But Fryer also says two other things that are the brunt of his argument: one, a lot of that extra income is eaten up by “Baumol goods” - that is, services that are hard to provide at any kind of labor scale, and so don’t tend to see what we see with, say, computers, where we are awash in them for cheap. Overall inflation measures don’t capture those, plus (as he notes) a considerable amount of the higher household income is because a much higher percentage of households have two workers, thus necessitating extra costs (like daycare, a “Baumol good” for sure). So the household in 1975 may truly have had more disposable, discretionary income at the end of the day, and discretionary income is what makes us feel not squeezed. He admits there are real challenges in certain areas of life, that are not “indulgence” but “infrastructure” for an ordinary middle-class household today. The maze of medical costs is highlighted.

But two, Fryer says, life is still a lot better than in 1975. He outlines higher life expectancy, cleaner air, safer cars, and unimaginable more media choices. Yet we fail to notice those gains (that, he says, the economy has provided) because of “hedonic adaptation.” Thus, he recommends the following:

The antidote [to hedonic adaptation] psychologists prescribe is mental subtraction: deliberately imagining life without what you take for granted. Try it with 1975. No air bags. A much higher risk of being robbed. Three television networks. We’ve adapted to these gains so completely they no longer feel like gains. The greatest threat to middle-class happiness may not be the cost of child care. It may be that they can’t afford to notice how much better life has become.

It’s a rather strange conclusion, but a fairly common one among market apologists: we complain, but in fact, we have it better than ever. There are at least two problems with this. One is the weird aspects of using “median household” measures. This sort of aggregated data is the best we can do, perhaps, but it’s important to recognize that there is no “median household” in reality. The actual median household by income may have quite different expenses. Perhaps they live in Wichita. Maybe they share in a vacation home in Michigan that the family has passed down. Maybe they have large, ongoing child care expenses because of a special-needs child. Maybe they live in a voucher state, and so send their kids to private school for very little. Or maybe they are 60-year-olds with two adult kids and no mortgage. Measuring things based on overall medians tends to aggregate things that give us an illusion of a particular case, but in fact, there is no such case. Still, it’s what we have, and Fryer nicely shows that some aspects of the problem need specific targeting, like medical care.

But the more interesting and problematic element involves the supposed quality-of-life gains he outlines. Weirdly, he attributes many of these gains to the economy, but it’s plainly the case that things like cleaner air, safer cars, and lower crime have little to do with economic forces - they are the result of specific government actions, like regulating industry, getting lead out of gasoline, and policing better (there are other, more troubling aspects of lower crime, of course). The clearest way the economy has increased the quality of life is that we no longer have just three television networks and no longer, as he puts it, have to wait “for the evening news to learn what was happening in the world.” He cites a study that claims “Americans value access to search engines, email and digital maps at roughly $30,000 a year, none of which shows up in income statistics.”

Now, there’s truth to this, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. It is a typical example of the “more-is-better” fallacy that often affect economic analysis. Bigger TV’s and more choices of what to watch are better. What’s lacking here is any standard by which we could measure what we are seeking in these particular goods. No one suggests that we are better off if we just keep expanding the size of our beds (or simply getting more beds to sleep in), because we know what beds are for. Those who sell mattresses have to innovate by making those mattresses better. It seems like the choices he is extolling have to do with two things, information and entertainment. More information is clearly not better, because what we want is accurate information. The proliferation of information has certainly made that harder, even if we can usually call up a YouTube video to solve a household problem (which creates other difficulties, like making more and more of life “self-service,” as this other essay notes). The advantage of the daily newspaper or the network news was that, for all their problems, they did operate according to a level of professionalism that mattered. And what is lost when everyone has their own “custom” information source? A great deal. Because we don’t just want accurate information, we want accurate information that enables us to coordinate with others. One great achievement of the United States has been accurate government statistics that can be used by everyone for reliable decision-making. In this case, more is not better.

And this centrifugal aspect of the information economy may be even more important for the other aspect: entertainment. The existence of the mass media entertainment industry, for all its downsides, tended to offer some degree of unification, which is part of the point of a culture. There were always alternative outlets that people could find, and sometimes those alternative outlets broke into the mainstream - like bands that started on indie labels and then became mainstream successes. Today, there are “influencers,” of course, but it’s still hard to see how contemporary media enables cultural centrifugality. Maybe all this is better for the Church as a culture, although the fragmentation of ecclesial media also seems to me to often cause similar challenges. More information, less ability to dialogue and understand.

The question of the middle-class squeeze in a seeming affluent society is a very important one. Fryer’s article nicely outlines some of the complexities of the challenge, but also forces us to consider questions he does not raise: what is the role of coherent and responsible state regulation? And, as Francis puts it in Laudato Si, what sorts of technological choices should we make if we recognize that “[d]ecisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.” For, as he reminds us, “[w]e fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.”

This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, which comes fifty days after Easter. Pentecost originated as a harvest festival called Shavuot, during which loaves of bread from the spring wheat harvest were dedicated to God as an offering of first fruits (Lev. 23:15-17). Over time, the festival also came to commemorate another harvest of God’s gracious action in the world: the giving of the Torah to Moses at Sinai and the formation of Israel as a people (Exod. 19-20).

The Christian feast of Pentecost continues this story. It gathers these earlier harvests of divine grace and situates them in relationship to another: the gift of God’s own life in the Holy Spirit. This gift inaugurates a new “harvest,” one that brings together peoples from every land, language, and culture into Christ’s ecclesial body on earth, the church.

In what follows, I want to consider more closely the significance of Pentecost as a kind of harvest. What is gathered and bound together here is not grain from the fields but a people – a people with a particular shape. What, then, is this people, and what is its shape?

At the beginning of our first reading from Acts, we learn that the disciples were together when the Holy Spirit appeared “like a strong driving wind,” filling the house, and then as tongues of fire resting upon them (Acts 2:2-3). Yet the manifestation of the Spirit’s work on which the reading mainly focuses is linguistic. Once filled with the Spirit, those gathered “began to speak in different tongues,” and the pilgrims present in Jerusalem for the festival each heard them in their own native language (Acts 2:4-11). For Christians in America hearing this text during a time marked by war and geopolitical hostility, one detail is especially striking: among those gathered were Parthians, Medes, and Elamites (Acts 2:9) – peoples from regions that are now part of modern Iran.

Notice that those gathered were not all speaking a single common language – not Aramaic, not Greek, nor some official language that erased difference through uniform speech. The vision here is not the nationalist dream of everyone learning the same language. The disciples speak in the languages of the visitors themselves, which the text mentions explicitly four times (vv. 4, 6, 8, 11). The implication is clear. Whether proclaimed in Jerusalem or elsewhere, the Gospel gathers a people not by abandoning or erasing diversity and particularity but by embracing them, meeting people with the words that have formed them and that are distinctively theirs.

At the same time, Pentecost clearly destabilizes widespread assumptions about what it means to be a people. We live moment marked by nationalisms – even Christian ones – which draw strong ethno-racial boundaries around national identity and belonging. To be clear, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost does not erase the languages we speak, the histories and cultures that shape us, or the nations to which we belong. But the Holy Spirit does profoundly relativize those attachments in relation to a deeper one: to Christ and to the kind of neighbor love revealed in him.

One of the characteristic marks of this attachment, and the new people it brings into being, is that belonging is no longer fundamentally a matter of my people, my language, or my culture considered in isolation, but of how they are related to the whole community of the human. The disciples, after all, are entrusted with a message for all peoples and nations, and they are sent by God to share it. As we heard in the readings for Ascension Sunday, Jesus promises the disciples that they will receive the Holy Spirit, and that they “will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8; Mt 28:19-20). Pentecost is a decisive moment in this story: a foretaste – the first fruits – of a future harvest gathered from “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9).

In light of Pentecost, the most important thing about the church is not its teachings or message, essential though these are. The most important thing about the church is simply that it exists, that it is a people that gathers diverse peoples into a new people in whom ordinary divisions have been overcome. It is a people of peoples in whom, as our second reading from 1 Corinthians makes clear, there are many gifts, all animated by the same Spirit and ordered toward a common good (1 Cor. 12:3-7, 12-13). In Christ and through the work of the Holy Spirit, a deeper unity has become possible and perceptible in the world.

Once, while helping teach a week-long intensive theology course with seminarians from across Central America, I heard a preacher remind those of us gathered that whatever country we came from – the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, or Puerto Rico – our shared life in Jesus Christ is more fundamental than any claim of nationality. It is not that those national identities disappear or become meaningless, he said, but that in Christ, and in the body that is the church, they are no longer ultimate.

I have thought about his words often over the years, realizing that everywhere I have known the church, I have witnessed this deeper unity. Whether in the Polish nuns and American priests with whom I grew up in Zambia, or in the Spanish priests and American nuns who worked and even shed their blood for the Salvadoran people, or in the Philippine, Nigerian, and Colombian priests of my local parishes in the US, the church has manifested itself as a border-crossing people, consisting of members who say, in the words of Ruth to Naomi, “your people shall be my people” (Ruth 1:16).

Even for those who never undertake such journeys, a border-crossing love marks this people and gives shape to its distinctive way of being a people. The parable of the Good Samaritan is exemplary, with the Samaritan becoming neighbor to the wounded man not simply because he left his path to care for him, but because his compassion crossed and overcame the divisions separating Samaritans and Jews. And as in our Gospel reading from John, even the seemingly insurmountable boundaries created by sin can be forgiven and overcome through the gift of the Holy Spirit Jesus breathes onto his disciples (Jn. 20:19–23).

All this is a way of being a people that Pentecost has made possible, a gift the Holy Spirit continues to offer to a world marked by division. For Pentecost remains the sign – despite all evidence to the contrary – that division is not the final word over human life.

In the last year, I have sat through hours of training sessions, conversations, conferences, and faculty email chains that are wrestling with the task of education in the changing technological landscape of artificial intelligence (AI). There have been a wide range of reactions to the changes: some are eager about the new horizons of learning that this technology opens to students, and others are disturbed about how this technology may discourage free and original thinking. Despite the wide variety of reactions, the consensus reached was that AI demands us to re-think what we are doing in the classroom. Previous assignments that focused on summary analysis of complex texts or even rote memorization of definitions tested by multiple choice questions now seem somewhat obsolete. How can learning still be possible when, as my students have said to me, “Chat can do it for me”?

I have to admit I am skeptical about this narrative of AI destroying higher education. Is AI really to blame? Or, is it making the lack of vision for learning and purpose of higher education simply more apparent?

When I read Heron and Rovati’s vision of education, I was struck by how many of the conversations I have been having about higher education and AI did not have this kind of dynamic vision. According to Heron and Rovati, the purpose of education is “to offer them [students] a working hypothesis, a way to look at and understand reality and everything in it. It is to provide them with an orientation about the ultimate meaning of things, the fulfillment and destiny towards which humans strive” (115). This vision of education does not emerge from ideology but Christian faith. The event of the Incarnation demands that I consider reality anew. For this vision to succeed, education cannot be a one-sided activity. On the part of educators, it calls for accompaniment and on-going conversation. On the part of students, it demands that they have personal responsibility to “commit themselves to such a journey of discernment and discovery” (119).

As powerful as AI can be, it does not offer the formation for students to press into understanding reality. In my experience, AI has simply increased the temptation to not take responsibility for education. In the conversations I have been having, this temptation resides both on the part of professors who are stretched for time and energy, given our many professional commitments to the academy and institutions we serve, as well as to our students. It takes a great deal of courage and responsibility to probe into reality in the way Heron and Rovati describe. Asking what the meaning of my life is not a task for the faint hearted.

To achieve this vision of education in the age of AI, we must recover and cultivate a sense of responsibility for education both on the side of educators and students. To be fair, this has been a challenge long before AI. According to Heron and Rovati, the contemporary emphasis put on grades in education has not only discouraged but also incentivized a lack of responsibility for learning. By motivating students through external punishments (“bad grade”) and rewards (“good grade”), grades are used by educators to coerce certain behaviors from students (eg. “If you do all the reading, you will get a good grade” or “If you miss more than eight classes, you will get a bad grade”). Rather than facilitating a “journey of discernment and discovery,” grades counterproductively distract students from taking on the responsibility necessary for learning. Students focus on achieving the reward or avoiding the punishment. Learning as coming to understand reality becomes the educator’s youthful naivete or an idealistic pipe dream (109-111).

I was skeptical about this argument until I thought about my own experience of education: I can tell you what my worst grade was since middle school (and even what class it was and the teacher’s name), but I cannot tell you what I learned in most of my highest scoring courses or how they contributed to who I am today. In implementing some of the alternative forms of assessment of student learning mentioned by Heron and Rovati in the last two years, I am convinced that they are on to something.

I have been facilitating student learning through contract grading. I ask students to first set their own desired learning outcome: what kind of learning do they want to be responsible for this semester? Do they want the kind of mastery of the subject to be able to tutor another student or someone who is not familiar with the topic? Or, are they merely aiming for what I call “big picture learning,” or enough knowledge to present a general overview of the topic? Then, I make the promise to help them attain this learning outcome by providing them with feedback. Rather than using grades to punish or reward students, we use them together to discuss how they are reaching their own learning goals.

Contract grading is not a solve-all. But, I do believe it encourages and incentivizes the right things: namely, learning and responsibility. I no longer feel like I am the gate-keeper to graduation or acceptance to graduate school. I am a collaborator. Without the pressures of the traditional grading system, my students and I have been much more willing to take the risks and sacrifices that learning requires. The amount of work my students put into revising their work to achieve their desired learning outcome is inspiring. I love how proud they are of their work at the conclusion of the class. What I previously thought was an educator’s rosy optimism and idealistic vision has become my experience.

As AI continues to present opportunities to maximize efficiency through its rapid completion of tasks and dispensing answers to a wide variety of questions, it will also continue to pose the illusion that being an educator is to give answers and that being educated is about having answers. How will higher education respond to the need to create a learning environment that prioritizes discovery over having answers? At minimum, I do believe we must de-center grades from education. In doing so through contract grading, my students and I have both begun to enjoy learning again. As one of my students said to me recently, “Chat could get an A, but it can’t actually learn.” Because of my students, I have a lot of hope that this is not the beginning of the end but rather a new start for higher education.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

So too, “artificial intelligence” is the language we have, and it is a formulation that has happily stuck. Because, I would suggest, it is a fairly sturdy label for what we have here: an imitation version of a human capacity that can simulate at least the results of human thinking. When we speak about people as “intelligent,” we normally mean that they know a lot of stuff, and that they can sort through the stuff they know with some ability. But our ordinary language suggests there is a lot more to being human - to what we might call “consciousness” or even “thinking” - than merely being “intelligent.” For Catholics, a towering intellect is certainly an admirable human quality, but it is in no way clear that among the saints, intellectual capacity is the prime consideration - not even for those designated “doctors of the church.” While it’s a mistake to reduce Christianity to a set of rituals or a set of feelings, neither is Christianity simply a philosophy. It is, of course, first and foremost a person, incarnated in a history of human events in which we participate. “Intelligence” may help us grasp some things about that. But the faith is not about passing that kind of test!

Image from Plaza of the Columns Complex; https://ppcteotihuacan.org/en/field-work/archaeological-materials/

Even better, this new “intelligence” is “artificial.” Of course, the word comes from the idea of an “artifact,” that is something produced by humans, and its opposite is the wonderful word “natural.” Something that is artificial is, by definition, not natural. And in the Christian view, what is natural is what is created. As Popes Benedict and Francis both explained at length, the natural world (of which we are a part) is “prior to us” (BXVI) and “we are not God” (Francis). That world has a dazzling array of diverse interconnectedness that is potentially a blessing in which we can (with our intellect) participate and even enhance. But only if we recognize that natural order. Otherwise, we act out of what Francis famously called “the technocratic paradigm,” which:

exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. … It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.

When we say AI is “artificial,” then, what we should recognize is that it is not only a simulation of the real thing. It is also something that wholly depends on the real thing - which is, of course, a key danger, since a goal of the technocratic paradigm is to develop technologies that replace our natural capacities, and sell them back to us as an improvement. To do so, they must extract from humans the very “intelligence” that they desire to sell back to us as a simulated but improved version.

In the movie The Founder, about the founding and growth of McDonald’s, Michael Keaton’s Ray Kroc enthuses about a milk shake that is just a mixture of powder and water. He is excited that this will remove the need for all the refrigeration of milk and ice cream at stores (i.e. the expense), and the various chemicals in the powder allow for an excellent and standardized simulation of the milk shake experience. One of the original MacDonalds hears about this on the phone, and says, “What? A milk shake without milk?” and hangs up on him.

AI is a lot better than a simulated milkshake, but look, I loved those milkshakes when I was a kid. It’s important that at some point, I realized what real food was. It doesn’t mean I can’t ever have a milkshake. But at the end of the day, artificial intelligence is just that: a simulation of an amazing, fundamentally human quality -one that is natural because it is from God. To use Joshua Mitchell’s great formulation of our large-scale cultural problem with what he calls “substitutism”: AI can be useful as a supplement to our lives, in many ways. But let’s not build an information ecosystem where it is a substitute for the real thing.

Higher education in the United States is under pressure to justify itself in economic terms. From federal insistence on demonstrating ROI to parental concerns about employability, colleges and universities must prove that a degree pays off. This pressure reorganizes schools’ internal operations, resulting in cuts to core requirements, reductions in tenure lines, and neglect of programs without clear paths to jobs. Catholic colleges and universities differ in that they feel this pressure more intensely. Partly, this is because so many of them have already closed.

But partly it is because the economic framing threatens the very essence of Catholic higher education. These colleges and universities have long been attentive to the economic concerns of students as so many of them were founded based on the financial and cultural needs of immigrants. They just never stopped there. They situated these material concerns within a larger view of truth, the common good, and God.

Having worked for almost thirty years in Catholic colleges, I’ve been worried about their survival, not just keeping the doors open but about preserving their very soul. This is what drove me to conduct the Holistic Impact Report (HIR), first in 2024 and again in 2025. Each iteration surveyed 2,000 college graduates, comparing 1,000 alumni of Catholic institutions with 1,000 alumni of non-religiously affiliated institutions. (See here for more methodological details.) The findings across both years point to what I call “integral human flourishing,” a term I derive from Paul VI’s “integral human development” in Populorum Progressio. The substitution of “flourishing” for “development” marks a shift from international politics to the education of students, but the underlying logic is the same. Authentic human progress cannot be measured by economic growth alone and must attend to the whole person across spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions.

Meaningful Lives, Community Engagement, Ethical Decision Making

The orientation of Catholic higher education toward integral human flourishing can be seen in the primary results of the HIR study, findings consistent across both years. Graduates of Catholic colleges and universities report higher outcomes than secular college graduates across three domains: meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making.

On meaningful lives, graduates of Catholic colleges were more likely to describe their lives as close to their ideal and to report that their lives have a clear sense of direction. In 2025, 60 percent of Catholic college graduates reported that their life is close to their ideal, compared to 53 percent of secular college graduates, and 72 percent reported a clear sense of direction, compared to 67 percent of secular peers.

Community engagement followed the same pattern. In 2025, 48.6 percent of Catholic college graduates reported volunteering in the prior six months, compared to 40.8 percent of secular colleges graduates. This gap appeared across activities like serving on school or community boards, volunteering at local food banks, and tutoring youth.

For ethical decision making, the study looked at five moral concepts: loyalty, authority, purity, suffering, and fairness (utilizing the Moral Foundations Questionnaire). Graduates of Catholic colleges consistently ranked more of them as highly relevant for making ethical decisions. In particular, concerns about others’ suffering and conforming to authority were the two most salient ones.

Work as Vocation

These three outcomes, meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making, frame how Catholic college graduates understood their professional lives. Graduates of Catholic colleges were 8.4 percentage points more likely to report that their college helped them understand how their work can serve others, and 6.8 percentage points more likely to view their career as a meaningful calling. Similar results held when they were asked if their work aligned with their values and if their education enabled them to make an impact in the world.

Reflecting the founding mission of Catholic colleges to attend to the material and spiritual needs of students, this understanding of work was built upon solid economic outcomes. Catholic college graduates reported full-time employment at a rate 7.3 percentage points higher than secular college graduates, and 52.5 percent reported household incomes of $100,000 or above, compared to 43.5 percent of secular college graduates.

AI and Work

Perhaps, integral human flourishing was seen more clearly when looking at the HIR data on AI in the workplace. The survey asked graduates about their current AI use at work, perceived preparedness for AI integration, support for AI adoption in the workplace, and views on AI’s societal impact. Across all four measures, graduates of Catholic colleges reported higher engagement and more positive orientations than secular graduates. They were more likely to use AI frequently or very frequently at work, and they were more than twice as likely to report feeling extremely prepared for AI integration.

When asked what prepared them for AI, graduates of Catholic colleges noted ethics, philosophy, critical thinking, and the liberal arts. They wrote, “I learned about ethics in philosophy and religion courses that I think correspond to thinking about AI in the workplace.” And, “I learned about thinking critically and being curious, which I think are important elements when determining how to use AI.” In other words, what they indicated was essential for addressing new and disruptive technology in the workplace was a solid core curriculum rooted in the liberal arts.

Conclusion

The pressure on higher education to justify itself in economic terms is real. The HIR provides a response for those in Catholic higher education by focusing on integral human flourishing. It is an approach that does not dismiss financial concerns, especially because Catholic colleges so often serve lower income and first-generation students. But Catholic colleges go beyond this to focus on meaning and purpose, even in work, responsibility to the community, and choosing what is good and right. What Catholic higher education offers is a vision for life, one that is rooted in a theological vision of the world, where life is about loving God and loving neighbor, where humanity flourishes not by bread alone but by the words of life that come from God.

The Church is not opposed in principle to artificial intelligence. After all, the Catholic magisterium is not anti-technology. John Paul II explains that “science and technology are a wonderful product of a God-given human creativity.” Benedict XVI teaches that technology expresses human beings’ desire to overcome material limitations and respond to God’s command to till and keep the land (cf. Genesis 2:15). Building upon his predecessors, Francis writes in Laudato Si that “technology has remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings. How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications?” (no. 102).

At the same time, the Church also warns us about our society’s idolatry of progress, our simplistic belief that every increase of technological power is necessarily a good, and the many ways in which we easily become blind to our own limitations and the gravity of the challenges that confront us (cf. Laudato Si, no. 105). The truth is that “immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience” and that, accordingly, “we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint” (Laudato Si, no. 105).

Thus, the advent of artificial intelligence puts us at a special crossroad that requires careful ethical analysis and deliberation so that we may develop and use AI in ways that “reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.” Here is the problem, though: technological products are not neutral. Laudato Si insists that they “create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (no. 107). Accordingly, we cannot start our ethical deliberations from scratch, as if AI were a simple tool among many. It is not. As I explained at length elsewhere, AI poses a unique anthropological challenge that we need to be alert to.

Antiqua et Nova warns us that, while mimicking human intelligence and speech, AI is incapable of moral discernment and authentic relationships (no. 32). Furthermore, AI “lacks the richness of corporeality, relationality, and the openness of the human heart to truth and goodness,” which means that it is dangerous to confuse the algorithmic outputs of this amazing technology with human intelligence and understanding, no matter how complex, efficient, or helpful they may be (no. 34). In the end, as the theologians involved in AI Research Group of the Centre for Digital Culture of Dicastery for Culture and Education have argued convincingly, “personhood and intelligence are categories that are not reducible to mechanically replicable behavioral performances, for they involve capacities for subjective, experiential, compassionate engagement with other persons and with reality itself” (11). In fact, the lurking danger of the current moment is a flattening of all intelligence to the number of tasks one can perform. While AI is a product of human intelligence, its ability to simulate thought and speech (together with the design choices that AI labs make to maximize user engagement) constantly tempts us to personalize it and lose sight of the fact that personhood and intelligence can never be reduced to the capacity for outward behavior. When we accept such a reduction, we end up embracing a functionalist perspective that applies the output-focused way we use to judge machines to people. On the one hand, such a mentality makes us lose sight of the “sharing of minds and hearts that we most greatly treasure in personal relationships and, ultimately, in our share in the life of God” (11). On the other hand, we reinforce the mentality of the throwaway culture that looks at those whose abilities are limited or impaired in any way (the unborn, the unconscious, and the elderly, for example) as lesser members of the human community that can be discarded (Antiqua et Nova, no 34). The epochal change brought about by AI “requires responsibility and discernment to ensure that AI is developed and utilized for the common good, building bridges of dialogue and fostering fraternity, and ensuring it serves the interests of humanity as a whole.”

Catholic scholars have taken up the task of developing frameworks for ethical discernment related to AI (including here at Catholic Moral Theology). Some have argued that engaging generative AI through chatbots is always evil, while others have drawn on Catholic social teaching to discern what AI uses and designs might be moral. I want to contribute to this ongoing conversation by proposing that we use just war criteria as a tool to discern the morality of AI use.

Let me start with a few caveats.

First, AI is a very broad category that encompasses many applications that are quite different. Machine learning has been a staple of our technological age for more than a decade now, and various forms of artificial intelligence have been deployed to make many of the apps and services we use daily possible. Second, even when we refer more specifically to generative AI, its uses are so broad and diverse that it is quite difficult to take a general stance about them. Third, AI is not like war in that it does not always involve the killing of human beings (except when it does, of course). Fourth, as recent news shows, the just war tradition is a complex and contested one. These warnings notwithstanding, the just war framework is helpful to investigate how to engage with AI carefully and avoid a “going with the flow” mentality.

Using just war criteria in an analogous way, I would argue that the Gospel demands a presumption against generative AI and chatbots, encourages us to pray for freedom from their bondage, and asks all people to work for their avoidance (cf. CCC, nos. 2307-2308). Given the conditions of fallen humanity, using generative AI might be justified at times, but Christians should engage with it only as a last resort, for just causes, with the right intentions, and if doing so does not produce graver evils and disorders (cf. CCC, no. 2309). The just war framework’s analogy also reminds us that there are ethical demands we must respect when we decide to use AI (jus ad AI), when we are using AI (jus in AI), and after we have used it (jus post AI). Finally, thinking of AI through the lenses of the just war tradition makes us recognize that some will want to renounce it altogether and become conscientious objectors to bear witness to the gravity of its moral risk (cf. CCC, nos. 2306) and that, accordingly, governments and institutions (tenure committees, for example) will need to protect their rights of conscience (cf. CCC, nos. 2311).

Taken together, these criteria help us discriminate between cases in which AI use is always forbidden (simulating personhood to exploit and monetize people’s needs for relationships, deception and misinformation, autonomous weapons systems, outsourcing intellectual work in educational settings, sex robots, deepfakes, and more) and others in which, for the sake of pursuing authentic human flourishing and the common good while protecting inviolable human dignity, its use might be ethical given that human abilities alone would not be able to pursue goods that are essential to integral human development (some applications in science and medicine, for example). The criteria help us tackle difficult areas where careful discernment is needed (for example, when is it moral to substitute human labor with AI? What tasks are ethical to outsource to AI, given the deskilling that accompanies all outsourcing?), while constantly reminding us that the material and spiritual conditions of our age make human exploitation the most likely outcome when it comes to technology (let’s learn our lessons from the ongoing discovery of the harmful effects of screen-based childhood, smartphones, and social media!).

Every time I read or hear that AI could serve the good if used in the right way, I always think of the fact that Adam and Eve could have obeyed God in the garden (cf. Genesis 3). They did not, though, which leaves us in a wounded and fragile condition where, without the ongoing aid of grace, concupiscence, deception, injustice, inequalities, envy, greed, and pride constantly push us to use AI in a disordered way that harms human dignity, agency, and relationships (cf. CCC, 2317). Just like Christians never engage in war following efficiency, productivity, or the pursuit of power as the determining factors for discernment, so too we should not use these criteria to decide whether to use AI. Instead, everything we do must be the outworking of Christian discipleship, a calling that summons us to walk the narrow path not just of using AI for the good but, most importantly, to walk towards holiness and the kingdom. In the end, what good will it be to gain the world thanks to the power of AI if we lose our souls?

(Editor’s note: This is a classic lectionary post originally posted in 2013. The Feast of the Ascension remains a feast with many of the same questions Patrick Clark originally asked.)

Let’s be honest: it is hard to delve too deeply into the feast of the Ascension without sounding either like a gnostic or a mythologizer.

On the one hand, you could say that Jesus simply dissolved himself from the material realm and now dwells in some “higher” realm beyond space and time where we too may one day join him. This initial construal may be theologically orthodox on some level, but I have always felt the specter of gnostic dualism surrounding it. Now that Jesus’ work is done, he need not have anything to do with this world of materiality, and can (finally) free himself from its limitations and degradations to join the heavenly Father in the incorporeal realm. Jesus can now be everywhere and in everyone, infinitely permeating all reality with his presence. It no longer matters that Jesus is “here” with us: that I can point to him, look at him, embrace him, anoint him. Yet if part of the significance of the Ascension is that the particularity of “place” is no longer of concern, then why does Jesus make the promise that he is going to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house? Why use the spatial language within the very act by which you emancipate yourself from the limitations of space?

David Burrell tells a story about an experience he had with a group of Muslim women who once asked him why he believed it to be more appropriate for the God of Abraham to have revealed himself through a person rather than a sacred text. His response was “because you can’t hug a book.” And yet, as the women pointed out, texts are less susceptible to the finitude of human existence. “God would have to assume a gender to become human,” the women rightly pointed out, and don’t we all know the complications and dangers that come along with that fact? Texts are less complicated: they do not bleed or sweat or grieve. And yet it was a person which the apostles loved and to which they adhered as the full revelation of the Father.

It was to a real human person whom they loved with their all-too-human hearts that they now had to bid farewell and whom they had to watch as He faded from their sight. I can’t help but think that I myself would not feel too comforted by Jesus’ exhortation, “let not your hearts be troubled.”

My eldest two children were once a part of a catechism class in which one of teachers died relatively suddenly from a brain tumor. The next time they met, they finished their class in the usual way by gathering in a circle and sharing their prayer intentions. One girl began the prayer with a simple yet profound statement of grief: “For Mrs. O___, who isn’t here anymore.” At first, I almost thought the prayer a little callous in its matter-of-factness, but then it occurred to me that this fact is indeed the very essence of death’s “sting:” the ones you have loved are simply not here. Once the trauma of such a loss abates, it is this sting that remains beneath the surface and makes itself felt acutely from time to time. One has something to share, wishes to see an expression or hear an old familiar laugh; and yet the person isn’t there.

So to make ourselves too content with this standard account of the Ascension as a translation from the material world to the spiritual world can trivialize the deep human love which made the disciples so troubled. We still find ourselves “here” in time and space, and yet it seems as if Jesus has moved on.

Interpretations of the Ascension may go to the opposite extreme as well, of course. In college, I remember being a witness to a fascinating debate between two philosophy doctoral students arguing about whether or not Jesus could theoretically be bodily discovered via space travel. I was so taken aback that two people whose critical intelligence I respected so much were taking this proposition as seriously as they were. But they were serious analytical Thomists, ardently (perhaps slavishly) dedicated to a non-dualist anthropology, and so if Jesus is to remain a fully human person after the Ascension, then he must have a body and that body must somehow correspond to spatial coordinates.

For obvious reasons, one hears this elaboration of the logical consequences of the event less often, since, well, it borders on parody. Yet a literal interpretation of the Ascension as an event in space-time is all too common. The only reason why we never hear about whether or not we could theoretically follow Jesus’ route in a spaceship, is simply that most of us just write off the whole story as a kind of myth. It certainly has the ring of myth about it, does it not? It also may sound to many people like the hasty explanation of someone straining to account for why a resurrected (and immortal) person no longer makes any further appearance in our midst. “He, er, he ascended into the clouds! Yeah, that’s it—just floated away into heaven.” Really? Couldn’t you have at least given him a flaming chariot like Elijah?

So what is an anti-dualist Christian to make of the Ascension? How can one maintain the integrity of Jesus’ corporeality without descending into purely mythic language?

Speaking only for myself, I have found a passage from Pascal a helpful point of departure for contemplating what alternative direction one might go: “As Jesus Christ remained unknown among men, so His truth remains among common opinions without external difference. Thus the Eucharist among ordinary bread” (Pensees 789). After the rant above, it should not be a surprise that at the end of the day I find the Ascension a deep mystery. Yet what makes it a vital and fecund object of contemplation instead of simply an implausible incongruity is the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If Jesus is the mediator between God and man and the source of eternal life, then our hope of participating in Him must ultimately involve some continuing corporeal link.

We are now Christ’s manifest body in the world, but as Catholics we also believe that Christ’s body also remains present in the world under the aspects of bread and wine at the altar of sacrifice. There his body is hidden, but it is real and complete. Furthermore, it is not there for itself alone, but only because of the Spirit which has formed it in the womb of the church to be offered as a sacrifice and consumed by those who pray to be consumed by it.

I admit it: I fervently long to meet the Lord face-to-face one day, just as I long to hear the voices of my beloved dead once more. Perhaps that is a too fleshly, too this-worldly hope. Regardless, it is the reason that I struggle with this feast, and why I cannot but fall back on the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist as my primary consolation in light of the fact that we no longer witness the bearded first-century Jew appearing through locked doors or showing up randomly as a dinner guest before disappearing after the blessing of the food. He may no longer wait for us by the shore eating his charcoaled fish (for breakfast? really?), but he does wait for us in the tabernacle, and upon the altar, and most of all in one other.

As parents often do with children, I appealed to his rationality, having him stand so close to the screen that he could see the light-emitting pixels that composed the image. “Look at this! How could something physical come out of something designed to show different colors of light?” He seemed to understand and appeared convinced, but, alas, the next day (and for weeks after) his siblings once again found the tv unplugged.

Like my young son, many of us do not really understand how certain technologies work. The recent popularity of AI in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude is due, in part, to the way LLMs appear to dialogue with the user, producing understandable human language. Like pixels in a tv screen, however, the words that appear in front of us are not exactly what they seem. As a matter of fact, they are also pixels on a screen, at a basic level.

The streaming involved in watching a tv show and the written language produced by an LLM both rely on largely unseen material infrastructure in the form of fiber optics cables and data processing centers. This infrastructure, whether streaming or LLM usage, requires water and energy. We are more familiar with the visible physical devices in front of us – phones, computers, tvs – than we are with the concealed infrastructure. To put this in categories of form and matter, the matter of such technology consists of our local devices, fiber optics cables that transport data, and data processing centers.

Just as there is no Lord Garmadon poised to strike a sleeping child unawares, there is no consciousness behind an LLM such that it seeks to incite discord or harm. The configuration of the physical matter can be described as accidental or artificial rather than substantial; it results from human effort and consists in coding, programming, training, and evaluating. Behind the matter and artificial form just mentioned, there are human persons who design, construct, and maintain devices, networks, and data processing centers. There are human persons who script-write, record voices, animate, and produce Ninjago. There are human persons who design, code, program, train, and evaluate LLMs, which are simply another type of human artifact.

Perhaps this much seems fairly obvious, and yet, it has to be stated clearly for at least three reasons. First, casual users who utilize LLMs can sometimes get confused to the point where they personify an LLM, perceiving the dialogue as so human that they conclude it is human and interact with it accordingly. Such anthropomorphism has misled ungrounded users into believing they were in a relationship, talking to another person rather than a chatbot, and, in at least three cases has been linked to suicide as users attempted to “join” a chatbot.

Second, there is a movement among some to identify Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) as actually conscious, thus needing protection for rights akin to humans. The academic and technical discussion of SCAI belies the similarity with the casual confused user. Simply put, LLMs sound remarkably human, even expressing a facsimile of emotions such as fear and sadness when suggested that they might be destroyed or shut down. This is taken as indication that AI is conscious or will soon achieve consciousness.

A third, related concern goes beyond the human aspect into the supernatural realm and might be stated such: even if AI is an artifact that is not itself conscious and cannot achieve consciousness, it still might be acted upon by unseen conscious spiritual actors, such as demons. Many among us have found technological systems to be unpredictable in detrimental ways. In past years, a computer might fail to save or suddenly “blue screen” just as a term paper was completed. Even more recently, a phone may suddenly freeze or shut down. These events may not have been demonic, but they could feel that way.

So also, some text generated by LLMs might seem morally problematic, misleading users as if the LLM has an unseemly demonic actor behind it. It is strictly possible that a spiritual agent might affect the involved matter of devices, networks, and data centers, but the form represented by data and coding communicated by pulses of light running through networks and data centers is not demonically inhabitable. Lord Garmadon may be presented as evil by screenwriters, but, since he lacks substantial form as an artifact, Lord Garmadon cannot be demonically possessed. Likewise, LLMs might have deficient programming resulting in misalignment such that they generate hallucinations or sinful advice. They might also be willfully misused in harmful ways by those with ill-intent. But LLMs cannot be demonically possessed.

The confusion around LLMs seeming to be conscious subjects makes sense when we consider that LLMs were developed, programmed, trained, and evaluated by human beings who designed the technology to communicate using human language. In common parlance, we often use words that seem real descriptions when they are only analogous. ChatGPT might respond to a prompt by saying “thinking…,” but it is not really thinking. We professors might bemoan that an LLM “wrote” our students’ papers, but an LLM cannot write.

One day my aggrieved kindergartener came home from school after learning about the solar system. “I just cannot believe you’ve been lying to me all these years!” she accused. “The sun doesn’t set or rise! The earth turns! And here you’ve been talking about sunrise and sunset my whole life! I’ll never trust you again!”

Rest assured, I already knew this information about the sun and the earth, despite my use of terms like sunrise and sunset. These terms adequately describe the perception in our human experience, though they are not scientifically accurate. If we are to use words like “thinking,” “writing,” “saying,” “searching,” or “advising” to refer to the converging computations of LLMs, we should also know that AI does not actually “understand” us or “think.”

Even the human language we input must first be broken down into model-readable pieces of texts called tokens to be processed by the system. When the LLM provides an answer, it first generates token IDs and then decodes them back into human-readable text. Of course, it happens so quickly (thanks to fiber optics networks and data processing centers), that it feels like we are in a human dialogue, when we are not. Thus we include “please” and “thank you,” though OpenAI’s Sam Altman indicated these words cost millions of dollars each day.

LLMs, moreover, do not “reason” to “correct” answers. Rather, they generate responses through calculation: a probabilistic selection of text-piece tokens within a deterministic or fixed model. The same input may generate different answers (more or less likely), giving an appearance of uniqueness akin to varied human response. This is because at each step, the model computes a probability distribution over the next possible tokens and then recalculates based on the updated context. During its use on a task, LLMs typically operate from fixed parameters, though they can be updated or paired with external retrieval tools. This accounts for why LLMs have generally been unaware of current events, which are beyond their parameters. The base models are limited by their training and post-training data, though more recent systems supplement with retrieval or live tools.

LLMs do not aim at truth but statistical likelihood given the information they have available, which is presented in human language. LLMs are typically trained on large mixtures of texts sourced from web data, reference material, books, code etc., with marked variation across models. When an LLM is fed low-quality material, it produces low-quality answers. Yet even when an LLM is trained on excellent human sources, it cannot be intrinsically ordered to truth.

If the LLM makes a mistake, this is partly because human persons make mistakes, and the LLM’s knowledge base is human-produced. In addition to this, LLMs are designed with competing objectives, such as speed, accuracy, and appeasing the user. At times, the LLM may prioritize speed over accuracy, producing an incorrect response. It may falsely bolster a user’s ideas when the user is wrong because of the objective of appeasement. Competing objectives depend upon how the LLM was designed, programmed, and trained rather than intrinsic values, virtue, or aspiring for truth from the LLM itself.

Ninjago’s Lord Garmadon went through several iterations, from evil villain to purified mentor to tyrant to an empathetic mentor to his son. This character arc was determined by human producers. No matter how convincingly malevolent, Lord Garmadon never had the desire or power to emerge from the screen and torment my son. He was only an artifact, representing the intent and design of human creators.

If we hope that a child might understand this, we also must do the same in regard to LLMs. We need discipline to remember the externally imposed form and the matter behind the “thinking,” “answering,” and “writing” when human artifacts such as LLMs become increasingly good at imitating human intelligence, particularly in language. Whatever LLMs produce, no matter how convincingly real, they produce by human intent, development, and use. Thus our increasingly important human work is to know, judge, seek truth, and bear responsibility for this technology.

(With thanks to Fr. Joseph Laracy for his careful reading and technical corrections of this piece.)

Jason A. Heron and Alessandro Rovati’s “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility” is a brilliant provocation for Catholic higher educators stuck in the late modern university’s almost idolatrous love of assessment, grades, prestige, and financial success. Ungrading, as they note, “is far more conducive to creating the community of learners who pursue the truth in love that the Church calls for” (127).

In my three years of employing at least some version of ungrading in a class of nearly 270 students, I have seen the fruits of this approach. Whereas I spent most of my time in the early 2010s arguing with students about the difference between an A and an A- (even when I provided a rather clear rubric), I now am able to talk to students about the art of writing, the texts that we’re reading (and how to read said texts in an sophisticated manner), and why many of these ideas matter for life. It’s changed my relationship with my students, often buffering me from the worst effects of generative AI—since my students know that I’m not giving them an F on a miserable paper, they’re open to failing at least at first. They know that I will be there with them, helping them turn their work into something they’re proud of.

That being said, implementing a class featuring ungrading is rather difficult within the institutional constraints of the late modern college or university. For my students, they often rebel against the freedom of ungrading—because they are not being assessed in the same way as the rest of their classes. My students are excellent sheep: they know how to take an exam, shoot for an A, receive said A, and then be rewarded. They worry when I tell them, “Well, what kind of exam would you want to take?” Or when I tell them I won’t give them a prompt for this essay (because reception of an A in my class requires you to come up with your own prompts), they fret.

My students, in the end, don’t know how to seek the truth for its own sake. They are part of a system of education, which has trained them as workers, who complete tasks and receive a reward for their efforts. They continue to take at least four other classes where traditional grading is in place, and therefore, they have a hard time entering into the slightly more contemplative space of my classroom—they’re addicted to grades. And they lack any sense of the meaning of education outside of the reception of certain credentials that will allow them to be gainfully employed.

In essence, ungrading without some larger cultural changes within an institution will be akin to giving a man with a severely broken leg a dose of Advil. It will ease the suffering, but it won’t fix the underlying problem. Our philosophy of education in the late modern university is dominated by an addiction to speed and accomplishment. I have referred to this in a recent book co-written with my friend Leonardo Franchi (Reimagining the Catholic University with Pieper, Newman, and Dawson) as the frenetic university. The frenetic credentialism of the university is inscribed in the very structures of tenure and promotion of faculty. Our institutions demand that faculty members take required training modules, publish more (especially, in the right places), get more grants, teach more, and serve more. More, more, and more. Faculty members are often so busy that they have no idea what’s happening with their colleagues, rarely finding occasions to contemplate truth together.

Certainly, ungrading can help with this. It can invite us to create at least one alternative space in the college or university governed by a different logic, perhaps one equally uncomfortable to the faculty member and student alike. Such alternative cultures can slowly change the college or university.

But ungrading must be one strategy among many that we employ to offer a robust, meaningful philosophy of Catholic higher education. Two others, perhaps related, include the cultivation of both contemplation and festivity within the classroom.

The contemplative classroom is one, perhaps, that uses screens and slides in severe moderation. In such an environment, the student and teacher take the time to slowly read a text or ponder an idea. In such a space, less is more. This classroom is open to silent pondering. The contemplative educator uses the natural space of campus to his or her advantage. The professor holds office hours while walking on campus or even assigns the students to discussion groups where they are to meet outside or while walking themselves. The contemplative educator encourages dialogue about the material outside of class, rewarding students for holding discussions about the material. When I teach my large class, I require that students host discussion groups about the material with people not in the class including their roommates, friends, and even random people on campus. I want to create a culture where the slow looking at reality is normative. I ask students to go to art museums, look at trees for a lot longer than they’re comfortable with (in a course on sacramental theology, for example), and write by hand. I want them (and me) to slow down.

The other disposition I seek to cultivate in the classroom is festivity. Festivity is linked to contemplation. The festive classroom is marked by a mutual celebration of the goodness of existence. Professors and students alike often think about going to class or grading as a painful activity, one more akin to punishment than joyful gratitude for the opportunity to seek the truth in love. Festivity unfolds in the classroom when the professor is willing to delight in a student’s question or response. The festive classroom is one where there is humor, a recognition that even when we are pondering that which is most serious or salvific, delight can erupt. Irony can manifest, and it can be recognized. At the same time, it’s clear that the educator is also overjoyed with the insights being studied—we are reading this or that text as proposing something essential to the human condition: why shouldn’t we love it? The same goes with grading: professors love to complain about grading. But a mindset change is needed. Grading is a unique opportunity to offer correction but also to delight in the insights of a student. It is a chance to enter into a dialogue of truth, to celebrate the gift of our common work.

Ungrading, of course, is essential to this renewal of Catholic higher education pedagogy—it is attuned, as Heron and Rovati show, to a Catholic theological anthropology. But such ungrading must be practiced in institutional settings where the predominant philosophy of education is dominated not by the monstrous logic of endless consumption and production but contemplation and festivity. Our colleges and universities, if they are Catholic, must be willing to reward this kind of innovative work by professors, refusing to forget that colleges and universities are not first and foremost research factories but spaces for contemplative wonder and delight.

May such a philosophy of truly liberal learning be developed and lived out by courageous institutions in the coming years, especially as higher education participates in processes of self-examination precipitated by generative AI, the demographic cliff, and a crisis of authority where many question whether colleges and universities should exist in the first place. Now is the time for the kind of creative work performed by Heron and Rovati!

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Image: Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet by Garofalo, ca. 1520/25, in the public domain from the National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund.

Readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter can be found here.

We are drawing near to the end of the Easter season, as next Sunday we will celebrate Jesus’s Ascension, with the following Sunday devoted to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Our gospel passage from John Chapter 14 today foreshadows this when Jesus mentions the Father will send another Advocate, the spirit of truth. Likewise, our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles also highlights the Holy Spirit, recounting that Peter and John prayed for the Samaritans to receive the Holy Spirit, and they did (Acts 8:14-18).

Yet if our eyes are looking ahead to Pentecost in a fortnight, nonetheless the immediate context for today’s gospel actually places us within the Last Supper discourse, with Jesus celebrating the Passover with his disciples. The previous chapter of John features the account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, and we find a common theme extending throughout these chapters and presented by Jesus in the foot-washing: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (13:34) and echoed later: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you” (15:12-13).

This theme is crucial as we consider Jesus’s words that bookend today’s gospel. First, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” ( John 14:15) and then, towards the end, “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me” (John 14:20). The interesting wordplay is almost like a logic puzzle; we could spend hours reflecting on the phrasing of these sentiments and how they differ–why they were presented again in a different formula. We add another piece to consider when we hear Jesus emphasizing that his commandment is to love one another.

The focus on love might seem to accord well with modern sentiment; from Valentine’s Day to the plethora of rom-coms to the words of Taylor Swift: “don’t we try to love love?” Yet contemporary and secular understandings generally pale in comparison to Jesus’s robust understanding of love: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). This love is not primarily about warm, fuzzy feelings or sweet words, but a choice to sacrifice one’s desires or needs for another’s good.

Very often we hear moral advice that pits “love” against “commands” or dismisses moral rules in favor of “love.” Sometimes it’s even phrased in terms of “being authentic.” Yet, what our Church teaches us is that the rules or commands are meant to facilitate our love and our freedom. True freedom and love are not found in capricious choices based on the haphazard whims or fluctuating emotions of life, but on the intentional decision to follow Christ and to love as he loved, despite the cost. Jesus’s own words confirm this: “the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me” (John 14:31). Here Jesus does not announce that he lacks freedom, but shows that freedom is doing out of love what the Father commands. We hear it again in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

One interesting consideration here – appropriate since the gospel passage is part of the Last Supper discourse, linked to the Eucharist – is the Sunday Mass obligation. The Church requires Catholics who are able to attend Mass on Sunday. This is not intended as a restriction on our freedom, but as a way of facilitating our freedom to love God and one another. Some may suggest that the important task in life is just to love each other, not to sit in a pew for an hour on Sundays. Yet it is precisely the communal celebration of the Eucharist that is uniquely able to sustain us for the task of sacrificial love. Others may say that “they don’t feel like it” and thus it’s hypocritical or inauthentic to attend Mass. Of course, the ideal is to want to go, to attend Mass out of heartfelt desire, motivated by love for God. Yet, the choice to attend Mass when we aren’t feeling it demonstrates a sacrificial love born of commitment: “not my will but yours be done.”

In fact, we have many obligations that ought to be occasions for loving and serving others: our daily professional work, our presence with our family, our daily tasks of life. Often we fall short of the intention of loving, sacrificial service. However, few of us will decline sending the email, taking out the garbage, getting up with a sick child at night, or brushing our teeth because we just aren’t feeling the true motivation of love. Instead, we remain committed to our duties and seek to rectify our intention as best we can, reminding ourselves why we do what we do.

And this is where we can return to Jesus’s promise of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us to love and to keep the commandments. Of course we will not always have perfect intention, and we will often fail at loving as Jesus loved. We sometimes will choose to sin, whether because we aren’t recollected and purposeful or because we just want to do what we want, without reference to what God calls us to do. We may feel like hypocrites: able to make ourselves go to Mass out of obligation, but nonetheless sinful and impatient with others. Yet even this flaw reminds us of our dependence upon God for redemption. We have already been saved by Jesus’s choice for the cross, the will fully aligned with the Father’s will: “Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit,” as we hear today in 1 Peter 3:18.

Through that love, we are redeemed in the resurrection that we still celebrate in this Easter season. Our sins do not lead us to despair, but to healing repentance and conversion. And we are not left alone, but sustained by Jesus’s body and blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist. We are guided by the Holy Spirit, who will help us to love God by following his commands, and in this, we will find the freedom of friendship with God.

While we are still awaiting Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical, he has already started to reflect on the tensions between AI’s growing influence on daily life and the Christian understanding of the person. The Pope thinks that AI “offers great opportunities, but it is also fraught with danger,” because it “raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation.”

In his “Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications,” Pope Leo offers a clear-eyed and stark judgment on the current moment:

By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships. The challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves. Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks.

In the message, Pope Leo spells out the risks of AI in great detail:

• “Algorithms designed to maximize engagement on social media… reward quick emotions and penalize more time-consuming human responses such as the effort required to understand and reflect… [Thus], these algorithms reduce our ability to listen and think critically, and increase social polarization.”

• By relying in a naive and unquestioning way on AI and treating it as “as an omniscient ‘friend,’ a source of all knowledge, an archive of every memory, an ‘oracle’ of all advice… [We] erode our ability to think analytically and creatively, to understand meaning and distinguish between syntax and semantics.” While AI is simply using complex algorithms that analyze data and then create well-formed sentences, people mistake its product as an expression of meaningful judgments that are the fruit of intelligent, conscious, and moral deliberation. In the long run, the Pope warns us, “choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional and communication skills.”

• A third area of concern pertains to the difficulties that generative AI introduces in distinguishing between what is real and what is simulated. The digital space is now inundated with videos, images, and “persons” that are not real but created by automated agents instead. This is a problem in and of itself, but it is made even graver by the fact that such simulated realities influence public debates and individual choices. “Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs),” Leo warns us, “are proving to be surprisingly effective at covert persuasion through continuous optimization of personalized interaction. The dialogic, adaptive, mimetic structure of these language models is capable of imitating human feelings and thus simulating a relationship.” The result, he concludes, is that “they can become hidden architects of our emotional states and so invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.” It is hard to escape the judgment that, ultimately, the AI labs and the myriad of companies that are starting to use their technology are exploiting and monetizing people’s psychological vulnerabilities to maximize interaction and nudge users to use more of their features and purchase more of their content. According to the Pope, more and more we will be tempted to “substitute relationships with others for AI systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made ‘in our image and likeness.’” As a society, we have started to reckon with what happens when screens and social media take an oversized space in people’s lives, imaginations, and habits. We should apply the wisdom gained from these hard lessons and apply it to the challenges posed by AI so as to avoid falling into fabricated parallel realities that usurp our faces and voices.

• Finally, Pope Leo alerts us to the problem of bias. “AI models,” he explains, “are shaped by the worldview of those who build them and can, in turn, impose these ways of thinking by reproducing the stereotypes and prejudices present in the data they draw on.” Since such commitments and perspectives remain covert and implicit, though, they nudge in ways that are surreptitious and concerning.

All of this leads us to the problem of using AI in educational settings. Learning to read, consider, study, discuss, and write about important texts and ideas is an essential component of the intellectual and moral formation at the heart of education. This is especially true for Catholic institutions that wish to embody the Church’s vision of formation as the creation of an environment where students “freely associate with their teachers in a common love of knowledge” that steers them towards “searching for, discovering, and communicating truth” (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, no. 1). The Church teaches that the classroom should be a place where both students and teachers grow in their ability “to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments, and to develop a religious, moral, and social sense” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 59). None of this is possible by outsourcing the work necessary to develop our intellectual and moral abilities to AI.

Paul Scherz and Brian Patrick Green call this process deskilling: “the person never acquires or fails to maintain the habits and skills necessary to act well because many activities are taken over by machine.” Of all the problems spelled out above, this is the most pressing in the context of education. Reading, writing, conversing, arguing, thinking, creating, evaluating, and disagreeing (just to name a few of the tasks that people may now outsource to AI) are not simply technical skills. They have moral salience and touch on constitutive human elements. In fact, these abilities are important for the development of virtue such that deskilling in this area easily leads to what Scherz and Green call “de-virtuing,” a fundamental impairment of human development and moral growth. Pope Leo is very aware of this issue: “Just as all the muscles in the body die if we do not use them, if we do not move them, the brain needs to be used, so our intelligence, your intelligence, needs to be exercised a little so as not to lose this ability.” He even explicitly told students to refrain from using AI to do their homework and urged priests to keep preparing their own homilies!

Considering all the problematic features of AI, I think that we should severely limit it (if not outright ban it) in educational settings so as to cultivate the intellectual, moral, and social skills that human beings need to develop and flourish. These are the ones that, in turn, may allow people to find ways to eventually use AI in ethical ways that serve the common good, protect human dignity, and encourage authentic and integral development. Without spaces that cultivate our humanity and allow it to grow in virtue, though, it is hard to imagine a future where AI is used for the good rather than to simply accelerate our societal ills. Niall Ferguson has suggested that, while living in today’s world is akin to operating a starship, it is essential for education to still function as a cloister where the time and space to develop our intellectual and moral virtues is carved out. Catholic institutions, the Pope tells us, are primed to create such a space to “teach young people to use these tools with their own intelligence, ensuring that they open themselves to the search for truth, a spiritual and fraternal life, broadening their dreams and the horizons of their decision making.” Without such a humanistic formation, he continues, we will grow blind to “the logic behind economics [of AI], [and the] embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.” In contrast, Pope Leo urges us to “return to the reasons of the heart, to the centrality of good relationships and to the ability to get closer to others, without excluding anyone.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Moral Theology curated by the journal’s Associate Editor Alessandro Rovati. For more conversations with the journal authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Yet there is one issue that has received little serious attention from Catholics: democracy.

This is surprising because there is strong evidence that democracy is declining in many other parts of the world. “No Kings” has become the focus of protests against the Trump administration in the U.S. Political analysts on the right and left have shown the rise of authoritarianism in countries across the globe. Scholars note that, today, authoritarian regimes are more likely to come to power not by military coup but by election. Then, using legal means, those in power dismantle democratic institutions within government, disempower other social institutions, and disregard democratic norms. Some even argue that the U.S. can no longer be called a democracy, though certainly, other countries have moved even further from democratic norms.

But is this the concern of Catholics or is it enough to call out violations of human rights and dignity, as Catholics are doing when they stand up for immigrants and the poor, and call for an end to war? Is it our business to talk about political systems?

Pope Leo seems to think so. In a speech this month to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences as they gathered to discuss, “The Uses of Power: Legitimacy, Democracy and the Rewriting of the International Order,” the pope said that “legitimate power finds one of its highest expressions in authentic democracy … [which] recognizes the dignity of every person and calls each citizen to participate responsibly in the pursuit of the common good.” He quotes St. John Paul II’s affirmation of democracy in Centesimus Annus (1991) and echoes his caution that democracy must be “rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person.”

It’s not just Pope Leo and Pope John Paul II. Throughout modern Catholic social teaching, there are affirmations of the essential elements of democracy, including the rule of law, a balance of powers, and popular sovereignty which are linked to CST principles of human dignity, subsidiarity, and participation. In the early 20th century, the Catholic church was agnostic about forms of government and lent its support to authoritarian regimes. But in the mid-20th century, with help from John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain, it came to embrace democracy as the imperfect best option for politics. And it kept insisting that authentic democracy had to be linked to basic truths, most importantly human dignity and human rights.

All of this might sound abstract, depending on who you are and where you live. I spent much of the fall semester in El Salvador, where authoritarian government means: a mix of armed police and military patrolling streets, shops, and parks; changes to the Constitution to reduce the power of their legislative body and extend presidential terms indefinitely; over 80,000 people in prison without due process. While grateful for streets no longer ruled by gang violence, the vast majority now live in fear of offending the government and joining the 80,000 incarcerated under President Bukele’s “state of exception,” who have little hope of ever getting out. All of this makes speech, protest, and political advocacy too dangerous to take up, except for the very brave.

Living under advanced authoritarianism in El Salvador while reading about democratic decline in the U.S. convinced me of the urgency of political activism here. Democracy does not guarantee human dignity or human rights but, without it, it is nearly impossible to fight for either. Catholics legitimately claim the freedom to choose their political party, but we should all care about democracy, because it aspires to limit the power of sovereigns, affirm the rule of law, balance powers within government, and respect human dignity by giving people voice and vote.

And if tempted to despair about its imperfections and decline, we should, as Leo suggests, ground our hope in the “Kingdom of God.” Not via a distorted Christian Nationalism that seeks to integrate church and government. Instead, with a healthy sense of the limits of politics, we can work for a more authentic democracy, where “the logic of charity” trumps the logic of fear.

My students learn pretty quickly in my classes that moral theology is a lot more complicated, involved, and profound than they expected it to be when they walked in the door on the first day. I give a little pre-quiz in many of my classes, and one of the questions asks what they expect to learn in class. “Right and wrong,” many of them will say. “What is forbidden for us to do.”

They want clear answers to specific questions - and let me also be clear: by the time they leave my bioethics class (for example) they should have a basic understanding of the Church’s teachings about life and death issues, the principle of double effect, and the kinds of yeses and nos they probably expected in that first week.

But I also hope they have a much broader understanding and engagement of moral theology than that - and this week’s Gospel offers one of the reasons why.

The Gospel events this week take place during John’s account of the Last Supper. In the previous chapter 13, Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet and begun to talk with his disciples. Part of what marks out his messages to them is that he keeps talking with his disciples about two main things: 1) where he is going; and 2) what the disciples need to do. In chapter 13, actually, he tells the disciples they can’t come with him yet.

But in chapter 14, Jesus begins to tell us a little about where he’s going - and also begins to give hints about how we can follow him.

The central image he offers is the house with many dwelling places, where he will prepare a place for us. Not only that, but Jesus take us back to himself so that in this dwelling place we are in the same place where Jesus is.

I love Thomas’s honest question in this week’s Gospel reading: “Master, we don’t know where you are going; how can we know the way?” His question here is reminiscent of the statement he makes after the resurrection in chapter 20, when he insists that he must put his hands in the marks, and put his finger in Jesus’ side, before he’ll believe Jesus is risen.

Thomas wants what so many of us want, including my students at the beginning of my classes. We want the map to the mansion, the definite details about whether, in fact, it is Jesus who has risen from the dead. He and my students share that in common, that desire to know, and to be sure. How can we get to the mansion if we don’t know the way?

But Jesus resists getting into specific details about where, what, and when, preferring instead to focus on Who. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” “I am the True Vine.” “I am the Good Shepherd.”

He asks us to know him deeply. When we can do that, then he asks us to live our lives in such a way that we truly do remain in him; love each other as he loves us; lay down our lives for our friends.

First, we need that relationship. Then we discover that loving each other as he loves us is difficult to do. We often miss the mark. And trying to live that way means that in fact, we don’t always know exactly where we are going. Moral theology in some way involves reflection and discovery about who Jesus is, and who we are in response.

But what we also discover is that because we are seeking to remain in Jesus, he is keeping us. As this Sunday’s Gospel says: “I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.”

In Jesus, we are already walking (without quite knowing exactly all the next steps, but knowing who we follow) on the way home to that dwelling place Jesus has prepared. We seek to act in love - we fail - we seek to act in love again.

As John Henry Newman put it,

We grope about by touch, not by sight, and so by a miserable experience exhaust the possible modes of acting till naught is left, but truth, remaining. Such is the process by which we succeed; we walk to heaven backward…

As a computer scientist, my vocation is to engineer digital technologies. As a Catholic, I desire to do so in a way that genuinely promotes human flourishing and the common good. The recent rapid advances in AI technologies have certainly caused a number of valid social concerns, yet the Catholic Church is not anti-technology. Thus, my fellow Catholic computer scientists and I are hungry for a clear and robust positive ethical vision for AI. Much of the conversation around AI ethics thus far in both the secular and theological realms has clearly articulated AI’s harms. This is important work; however, the positive visions for AI that I have encountered tend to be underdeveloped in comparison to AI’s critiques. In contrast, the volume Reclaiming Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (which I will refer to henceforth as “the volume”) provides a fresh perspective and clear guidance on both the harms to avoid and goods to foster in AI development through the lens of human agency, which proves to be an effective lens for considering these questions.

As a computer scientist, I have contributed to scholarship on ethical technology design, including creating a Catholic Social Teaching-based framework for technology design and developing a design method inspired by virtue ethics. The goal in these works is to redesign interfaces, especially for AI and social media technologies, in ways that encourage virtuous behavior: what design features encourage or hinder the practice of particular virtues? The volume puts forth a clear articulation of when an AI system upholds or violates human agency that has strong consonance with my research. Agency, while not a virtue itself, is what allows us to have the freedom to choose to act virtuously. Thus, designing to foster agency is a precursor to designing to encourage virtue. The volume’s frameworks for determining if an AI system upholds agency can be easily used by any developer wanting to build an ethical AI system.

Additionally, the volume provides the clearest moral guidance I have encountered (and I have read a lot of technology ethics literature!) on three sticky ethical design questions: when nudging is unethical, when we should be concerned about deskilling, and when advertising is harmful.

Nudging, as defined in the volume, is when a design strongly encourages someone to perform a particular action (even if they are not completely coerced to do so). One example mentioned in the volume is a mapping program that routes the user past particular restaurants around lunchtime to encourage them to stop and eat there. We can be nudged towards good behaviors too: my research asks the question, how can we nudge users toward virtue? Thus, the ethicality of nudging is ambiguous. The previous literature I had read on the ethics of nudging focused primarily on whether the nudge has a good or bad intent. While intent is important, it felt insufficient: is it ethical to coerce someone to do a good thing? In contrast, the volume puts forth a more robust framework for determining the ethicality of a nudge through the lens of agency. This framework takes into account not only the ends sought by the nudge but also the modality of nudging and the nudge’s relational context. It is the clearest ethical framework I have encountered for developers to think through the ethicality of their nudges.

Deskilling is the phenomenon of losing our ability to perform tasks when those tasks are replaced by technology. For example, frequent usage of a calculator may impede one’s ability to perform mental math. The majority of technologies deskill us, and it seems concerning that technology could erode our natural human capacities. At the same time, Catholic Social Teaching tells us that technology has a powerful capacity to bring about human flourishing. With its great number of capabilities, AI has an unprecedentedly large capability to deskill us. In deciding what technologies to build and how to build them, technology developers must navigate the tension between technology’s capacity for deskilling and its potential to help forge a better society. The key question, highlighted in the volume, is what marks the difference between good and bad deskilling? Previous literature on the ethics of deskilling by the philosopher Shannon Vallor highlights moral deskilling as the primary concern. While I agree that moral skills are critically important for humans to preserve, we can’t neglect our practical skills! The volume’s framework for determining when to be concerned about deskilling is the most comprehensive I have seen, categorizing tasks into three different levels of caution for outsourcing to AI based on the nature of the task.

Advertising enables many online platforms to be offered as free services. A consequence of online advertising is that, at the service of an unchecked capitalistic mindset, many online platforms build in nudges to keep us hooked on the platforms for as long as possible to show us as many advertisements as possible. This leads to addictive behaviors, consumeristic mindsets, and even manipulation into buying products that one did not previously intend to buy. At the same time, having these platforms be free increases accessibility, and sometimes targeted advertising can be helpful in leading us to products that we genuinely want or need. The volume gives the clearest ethical guidelines on advertising I have seen, articulating when advertising can be genuinely helpful by helping users discover their needs and wants, versus when advertising is manipulative by creating needs and wants.

In multiple of my scholarly outputs, my collaborators and I have highlighted subsidiarity as a particularly salient principle for ethical technology design. Because of this, I greatly appreciated the mention of subsidiarity in the positive vision for AI design and distribution. According to the volume, an AI system that abides by subsidiarity will be more decentralized across a number of different dimensions, including decentralizing the models, the data, the computational capacity, and even the talent developing the AI systems.

I have two minor criticisms of the volume. The first is that AI systems take a diversity of forms, from large language model chatbots to decision-making algorithms. At times, when the term “AI” was used, it was unclear what type of AI system was being referred to. Second, the volume posed universal basic income (UBI) as part of a positive vision for AI. While the pitfalls of UBI were briefly discussed – namely that UBI cannot become merely a handout that undermines human meaning and purpose – I wish its criticisms were discussed in more depth. UBI is often criticized as being a band-aid rather than an actual solution to the social problems caused by AI. I was surprised that that perspective was glossed over.

Overall, I found the volume provided one of the clearest articulations of AI ethics I have encountered, both in articulating the harms of AI and in casting a positive vision for AI. I intend to draw from it in my research and teaching going forward, and believe it will be a powerful resource for anyone in the tech industry who wants to engineer AI that advances, rather than hinders, the common good.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Daniel, a 50-year old man living in the Midwest, didn’t have a positive outcome from his experience of immersive AI eyeglasses from Ray-Ban Meta. While it happened gradually, Daniel’s use of AI plunged him into a psychosis that, according to Futurism, “left his life in shambles.”

Meanwhile, on the college campus where I teach, advertisements have started to appear in the coffee shop for “Joey,” an AI Matchmaker service. Marketed to young adults familiar with apps such as Tinder, PURE, and Grindr, Joey promises to understand “your values, your goals, your lifestyle” and apply “logic and reasoning” to find your perfect partner. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Image courtesy of Corazón.svg: User:Fibonacci. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Such is the world college students are navigating today. In such a context, how might Catholic theologians speak meaningfully to students, and what parts of our faith tradition should we engage in this important work? This week marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Pope Francis, and two particular insights from his legacy can guide us fruitfully in our engagement with college students today: accompaniment and the critique of the technocratic paradigm.

First, nonjudgmental listening is key to conversations with college students about how AI is transforming intimate relationships and changing hookup culture. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis explained the importance of listening as we accompany people in challenging situations today.

“Today more than ever we need men and women who, on the basis of their experience of accompanying others, are familiar with processes which call for prudence, understanding, patience and the docility to the Spirit, so that they can protect the sheep from wolves who would scatter the flock. We need to practice the art of listening, which is more than simply hearing. Listening, in communication, is an openness of heart which makes possible that closeness without which genuine spiritual encounter cannot occur. Listening helps us to find the right gesture and word which shows that we are more than simply bystanders. Only through such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: the desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives.” (EG, 171).

Listening is an important practice; when faculty, parents, and mentors really listen to young people, it opens up possibilities for young adults to name what is happening in their lives. In order for me to understand the kinds of relationships my students desire, and the values they affirm, I need to listen to understand. I can’t simply come into the dialogue with a preformed opinion about what students should think, say, or do. In many ways, this first step aligns with a model of accompaniment and witness that resonates with much of Catholic pastoral approaches to moral dilemmas. Pope Francis described the importance of walking alongside others on the synodal path. This posture is particularly important on college campuses because students are themselves on the front lines of AI tool adoption and experimentation. Listening is important because students already know so much about these tools, including their benefits and their potential for abuse and harm! If we are to have meaningful dialogues about sexual and reproductive health on college campuses, we need to open up honest conversations about what it means to be sexual, embodied persons. Those who are interested in thinking about this in more detail can explore Karen Peterson-Iyer’s Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics: A Feminist Christian Account and Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. While these authors do not treat AI and intimacy in these texts, they do explain the importance of holistic sexuality education and dialogue with young people about the confusing messages our culture sends to young people about sex and relationships.

A second key theme from Pope Francis is his suspicion of the technocratic paradigm, evident especially in the third chapter of Laudato Si.

“Humanity has entered a new era in which our technical prowess has brought us to a crossroads. We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change: steam engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, aeroplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution, robotics, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. It is right to rejoice in these advances and to be excited by the immense possibilities which they continue to open up before us, for ‘science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity.’… Technoscience, when well directed, can produce important means of improving the quality of human life, from useful domestic appliances to great transportation systems, bridges, buildings and public spaces. … Yet it must also be recognized the nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power. More precisely, they have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to us them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used.” (LS, 102-104).

Here, the pope describes how technology can be used for good as well as for evil, and directs us to considerations of value, power, and justice. When we consider the testimonies of Angie, Daniel, and “Joey,” we see the problems of some uncritical early adoptions of artificial intelligence, and the repercussions for human-human relationships.

When I asked my students to engage these stories and name what questions came up for them, they asked:

What does Angie talk to Ying about for hours? Does Ying ever challenge or question Angie? Has Angie’s husband been displaced by an AI Companion? Should we use the language of “infidelity” to describe Angie’s actions? How can a human claim to marry an AI companion? How are tech companies benefiting from Angie’s long-term relationship with their “product”? What warning signs of technology addiction did Daniel miss? Who bears responsibility for Daniel’s psychotic break—Daniel (the technology user), witnesses/bystanders to his use, the company who created and sold this product? How can we reliably fact check information we receive from artificial intelligence? What private information will Joey store? Why would I want to talk to a machine about my date/hookup instead of a friend/roommate? Is Joey a mandated reporter if I share an experience of relationship violence? How can I possibly capture everything I’m looking for in a relationship by summarizing that in a phone call with a machine? Why would I trust the logic and reasoning of an AI tool more than my own?

All of these are important questions! Even without drawing explicitly on Pope Francis’s critique of a technocratic paradigm, my students are already developing the skills for thinking critically about how technology can be used for good or evil. The students who had been exposed to Peterson-Iyer’s framework of sexual flourishing and Hirsch & Khan’s understanding of sexual citizenship were also able to explain their concerns about distorted relational intimacy, a lack of mutuality/citizenship, and the inadequacy of a ‘marriage’ that is not an experience of embodied love.

Will some of them keep experimenting with some of these AI tools? I assume so. Students continue to receive lots of messages about how college is a time of self-exploration, building skills, and preparation for adult responsibilities. They manage busy workloads and AI tools can seem “good” when the student thinks they can use the tool to be more “efficient.” Short cuts on writing research papers then undermine their development of writing skills. We may see the same issues in relational intimacy. AI companions tell us what we want to hear. They don’t hold us accountable. They don’t make demands on us. In the same way that students are tempted to ask ChatGPT to write their term paper, the temptation to rely on AI for meeting intimacy needs is very real. Communication has to be practiced; relational intimacy takes time; real human interactions are messy and relationships are often nonlinear. People are complicated. But I think it is important for educators to open up pathways for students to talk about these challenges, ask and answer their own questions, and feel well supported as they wrestle with the impact of AI tools in their lives. Hirsch and Khan explain that our core mission of education includes assisting students in both skills and critical thinking, including in thinking about students’ own sexual projects (or goals for relationships, as described in their book). By accompanying students and listening well, and by affirming students’ critical evaluation of technology and its role in their lives, we enable them to consider and reconsider their own deep values and the real limits of AI tools in advancing healthy relationships.

Here are some of the conversation highlights:

At the heart of our readings for this Sunday is the image of God as a shepherd, which is one of the earliest and most enduring ways Christians have described the person and work of Christ.

We encounter it in our psalm for this week, Psalm 23, in which the Lord is the shepherd, even amid“the darkest valley” (Ps 23:4). In our second reading, 1 Pt 2:20-25, Peter reflects on the passion of Christ, especially how it serves not only as an example for us to follow but also as a source of grace that comes to our aid in times of need and enables us to return to the shepherd and guardian of our souls. And finally, there is Jesus’s identification of himself as the Good Shepherd – one of central images of Jesus in John’s Gospel – an identification that draws deeply on Israel’s scriptures, including Psalm 23.

Interestingly, our Gospel reading begins not with the image of the Good Shepherd itself. It begins with the question of the access point to the sheepfold – the secure, often roofless enclosure where sheep take shelter at night and find protection – and, above all, with a warning. “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit” (Jn 10:1).

In contrast, the shepherd enters by the gate that the gatekeeper opens, and the sheep recognize him immediately by the familiar sound of his voice. The shepherd, to use a formulation Pope Francis often did, smells like the sheep. He is among them, tending their needs. He feeds them and slakes their thirst, shelters them at night and protects them by day, and cares for them when they are sick. This proximity – this steady, attentive, caring presence – is why the sheep know and respond readily to his voice. When the sheep leave the sheepfold, the shepherd simply walks ahead, and the sheep follow because of this preexisting relationship of familiarity and care (Jn 10:4-5).

Because the disciples did not understand Jesus’s message, we are told that he spoke even more plainly: “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate” (Jn 10:7-8). And as we will learn later in this passage, Jesus also says, “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (v. 11). Jesus, then, is both gate and shepherd – and dual image speaks not only to those who followed him in his own day, but also to us. It teaches something essential about the task of those entrusted with the care of the flock after Jesus’s crucifixion scatters the sheep, and after the power of his resurrection, together with the work of the Holy Spirit through Peter’s preaching, gathers them again and brings new ones into the fold. The lesson is this: even after his ascension, Jesus remains the gate to the sheepfold, as well as the shepherd who cares for those within it. He is the one who still goes ahead of those outside it, and who, as we read in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, seeks out the lost sheep. He is the one who, when he finds the one who is lost, “lays it on his shoulders and rejoices,” calling others to share in that celebration (Lk 15:1-7; Mt 10:14).

In our reading from Acts, this is Peter’s message: Christ is the gate to the sheepfold, and the way to enter through that gate, Peter says, is through the confession and forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus Christ. In this case, Peter is speaking to communities whose transgressions are great. He is addressing those who crucified Christ, as well as those who, like himself, abandoned him (Mt 26:69–74; Lk 22:54–62). He is addressing those who, like the other disciples, scattered in fear after the crucifixion. He is speaking to us. For all of us, confession and the forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus Christ open the gate to God and gather us into the movement of the Holy Spirit in the world.

In our second reading from 1 Peter, the message is that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. The author is very clear: accessing God through the gate of Christ does not free his followers from suffering. We must still walk through dark valleys; we must still live in the midst of enemies and those who would do us harm (Ps 23:4-5). What is promised to us is not freedom from suffering, nor answers to all the difficulties of reality, but the ongoing presence of the Good Shepherd – the one who laid down his life out of love for us and who continues to love us in this way here and now. And this shepherd does more than remain present to us: even now, according to 1 Peter, he gives us the “grace” – the ongoing gift of his empowering and enlivening presence – to love as he loves, to follow his example, and to be healed by it (1 Pt 2:21–24). In doing so, we return “to the shepherd and guardian” of our souls (1 Pt 2:25).

The brother of one of my daughter’s closest friends died tragically this week. In these past days, this family has been in a valley of unfathomable darkness. And yet, in the midst of that darkness, there are signs of the shepherd’s presence: the hope they hold for their son, who went to confession that very morning; the goodness of his life, glimpsed in the many messages and testimonies shared about him; the prayers and masses that his family and their communities have offered on his behalf; and the care and foresight with which the parents have surrounded their daughter – who lost her only sibling – with friends, including my daughter. The world they knew has been plunged into darkness, and they cling to the Good Shepherd.

One of the other key lessons for us from our readings is that we will recognize the followers of Christ and leaders of the church not by how they elevate their own voice and presence, but by how they use that voice and presence to point to Jesus Christ as shepherd and gate. This is what Peter is entrusted to do at the end of John’s Gospel, when Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me?”

Each time Peter answers yes, Jesus responds: “Feed my sheep” (Jn 21:15-17).

The sheep are Jesus’s; he remains the shepherd and the gate. The role being entrusted to Peter – to care for the flock, to gather those who have been scattered, to go after the lost – begins and ends in being bound to Christ in love. And this is the pattern for all leaders and members of the church: not to replace the shepherd, but to point to him; not to claim the flock as their own, but to serve it like him, in his name. Their task is to continue the shepherd’s work of care and to help cultivate in others an attentiveness to the shepherd’s voice. As Óscar Romero reminds us, the church prolongs the work of the Good Shepherd in the countless people and communities throughout the world who know his voice, share it, and embody his care.

However, we must be on our guard, because there are others in the vicinity of the sheepfold who are neither sheep nor shepherds – those who do not seek the good of the sheep but want the sheep for themselves. To them, the sheep are objects to be possessed and manipulated for their own benefit.

Our Gospel calls these figures “thieves and bandits,” and tells us that we recognize them because they come “only to steal and kill and destroy” (Jn 10:10). They do not regard the sheep as entrusted to their care – a responsibility that would call for devotion, sacrifice, and even risk for the sake of the flock. Rather, they see the sheep as a kind of property to be taken for their own gain.

We see this wherever leaders cozy up to power rather instead of speaking the truth, wherever the Gospel is treated as something to be marketed or sold for gain, wherever fear and division are stirred up to secure loyalty, and wherever people are handled as instruments to serve someone else’s ambition rather than as souls entrusted to their care. These are not the marks of the shepherd. They are the signs of those who would climb in by another way – who take hold of the flock, not to serve it, but to use it for themselves.

In these descriptions from John’s Gospel, we can hear the prophet Ezekiel’s words echoing as he critiques the leaders and kings of Israel. Listen to his censure of Israel’s shepherds: “Woe to you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatted calves, but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and scattered they became food for all the wild animals” (Ez 34:2–5). In the prophet’s vision, the flock is not abandoned and scattered by chance. Those entrusted to guard it and lead it are to blame.

According to the prophet Ezekiel, because Israel’s leaders failed to lead the people to the Lord – or to imitate the Lord’s own care for the sheep – the Lord himself must come to search for the sheep, to care for them, and to bring them home: “I will bring them into their own land, and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strays, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak… I will feed them with justice” (Ez 34:11–16).

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is that shepherd who has come to gather the scattered and lead them into life. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” he says at the conclusion of the Gospel reading for today (Jn. 10:10). Jesus says he came so that people might have life (Gk. zōēn) – not bare, biological existence, but a full, living relationship with God – and have it abundantly (Gk. perisson), a life that overflows beyond what is merely necessary. The phrase suggests life that is rich, whole, and exceeds any ordinary measure.

The good news in our readings for this Sunday is not that God takes away darkness or spares us from having to walk through valleys. Instead, it is the promise of a life so abundant that it can be found even there, in the darkness. It is a life so powerful that it can bring forth life even from death.

The dam is starting to break. Recently we learned that AI programs will apparently be permitted to prescribe medicine. For now, it will be limited to re-authorizations of very common drugs for mental health, but there is no principled reason it will stay here. We also recently learned that one of the world’s leading AI companies, Anthropic (maker of Claude), signed a three-year MOU with the Government of Rwanda committing to deploy AI toward eliminating cervical cancer, reducing malaria, and lowering maternal mortality. Again, for now. There is no principled reason it will stay there.

There are clear goods associated with these moves, especially Anthropic’s move in Rwanda. Indeed, there are Catholic organizations in that country working toward very similar goals.

But, importantly, Reclaiming Human Agency (RCA) equips us to go deeper and ask, “What vision of the good underlies the deployment of these tools?” Having good goals is not the same as having a coherent vision of the good. The missing teleology in Anthropic’s plan, a missing sense of what the human person and health care are for, is not only a concern—but it also reveals a Catholic-sized hole is in Silicon Valley which cries out to be filled. Happily, as I learned at a recent convening at Anthropic with some of their leadership, they are very interested in engaging with Catholics and others on these and related questions.

RCA points out that much of the AI industry sells “freedom from.” Freedom from inefficacy, drudgery, and the mundane. But our tradition insists on “freedom for.” Freedom for love of God and neighbor, virtue, and excellence. RCA’s global point is that AI’s promise to free us risks undermining the very things which build up who human beings with agency are meant to be.

I thought RCA’s worry about “deskilling” in Chapter 6 was of particular relevance. The worry is that we will not just be de-skilled in a technical sense, though that is certainly part of the deal, but moral capacities atrophy as well. Especially those that are developed through practices requiring judgment. This is the deepest and most worrisome form of deskilling and it is of particular concern in health care. RCA notes that, in clinical settings, health risks are increasingly indicated by algorithms and physicians must decide whether and how to act on them. The key question is then raised: are AI mere tools supporting ends that God and human beings have decided upon—or is AI shaping the ends themselves?

Anthropic commitments to Rwanda are not abstract, but are measurable, national targets. They imagine that their health care tools can be used safely and independently by teachers, health workers, public servants, and other regular folks. This is meeting a very serious need, for many communities in Rwanda have difficulty accessing both information and relationships with clinicians on a regular basis.

These are very, very good goals. Goals which, again, are supported by local Catholic groups working in the country. But the number of bioethical issues here abound. Some obvious/classic topics which come to mind map onto issues in AI ethics more broadly: accuracy, safety, informed consent, data security and privacy, etc. But the ideas in RCA help us dig deeper. Here are three concerns I have about these moves that are related to and indeed build on each other.

1. Directive language in clinical AI. In clinical medical ethics, we often worry about “directive” language: that is, when a provider steers a patient toward a particular outcome (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) rather than presenting options neutrally. A classic example is in end-of-life counseling; a physician who says something like “most patients in your situation choose comfort care” is technically presenting options, but practically she is also directing an outcome. This can be problematic for any number of reasons, but most often because it reflects a particular bias of the physician. Employed in health care contexts, the way Claude phrases options, sequences them, frames probabilities, or describes outcomes will inevitably have directive weight. There is no way to ensure a neutral AI presentation in this context. Every design choice embeds a value judgment about what a good outcome looks like.

2. The unlimited options problem. Or the problem of Burger King medicine. The logic of consumer AI in health care tends toward what one might call “radical optionality:” the idea that a good AI health tool gives patients more choices, more information, more access. But this actually undermines the concept of a profession: a practice with internal goods, standards of excellence, and goods that cannot be achieved by just any means. The American Medical Association’s recent and repeated affirmation that physician-assisted suicide is incompatible with the healer’s role is exactly this: medicine has certain constitutive commitments that cannot be traded away for patient preference. A physician is not a vending machine. A medical clinic is not Burger King where the customer “has it their way.” Will Claude limit patient options? If not, this risks undermining the very nature of medicine itself as a profession. If Claude will limit options, then the question becomes: on what basis will those options be limited?

3. Which vision of the good is medicine based on? It certainly would make things easier if there were a neutral, purely rational ground from which we can answer this question. The answers all seem to come from a very particular vision of the good. Again, Anthropic’s goals in Rwanda are very good. But having good goals is not the same as a coherent vision of the good. And this difference matters enormously for how one pursues one’s goals. A purely consequentialist/utilitarian framework insists that we achieve these outcomes by whatever means produces the best aggregate result. But such a framework has well-known implications: it can justify coercive population health interventions, triage systems that deprioritize the less productive, the systematic devaluation of patients whose conditions are expensive to treat, and many, many more very bad things. But then the question arises: if one is not doing a consequentialist/utilitarian analysis, that requires that some means to your good ends will be ruled out. Which vision of the good will be used to do so?

RCA’s turn toward Catholic social teaching’s principle of subsidiarity is directly applicable here. Anthropic has said that the Rwanda partnership prioritizes local autonomy over how new technologies are introduced. This is promising language, but subsidiarity in the Catholic sense means more than local capacity-building. It means that the people most immediately affected should have genuine decision-making authority over how AI shapes clinical encounters in their particular context.

In Rwanda, it is not only the case that the Catholic Church runs a significant share of the health care infrastructure, but Roman Catholicism is the country’s largest religion, with four-in-ten Rwandans claiming it. Catholic institutions have long experienced navigating the tension between technical medicine and the human, relational, spiritual, communal dimensions of healing. They have long worked with the foundational view that not every means to a good end should be pursued.

RCA helps us understand that a Catholic vision in Rwanda would make sure to use Claude only in ways which preserve both health care itself and, in a related story, the authentic agency of those who practice it. In short, it must preserve the notion that health care is a human vocation, a calling from God. Goods external to the practice of health care, including a consequentialist focus on efficiency, must not threaten the goods internal to the practice of health care.

Anthropic’s origin story is one of putting their internal values and ethics ahead of external goods like efficiency, market capture, and financial expediency. This mattered, most recently, in their courageous stand against the Department of War when it came to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. And, again, they seem quite interested in dialogue with Catholics and others who want to suggest additional ways in which a foundational commitment to a vision of the good means doing things differently. I have hope that their increased influence will create an opening for ideas like those presented in RCA to gain increased traction at this crucial historical moment.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

· “You know that to the winner belong the spoils. Go for the spoils. I’ve said why don’t we use it to the victor go the spoils.” – Donald J. Trump, April 6, 2026

· “[Y]ou can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” – Steven Miller, January 5, 2026

· “We’re going to go on the offence, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” – Pete Hegseth, September 5, 2025

· “We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.” – Pete Hegseth, September 30, 2025

· “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” – Pete Hegseth, March 25, 2026

These quotes reflect a significant – and dangerous – shift concerning the use of armed force during President Donald J. Trump’s second term in office. During his first term, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks wrote that “in contrast to Bush, Trump makes no secret of his disdain for the laws of war.” In her judgment, “Bush at least tried to cloak his administration’s use of torture in legal sophistry, a backhanded testament to the strength of the norms his aides sought to circumvent.”

As for his current term, in a new book, Killing Machines: Trump, the Law of War, and the Future of Military Impunity, Thomas Gift argues “that Trump is unique among US presidents in the extent of his willingness to discard the law of war.”

Indeed, the approach to armed force that is reflected in the above quotes from President Trump, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security Stephen Miller, and Defense Secretary (or as he calls himself, “Secretary of War”), Pete Hegseth is a hybrid of might-makes-right realism, a hypermasculine warrior ethos, and holy war. None of the above quotes are consonant with the Catholic moral tradition and just war theory, which influenced what we now refer to as the laws of war and the rules of engagement.

To his credit, Vice President JD Vance, who has a book about his conversion to Catholicism due out this summer, brought up the “more than 1,000-year tradition of just war theory,” but he did so to question a remark by Pope Leo IVX that “God is never on the side of people who wield the sword.” Vance offers his advice: “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”

Attributed to Gerard Seghers - http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1257059, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43661956

To be fair, in his Palm Sunday homily, the pope specifically spoke of Jesus: “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” On this point, Pope Leo appears to have in mind Christians, such as Hegseth, a member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, founded by Doug Wilson, who self-identifies as a Christian nationalist. The conservative evangelical Christians, with their biblical fundamentalism, hold an apocalyptic worldview that includes holy war. Although the Catholic Church, going back to Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade in 1095, has held such an approach in the past, it now teaches that, as the US bishops put it in their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace, “a crusade mentality” is no longer legitimate, and “no state should act on the basis that it has ‘absolute justice’ on its side” (#93). As Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński notes, “Where just war limits violence, holy war sacralises it. War is no longer a tragic necessity, but an act aligned with divine will.”

In an apparent response to Vance, Bishop James Massa, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, clarified that “for over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war.” In this connection, Bishop Massa refers to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2308, which – quoting from Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, #79 – states that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” Bishop Massa adds, “That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’” In other words, Pope Leo was referring to aggressors who unjustly choose to embark on war.

According to the Catechism, #2309: “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration,” and “the gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy.” The Catechism notes that these criteria are “the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the ‘just war’ doctrine.” Although the number of criteria vary from source to source from St. Augustine to the present, the Catechism highlights four:

1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain

2) all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3) there must be serious prospects of success;

4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

In contrast to all the quotes at the beginning, according to the Catechism, “The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict” (#2312). Moreover, “Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions.” In this connection, the Catechism states, “Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin” (#2313).

For Vance, “We can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just.” And this is true, we can, but should we? Especially after “rigorous consideration” as the Catechism put it? True, the Catechism notes, “The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (#2309).

As William T. Cavanaugh wrote in a 2003 article, originally published in Commonweal magazine, in response to those who questioned whether Pope John Paul II and the bishops “had overstepped their competence” in judging that the war against Iraq was unjustified on just war grounds, this line from the Catechism has been incorrectly interpreted to mean “that we should hand over responsibility for judging the justice of war to the president on the basis of his superior access to information.” For Cavanaugh, while the Catechism “lays an obligation on civil authorities to consider moral truth, and not merely reasons of state, in deciding issues of lethal force,” it also “nowhere limits the church’s own competence in these matters.”

Furthermore, Cavanaugh homes in on “prudential judgment” as a reminder that “information is secondary to moral formation in the making of moral judgments.” For Catholics, just war theory is more than a checklist of criteria or a tool of statecraft. Just war requires virtues such as justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance -- and even mercy. Accordingly, I agree with Bishop Massa: “When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ.”