Last year, the Catholic sisters of the Society of the Sacred Heart created a reparations fund to finance scholarships for African-Americans in Grand Coteau, La., where the nuns had owned about 150 black people.

This spring, students at Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, voted to create a fund, financed by student fees, to benefit the descendants of the 272 people who were sold in 1838 to help keep the college afloat. (The plan has yet to receive approval from Georgetown’s board of trustees.)

The Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown and organized the 1838 slave sale, are currently in talks with descendants of the people they once owned. Those descendants are seeking $1 billion for a foundation that would finance educational, health, housing and other needs.

In a statement, Timothy P. Kesicki, the president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, said the Jesuits and Georgetown officials “have been constructively engaged in discussing the descendants’ vision for a pathway forward.”

The decision by Virginia Theological Seminary moves the debate over reparations — which in recent months has bubbled up in presidential campaigns and in the halls of Congress — from the theoretical to a reality.

“It’s important because the conversation about institutional obligations to the descendants of the enslaved typically gets confined to a discussion of research and fact-finding,” said Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at M.I.T. who has written extensively about universities and their ties to slavery.

“It’s the religious institutions that have started to lay out a path from there toward restorative justice,” Dr. Wilder added. “It’s much harder for religious institutions to be silent on the moral implications of their own history.”