Series from the DTL Press
DTL Book Series
The DTL Press currently publishes three series. Click the links below to read about the books in each of series. Scroll down if you’d like to learn what each of our series has to offer in greater detail.
All eBooks published by the DTL—regardless of series—have four characteristics in common.
- A focus on theological education and religious studies
- A scholarly orientation
- Quick and efficient translation into multiple languages
- Available Open Access (end users can read our eBooks without paying any fees)
Open Resources for Global Theological Education Series
In our work with theological schools in developing nations, we have observed a clear need for theological resources in diverse languages. This series is designed to meet that profound need. The DTL is working diligently to find well-regarded works in the fields of biblical, religious, and theological studies that it can make more widely available in translation.
When circumstances allow, the DTL is acquiring the right to translate such works into additional languages and making those translations available in this series. Discerning readers will notice that no translator is acknowledged in the work’s opening credits. We must therefore point out that this work, like all works translated by the DTL, was—for the most part—translated by artificial intelligence. We trust that our application of AI has produced a translation worthy of author’s previously published text.
Learn about Theological Essentials, the DTL Press's series that is designed to bring the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the field of theological education.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything, including theological scholarship and education. Keep reading to learn about how the DTL Press is using AI to make fundamental theological resources more accessible to scholars all over the world.
In the traditional model, a scholar with both mastery of the scholarly discourse and a record of successful classroom teaching would spend several months—or even several years—writing, revising, and rewriting an introductory text which would then be transferred to a publisher who also invested months or years in production processes.
Even though the end product was typically quite predictable, this slow and expensive process caused the prices of textbooks to balloon. As a result, students in developed nations paid more than they should have for the books and students in developing nations typically had no access to these (cost-prohibitive) textbooks until they appeared as discards and donations decades later.
In previous generations, the need for quality assurance—in the form of content generation, expert review, copy-editing and printing time—may have made this slow, expensive and exclusionary approach inevitable. However, AI is changing everything. This series is very different; it is created by AI.
The cover of each volume identifies the work as “created under the supervision of” an expert in the field. However, that person is not an author in the traditional sense. The creator of each volume has been trained by the DTL staff in the use of AI and the creator has used AI to create, edit, revise and recreate the text that you see. With that creation process clearly identified, let me explain the goals of this series.
The DTL Press aims to develop credible, affordable, and accessible resources. As part of the DTL's mission, we aim to provide high-quality resources on a quicker timeline at lower price than traditionally available.
Read through the tabs below to learn more about how the process behind Theological Essentials makes it possible to accomplish credibility, affordability, and accessibility.
Credibility: Although AI has made—and continues to make—huge strides over the last few years, no unsupervised AI can create a truly reliable or fully credible college or seminary level text. The limitations of AI generated content sometimes originates from the limitations of the content itself (the training set may be inadequate).
But, more often, user dissatisfaction with AI-generated content arises from human errors associated with poor prompt engineering. The DTL Press has sought to overcome both of these problems by hiring established scholars with widely recognized expertise to create books within their areas of expertise and by training those scholars and experts in AI prompt engineering.
To be clear, the scholar whose name appears on the cover of this work has created this volume—generating, reading, regenerating, rereading and revising the work. Even though the work was generated (in varying degrees) by AI, the names of our scholarly creators appear on the cover as a guarantee that the content is equally credible with any introductory work which that scholar/creator would pen using the traditional model.
Affordability: The DTL Press is committed to the idea that affordability should not be a barrier to knowledge. All persons are equally deserving of the right to know and to understand. Therefore, ebook versions of all DTL Press books are available from the DTL libraries without charge, and available as print books for a nominal fee.
Our scholar/creators are to be thanked for their willingness to forego traditional royalty arrangements. (Our creators are compensated for their generative work, but they do not receive royalties in the traditional sense.)
Accessibility: The DTL Press would like to make high quality, low cost introductory textbooks available to everyone, everywhere in the world. The books in this series are immediately made available in multiple languages. The DTL Press will create translations in other languages upon request. Translations are, of course, generated by AI.
Limitations of Theological Essentials
Some readers are undoubtedly thinking, “but AI can only produce derivative scholarship; AI can’t create original, innovative scholarship.” That criticism is, of course, largely accurate. AI is largely limited to aggregating, organizing and repackaging pre-existing ideas (although sometimes in ways that can be used to accelerate and refine the production of original scholarship).
Still while acknowledging this inherent limitation of AI, the DTL Press would offer two comments: (1) Introductory texts are seldom meant to be truly ground breaking in their originality and (2) the DTL Press has other series dedicated to publishing original scholarship with traditional authorship.
