Paul Scherz, the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology and ND–IBM Tech Ethics Lab Program Chair at the University of Notre Dame, has guest edited the latest issue of the journal Social Research, focused on disruptions to the experience and processing of grief, and understandings of the afterlife.
Along with co-editors Joseph E. Davis, research professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and William Hasselberger, associate professor at the Institute for Political Studies of the Catholic University of Portugal, Scherz authored the introductory article, writing, “In this special issue, we explore the technology and our changed circumstances, and we ask what disrupting conceptions of death through technology might mean for vital aspects of human self-understanding, mourning, care relationships, and the social order in which we are born, live, and pass away.”
The 10 articles included in the issue grew out of a workshop convened by Scherz and his co-editors in Lisbon, Portugal, from October 10-11, 2025. The gathering was supported by funding from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, housed at Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and The Digital Ethics Laboratory at the Catholic University of Portugal, where the workshop took place.
The convening built on the co-editors’ observations about the rapid development of AI bots and the ways this emerging technology has changed the process of mourning a person’s death or loss.
“One of the things that was quite striking, with the development of griefbots, was this shift in terms of the broader transformation of understandings of death,” said Scherz. “For our gathering and this issue, we located people who have worked for a long time in this field and scholars who are among the best ethical thinkers in general who haven’t dealt with this topic, but we thought would have something important to say.”
In his own article, “Blessed Are They Who Mourn: Christian Perspectives on Griefbots,” Scherz explores Christian perspectives on so-called “griefbots” or “ghost bots,” AI bots designed to simulate the personality, voice, and appearance of a deceased person. Scherz lays out the case for both the positive benefit of griefbots in providing consolation, while offering a clear-eyed assessment of the ways such tools might strive to short-circuit or erase the natural processes of mourning and, ultimately, in the Christian theological understanding, being transformed and drawn closer to God.
The full issue is available online and via Project MUSE. Scherz is a key faculty member whose work advances the University of Notre Dame’s Ethics Initiative.