ReHuman names a distinctive contemporary form of Christian failure: compliance discipleship — the substitution of the shape of formation for its substance. The AI age does not create this failure. It exposes it.
The Contribution. This project contributes to theological ethics of technology, pastoral formation and adult discipleship, and the Black Church's long tradition of naming the moral character of technologies that dehumanize. It offers pastors, adult formation leaders, and seminary faculty a workable framework for distinguishing formation from imitation in an environment engineered to blur the two.
A complete reference list — including academic, ministerial, military, and professional references — is available on request. References can speak to teaching capacity, scholarly potential, pastoral formation, and institutional leadership.
Request References → jra2esq@gmail.com
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