Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler has appointed noted ethicist Jason Thacker as assistant professor of philosophy and ethics at Boyce College. Thacker, one of the foremost scholars on the intersection of faith and technology, currently serves as Research Director for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, where he will continue to serve as a Research Fellow after joining the Boyce College faculty.
President Mohler said Thacker’s background makes him an invaluable addition to the college’s faculty.
“Jason Thacker is an outstanding, young evangelical scholar who is doing cutting-edge work on artificial intelligence and many other areas,” Mohler said. “What we desperately need in this generation is a sustained evangelical engagement on issues of technology, intelligence, and a biblical understanding of humanity. Jason Thacker is poised to be one of the most significant ethical and theological thinkers of his generation.”
Dustin Bruce, dean of Boyce College, believes Thacker is the right voice to equip students for ministry in a digital culture.
“Jason Thacker has distinguished himself as a preeminent Christian ethicist,” Bruce said. “He makes a welcome addition to the Boyce College faculty, as we seek to educate students to meet tomorrow’s challenges with eternal wisdom. His scholarship and love for the church will help believers think carefully about the intersection of technology and their faith.”
The right to privacy, artificial intelligence and social media are unique issues facing Christians in the digital age. Thacker’s scholarship aims to confront each of these challenges with well-reasoned biblical wisdom.
Thacker’s books include: The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (2020), Following Jesus in A Digital Age: Biblical Wisdom for Digital Culture (2022), and Track: A Student’s Guide to Social Media (2023).
He also edited the recent volume The Digital Public Square: Christian Ethics in a Technological Society (2023) and has published scholarly articles on Christianity and technology.
Thacker, who has served as a Boyce Adjunct Instructor since 2021, has earned his MDiv and is a PhD candidate in Ethics and Public Policy at SBTS. He is excited to remain a part of the Southern community in a new role.
“My years at Southern Seminary were so formative for me,” Thacker said. “It is a true honor to rejoin this campus community as a faculty member as we all seek to apply the unchanging truths of God’s word to the moral and social questions of our day. There is a level of depth and nuance at Boyce that is unparalleled in Christian higher education, and I am thrilled to play a part in what God is doing in the lives of our students.”
SBTS Provost Paul Akin said Thacker is a perfect fit to help students respond to the digital challenges facing the church today.
“There is a clear need for more Christian leaders who can help us think biblically and carefully about technology,” Akin said. “Jason Thacker is widely respected as that kind of leader and wants to help develop those kinds of leaders in the next generation. I am really excited for our students to learn from him in the classroom and for our pastors and churches to benefit from his teaching and writing on these urgent topics.”
