By
YONAT SHIMRONUpdated 6:20 PM EDT, July 29, 2026
(RNS) — At the end of the Civil War, a Union soldier and Baptist minister founded a school in Raleigh, North Carolina, to provide formerly enslaved people with religious literacy.
Now that same school — Shaw University — wants to provide
literacy of a new kind: AI literacy.Starting next year, Shaw’s divinity school plans to offer a
new degree track:
a Doctor of Education (or Ed.D) in Artificial Intelligence and Moral Agency.As the AI spreads and performs more and more tasks traditionally done by humans, the divinity school wants to get ahead of the curve and probe its moral implications.
“We say Shaw was created to provide leadership in building literacy,” said Mark Harden, dean of Shaw University Divinity School. “We (half)joke this is our second calling because we’re building AI literacy for vulnerable communities with an emphasis on social justice and ethics.”
In June, the divinity school secured the go-ahead from the regional accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. It is now working on receiving a seal of approval with the Commission on Accrediting at the Association of Theological Schools, a network of 280 graduate schools of theology across the United States and Canada.
Shaw’s AI degree would be the first among the ATS network in either the master’s or doctoral level, said Chris Meinzer, ATS’s chief operating officer. Several divinity schools have begun offering solo classes in AI and ethics.
In December, Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the
Common Good received a $50 million gift from the Lilly Endowment to support the so-called
DELTA network that will provide practical resources for pastors, churches and schools to navigate challenges posed by AI. DELTA stands for dignity, embodiment, love, transcendence and agency — which it believes are the core Christian values. (RNS also receives grant support from the Lilly Endowment.)
“Almost everybody we’re talking with and working with in higher education right now is just getting really serious about how issues involving artificial intelligence are really shaping a lot of the ethical questions that we want to study going forward, and a lot of the formation work that we need to do with our students,” said Meghan Sullivan, a philosopher and director of the Institute for Ethics and the
Common Good at Notre Dame.