I devoured Magnifica Humanitas in just a couple of hours the day it was released - and the encyclical did not disappoint. It was not only the discussions of theological anthropology that I enjoyed reading, but also the longer overviews and introductions to Catholic social teaching. I am very much looking forward to using this encyclical in my Catholic Moral Theology course this fall.

But yes - like many people writing on this document, it is the questions of AI and human nature that are occupying much of my current reflections on the encyclical. As much as AI is a different language game (and indeed it is, in the ways it integrates our input into its activities, and reciprocates by directing our subsequent inquiries and considerations) - AI also still exists in the same broad universe of age-old considerations about technologies and humanity.

We have been here before, indeed we are always here in the midst of these questions. Therefore, we need to consider the ways in which our current conversations relate to previous ones about technologies and being human.

We have been here before. The pope begins with scripture, reminds us of the story of which we are a part. He argues that we are making a choice between the Tower of Babel and “the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” (1) The Tower of Babel represents both “an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction” but also “a profound danger…conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” (7). Babel narrates the ways humans aim for “self-affirmation” and “efficiency” rather than human dignity; in doing so, we doom ourselves, for we create a city focused on our idealism about being human - that is, what we think a human being is - rather than fostering a city that supports who we already are as human beings. Which is to say, always already dignified and worthy.

Because we do not believe this, not really, about our dignity and worth…

Babel is not the first time we have to confront our own doubts about our dignity. Turning back earlier in Genesis to the initial creation stories, we find God creating a good world in which humans can live, in both Genesis 1 and 2. God gives us the earth for our good use - and use it, we do.

(As a key side note I won’t develop here, I think Genesis demonstrates that the earth is both our given world and the arena for making use of what we have been given. Put differently it is the scene of our tool-making, of creating things that aid us in making this world our home. The significance of this is that in contemporary debates about viewing technology as primarily as tools, or as a culture/built environment, perhaps Genesis suggests it is both/and.)

Of course Genesis 3 happens, when the serpent makes us doubt our own dignity by raising about God’s commands not to eat from a certain tree. Yet even in the Fall humans are not prevented from stewarding the earth, nor from using the gifts of the earth. Indeed, out of great love, God creates some of the first postlapsarian tools we have, garments of skin.

Many theologians writing about technology-use have written about those garments of skin as our first technologies. Those garments begin to shape a world view in which nakedness becomes known, but also a world in which these second skins protect against sun, rain, ice, snow, and even against each other. Clothing becomes not only a technology that is a gift from God, but can be used in terrible as well as beneficial ways. So Pope Leo can remind us: “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” (9) Clothing can operate in demeaning and divisive ways (we can consider the kinds of clothing concentration camp victims are given) as well as caring ways (how about homemade swaddling PJs for newborns). We have faced these kinds of technology questions even from the beginning.

We are Always Here… We still face these questions today. Even those technologies that we now quite take for granted (doorknobs, pencils, scissors) shape worldviews in which some people are “in” and some people are “out”; some treated with dignity and some not. The doorknob, for example, must be turned in particular ways which are available only to some people, but not to all. Not every hand can open a clock-wise turning knob. Not every hand can reach a doorknob. Not everyone has a hand with which to open a door of this kind. And think of what exists on the other side of that doorknob that may support (or not) human dignity? What if it is a bathroom that cannot be reached in time? Then we can think about a series of doors and doorknobs - and a whole network of rooms in buildings that may be limited to only a few, by design. The apparently insignificant doorknob is the battle site for human dignity especially for those who are left out.

This is why it is crucial to pay attention not to the ones who have, but to the ones who do not have. Can we imagine creating doors that do not so exclude? Of course we can, and we have done so. But doing so requires both a desire to encounter the dignity and worth of another human being, and the creativity to respond in an alternate way.

Pope Leo’s description of humanity in Magnifica Humanitas thus stands critically in contrast to Babel: “building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.” (12, emphasis mine). To be human is to be limited. Even before the Fall, we were never created to be God, but in God’s image. Part of the definition of being human is that we are not God; we will not measure up either to our imagined perfections of who God is, nor for our imagined perfections of who we are. But this fact does not make us less human or less worthy; to the contrary, our dignity and worth are integral to our created nature as limited, weak, human beings.

Human Limits and Disabilities

The final point I want to make here is about disabilities in relation to Pope Leo’s theological anthropology (and I really have been here before! See this article from 10+ years ago at the Journal of Moral Theology, “We Do Not Know How to Love.”) Statistics about how many people have disabilities suggest maybe a quarter of the adult population has an identifiable disability related to hearing, neurodiversity, mobility, or vision.

A common narrative about technologies is that they support or enhance life for a range of identified disabilities: motorized wheelchairs, cochlear implants, gene therapies, and more. Isn’t life good when people can move, hear, not have to worry about the lack of particular amino acids? This is the kind of question people often ask - but it is also the type of question that presumes that only an ideal body can be a happy body. In a world where only some bodies get identified as disabled (25%), that means the ideal body looks like most people, maybe even 75% of adults.

Think about how this idea downplays the idea of human dignity - and mostly not for the people society presumes have disabilities. Rather, we downplay human dignity for the people who are presumed to be “ideal”. Who can’t reach the kind of doorknob I mentioned earlier? Well, as it happens, any one of us might be a person who can’t reach a doorknob on any given day. We might be faced with a large door, or be a child, or in a wheelchair, or finding our hands full of some necessary item that we can’t put down.

Presumed “ideal” people are especially the ones who have to imbibe the narrative of having to be efficient, timely, autonomous, and incapable of errors. What a horrible thing, to always be living in a world where there aren’t second chances, and where we think reform or change doesn’t really happen - precisely because we live in a world where our technologies serve efficiencies and imagined ideals.

Pope Leo instead encourages us to rethink how we see ourselves. We are all limited; the things commonly understood as disabilities are just one form of limitation.

What does it look like when we accept, even love, each other and ourselves because of our limits, our mistakes, our weaknesses - and we design our technologies with loving our limits in mind, just as with the doorknobs? This is why I think Pope Leo thus asks us to consider what it means to be “freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” (110)

What might it look like to design AI so that those of us in limited bodies get to shape technologies in a way that supports our common good? That is a tough question - but it is also a question we have always already been addressing.

Editorial note: In a classic post, Thomas Bushlack explores what it means to live moral life not out of obligation, but with intentions more deeply intertwined with Christ’s will. Ed. Jana M. Bennett

Stephen Pope has given us a splendidly judicious account of the ordo amoris, attentive to its historical roots and development within Catholic social teaching and rightly stressing the consistency with which the tradition has summoned Christians to special care for those most in need and most likely to be ignored and excluded. One dimension of the topic that Pope does not discuss here, though he has taken it up in his previous scholarship, is the way in which thinking about the ordo amoris was, at its origins and again today, informed by observations of natural orderings of attachments common among social animals.¹ We share with other highly social animals a tendency to prefer conspecifics over members of other species, members of one’s own clan over others, friends over mere acquaintances, kin over non-kin, offspring over other relatives. The ancient Stoics noted these natural tendencies, while arguing that human beings were capable through reason of recognizing the fundamental equality of all human persons and of drawing those instinctively relegated to distant circles of concern closer to the center through oikeiosis.² Christians deepened this teaching, inspired by Christ’s example of boundary-crossing love, his command to love enemies, and his promise of the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

Tracing the roots of the ordo amoris in observations of shared features of social animality sheds light on why Augustine, Aquinas, and others in the tradition have seemed to both support and challenge giving preference to the near and dear. To what extent should we affirm this default ordering of affections? We can say that it is natural to (and appropriate for) non-human animals, who do not have the capacity to take up a perspective from which to see that another’s loved one is just as precious to them as my loved ones are to me, let alone to grasp that each one is equally precious to God. Since humans do have this ability, however, our instinctive privileging of special relations is properly relativized. Not entirely, though, for we are also capable of recognizing the finitude of our resources and of our capacity to care and the goodness of special human relationships within which persons can be known and cherished in all their particularity. The challenge we face is to balance these appropriately, given both our capacities and our limitations. It is appropriate to accept the historical contingencies that render some particularly close to us “by place, time, or opportunity,” as Augustine taught, but also to recognize the contingency of these forms of proximity—it is as if by chance or lot that some are given into our special care, and chance can also bring a stranger or enemy into the orbit of our responsibility, just as the urgency of need can heighten responsibility for one whose claims might otherwise be perceived as distant.³

Recognizing the deep evolutionary roots of what scientists have called our “parochial altruism” helps us see just how difficult it is to overcome our instinctive privileging of in-group over out-group, friend over stranger, and just how alert we must be to unjustified forms of special preference.⁴ In-group bias appears very early in human development, and it is possible to trigger out-group hostility based on wholly arbitrary markers of identity.⁵ None of this legitimizes the deliberate distortion of a theological tradition of reflection that has clearly proclaimed that Christians should give priority to the urgent needs of even distant strangers over ordinary claims of nearer neighbors. But it does mean that we should not be surprised to see the ordo amoris being championed on behalf of privileging the in group. It is good to see clearly what we are up against.

1. Stephen J. Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994); see also Jennifer A. Herdt, The Great Wheel of Being: Ethics Beyond the Human (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 115–120.

2. Joseph Clair, Discerning the Good in the Letters and Sermons of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 39–47.

3. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Macmillan, 1986), 24–24 (1.28).

4. Pope, Evolution of Altruism, 155. On parochial altruism, see Elliott Sober and David Sloane Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9; Hannes Rusch, “The Evolutionary Interplay of Intergroup Conflict and Altruism in Humans: A Review of Parochial Altruism Theory and Prospects for Its Extension,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281 (2014): 1794:20141539; Herdt, Great Wheel of Being, 265–268.

5. Paul Bloom, Just Babies (New York: Crown, 2013); B. Mullen, R. Brown, and C. Smith, “Intergroup Bias as a Function of Salience, Relevance, and Status: An Integration,” European Journal of Social Psychology 22 (1992): 103–122. In the famous Robbers Cave experiment, twelve-year-old boys at a summer camp in Oklahoma were arbitrarily assigned either to “The Eagles” or “The Rattlers.” Violent conflict, name-calling, and in-group favoritism ensued in short order. Muzafer Sherif, O.J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood, and Carolyn W. Sherif, Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Book Exchange, 1961).

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

Magnifica Humanitas both confirms and complicates this view of CST (or Catholic Social Doctrine), and that probably means I’m going to need to revise my syllabus next year. Most of the conversation around the encyclical has focused on the contrast between the tower of Babel and the civilization of love, and ethical guidance on AI. But, as David Cloutier points out on this Substack, the beginning of the document includes “a full-scale meta-analysis of the nature and history of ‘social doctrine.’” At First Things, Joshua Hochschild claims that MH “refounds and ratifies social teaching as a primary mode of the Church’s engagement with the world.” Clearly, something is going on, but moral theologians have been so busy communicating the AI-specific content of MH that they haven’t had time to explore the narration of Catholic social thought which consumes the first two chapters of the document.

One place to begin that reflection is to consider MH’s list of social principles. Human dignity and rights are now understood as the foundation anchoring five principles: the common good, the universal destination of material goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice.

What is notable here? Human dignity is not simply first in a list, but situated as the foundation of the other principles, explicitly linked to equality and human rights. The principles that follow are, well, principles, not themes. The universal destination of material goods is included, as it is in the Compendium, but few other lists. Solidarity includes a call for participation and is specified by the option for the poor. Subsidiarity covers all intermediary groups, including families, and, along with the common good, frames MH’s claims about the role of government. Social justice defined as, “the capacity of a social, economic and political order to allow everyone — particularly the weakest — to live a truly dignified life, without leaving anyone behind” (no. 77), is elevated in a new way.

What is left out? As Leo continues to decenter just war theory in favor of a focus on nonviolence and just peace as the church’s prophetic contribution in conflict situations, it is not surprising that it does not appear as a principle. However, in a document released on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum and broadly understood as a response to the present and coming labor crises, it is interesting that neither the rights of workers nor the priority of labor is included as a principle, though MH is marked by an insistence on respect for dignity and rights more generally. The absence of the option for the poor, stewardship of creation, and the call to family is perhaps even more surprising. Family has been a unique and central part of the Catholic vision of the social order from the beginning of CST (see chapter two of my Family Ethics: Practices for Christians). The option for the poor came to occupy a central place in the tradition (see Dilexi Te, nos. 82-102) through dialogue with liberation theology in the latter part of the twentieth century and Laudato Sí compellingly articulated the church’s commitment to the environment in the context of its social teaching in the twenty first century. It seems that poverty, work, family, and the environment are now understood as particular issues to be considered in the light of more general principles. I have some concerns about this approach, but I’ll be reframing my syllabus around the one foundation and five principles articulated in MH and rethinking my first assignment.

What won’t change is the interplay of change and continuity in the Catholic social tradition as a central course theme. MH clearly situates the tradition in the context of history, is open about its development and about the church’s failings. It invites us to see CSD not as “a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment. It is born from the encounter between the eternal truth of the Gospel and the questions of history. It allows itself to be challenged by the signs of the times, and draws nourishment from the contributions of science, culture and human experience” (no. 27). That’s a vision I want to teach, even if we keep arguing—and I hope we will--about the details.

_{The image above is Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s 1649 painting “Elisha and the Shunamite Woman,” which is in the public domain, accessed from Wikimedia Commons.}

Readings for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Karma” is a concept we hear mentioned often these days, whether as the title of a popular Taylor Swift song or as an easy explanation for an event. This ancient Indian idea indicates that a person’s intentional thoughts, words, and actions influence the future in a causal way; this is seen as a natural law. For Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is also linked to reincarnation. These religions believe the accumulation of karma in one life determines the shape of the person’s next life on earth.

We can see where the idea of karma may be compelling or make sense to us at some level; it’s no wonder that even Christians will turn to karma to try to understand why something good or bad has happened. However, our own Catholic tradition has a different and even richer concept rooted in a loving God, and this is evident in our readings for today.

The first reading from 2 Kings presents a nice story from the life of the prophet Elisha, who is graciously hosted by a “woman of influence” in Shunem. Elisha is so moved by her hospitality in setting up a guest room for him that he wants to do something for her as thanks. Elisha’s servant knows that what she really wants is a son, and in biblical miracle fashion also seen with women such as Sarah, Hannah, and Elizabeth, Elisha informs her she will have a son.

Thus we see the woman is rewarded for her kindness. Yet this reward is beyond a concept of karma; karma does not account for miracles coming from the hand of God through a prophet. Moreover, prolonged infertility cannot be cured simply by graciously hosting a visitor. We know there is no such direct causality in a karmic way, nor did this woman expect such a repayment. What makes this remarkable is that the reward exceeds the good deed in a way that indicates a supernatural world encompassing the natural world. This is no basic cause and effect in a closed natural system, but rather shows a world that has a divine actor moved by love.

And yet, as with the ancient Indian concept of karma, we do believe we are responsible for our thoughts, words, and deeds. In the confiteor at the beginning of Mass, we communicate our responsibility for our sin quite clearly: “I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts, in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.”

And although we don’t believe in karma, we believe that sins have real consequences. At the natural level, we have all probably experienced this. Someone who embezzles money from an organization may be caught and punished, which is a natural consequence. Or they may not be caught but the organization has to file for bankruptcy. Another natural consequence is that the person develops a vice of deception. Sometimes, a sin from years past can have an unexpected natural consequence even many years later. And another regular consequence of sin is that it ruptures relationships with others.

However, as with good deeds, we see that sin does not operate in a closed natural system, particularly because it is an offense against God. Thus there are supernatural consequences to sin as well. Sin ruptures our relationship with God. Sin causes division in the body of Christ, the Church, which should be characterized by unity. Sin damages our souls, and it can also leave us feeling quite hopeless, as though we will never be good enough to merit heaven.

Yet this is precisely the opening that we need to recognize the supernatural perspective we have. We are not condemned to be reborn as the lowest caste, punished karmically for our bad deeds. Rather, in his great love, God sent his only Son to us (John 3:16). Jesus emptied himself and became human, obediently accepting death on a cross (Phillipians 2:5-11). In today’s second reading from Romans, we hear, “As to his death, he died to sin once and for all; as to his life, he lives for God” (Romans 6:11).

The message is entirely one of hope. To borrow the words of the biblical scholar Gary Anderson in his book Sin: A History, God has gamed the world in our favor. Yes, sin has natural and supernatural consequences, but we do not need to rely on ourselves or expect karmic justice from an unfeeling universe. We are saved through Jesus Christ, who reveals God’s love for us in his life, death, and resurrection. Our recognition of our sins and our repentance, our vulnerability and brokenness that leads us to depend on God, our willingness to admit we are doomed without Christ’s salvific work – these all provide a richer picture where God’s mercy transcends his justice. As represented by Elisha, God wants to give us more than we deserve; God will reward the good deeds, as Jesus states in today’s gospel from Matthew. Jesus also states: “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:38-39).

What might be the implications of all this? First and foremost, our faith is one of relationship with God, not a faceless principle of the universe. Secondly, we believe that our thoughts, words, and deeds have natural and supernatural consequences, so we have to attend to them: to avoid sin, to acknowledge sin, to do penance for sin, and to seek to grow in virtue through intentional good deeds. Third, we do all of this knowing that God wants us to win; he wants us to have eternal life with him. In his mercy, he gives us so many resources to help us: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and Confession, the lives of the saints as models, sacramentals such as holy water and rosaries, the Bible for our edification, the support of our friends and family, the beauty of nature for inspiration, etc.

Fourth, when we face difficulty, we see it as an invitation to take up our cross and follow Jesus. One of the best arguments against karma is that bad things often happen to good people (and God allows this in allowing humanity’s free will, often using bad things to draw us closer to him) and also, good things happen to bad people (and God allows this likewise!). When we are wronged, we don’t “leave it to karma,” but we do put it into God’s hands, trusting that he will bring about natural or supernatural justice somehow in his own time. At the same time we don’t “leave it to karma” when we see injustices in the world around us. We are called to advocate and work for justice, doing the good deeds that will be rewarded.

We are far from despair with such an understanding. And as we continue walking and praying through these weeks of Ordinary Time in the midst of summer, we take up our cross and follow Jesus, acknowledge and repent of sin, become part of the body of Christ in the Church’s sacrament of the Eucharist, and seek to live good lives, trusting in God’s reward.

One sentence in Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has received undue attention along with inaccurate interpretation: “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated” (192). While some have quickly concluded that the pope has “repudiated” and “disavowed” just war theory, others – including Catholic philosophers Gregory Reichberg and Edward Feser, as well as myself – observe that Magnifica Humanitas actually uses just war criteria in its analysis of how new technological developments, such as AI-based weapons systems, impact the way that war is justified and waged today.

The deeper problem, according to Pope Leo, is that “a culture of power is taking hold … and grows by normalizing war, pursuing ever-greater military power, taking advantage of the crisis of multilateralism and fueling a false realism that insists that there is no alternative” (188). What he calls the “normalization of war” is evident with the waxing militarism, unilateralism, us-versus-them and might-is-right mentality. “Today … we are witnessing a real paradigm shift in public discourse and in decisions regarding rearmament, with a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics,” writes the pope, “while the very ethical principles that had previously limited its use are being eroded” (190). Two paragraphs later, Pope Leo reiterates, “When historical memory fades and the ethical principles that protect civilians and the most vulnerable are weakened, it becomes easier to justify violence as necessary, inevitable or even ‘sanitized’” (192). The ethical principles to which he alludes are undoubtedly what the Catechism refers to as “the strict conditions for legitimate defense,” which are “are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the ‘just war’ doctrine” (2309).

I wonder, though, whether it is the moral criteria that are corroded and obsolete, or the forgetting and even the denial of the ethic that yielded them and that requires, according to the Catechism, “rigorous consideration” in their application (2309). After all, a few paragraphs later Pope Leo urges, “Concrete criteria for discernment must be established” to address the problems we face with warfare today (199). Again, in these paragraphs the pope clearly refers to the principles of last resort, proportionality, just cause, and noncombatant immunity while carefully applying them to raise questions about AI, weapons, and war.

As Feder suggests, “It is clear, then, that what the pope considers ‘outdated’ is not the principles of just war doctrine themselves, but rather any application of those principles that would permit military action for purposes other than defense in the strictest sense – and in particular, any application of them that ‘normalizes’ war as one ‘instrument of international politics’ alongside others.” The problem, then, isn’t the principles themselves. After all, throughout Magnifica Humanitas, “principles” are mentioned over 70 times and “criteria” nearly 30 times vis-à-vis “the Social Doctrine of the Church [which] is a legacy of wisdom, where we find principles for thought, criteria for discernment and judgment, and concrete guidelines for action” (3).

Curiously, in the sentence preceding his call for the establishment of “concrete criteria for discernment” regarding AI-weapons, Pope Leo asserts, “It is not enough to invoke a generic type of ethics” (199), but what he means by this is unclear to me. If by “generic” he means “general,” he could have in mind an ethic that is “vague,” “popular,” or “predominant,” each of which could be morally problematic by making it “easier to justify violence” (192). But if with “generic” the pope has in mind “universal,” “global,” or “common,” then such an ethic has provided criteria that are established not only in the Catechism and in the Catholic moral tradition but also in military ethics and international law.

As Firdous Syed reminds us, “Long before it was formalized in Christian theology, nearly every major civilization developed its own framework to regulate violence, recognizing both the necessity and the dangers of organized conflict. Each sought to place ethical limits on violence, protect non-combatants, restrain rulers and subordinate force to a higher conception of justice, duty or social harmony.” In fact, just war ethics historically can be found in non-Western and non-Christian cultures, as seen in numerous academic studies by reputable scholars such as Ping-Cheung Lo and Sumner B. Twiss, as well as John Kelsay and Rory Cox.

On this point, Lloyd Steffen has referred to “the ancient Western ethics tradition of natural law, which underwrites just war thinking.”1 As he puts it, there is “a way of ethical thinking,” an “ethic that lies behind just war” that should be “widely applicable to all kinds of ethical issues,” including but going “beyond the particular question of war or the use of force.”2 This ethic provides “a system of guidance for deliberating, analyzing, and prescribing action that is good, right, and fitting,” by giving “rise to rules” that function as “normative moral action guides” which are “not intended to rationalize war” but instead meant to “impose restraint, insisting that force be used only in a way that is proportionate to the end of addressing injustice and restoring peace.”3

For Steffen, moral deliberations about “the prospective use of force inevitably involve the content of just war thinking.”4 Similarly, in his 1969 book War and Moral Discourse, Ralph Potter observed that when morally evaluating any use of force, including by the police, “some analogue to the just war doctrine emerges, whether it be in non-Western cultures or in the Christian subculture.”5

In addition, in Steffen’s view, other human actions that cause harm, even if we do not think of them as uses of force, involve such “just war thinking,” and he illustrates how with end-of-life decision making in bioethics and the death penalty in criminal justice. Similarly, Lisa Sowle Cahill has used just war reasoning and principles to examine embryonic stem cell research, noting: “The task is therefore not to decide ‘prospectively’ whether it is a good idea, but to subject it to moral guidance and restraints, acknowledging its potential for beneficial outcomes while limiting the social damage and moral compromises it involves.”6 Likewise, in addition to my own work on just policing, I have proposed a just mining theory with criteria under three categories that parallel just war’s jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum – namely, jus ad extractionem, jus in extractione, and jus post extractionem.7

Significantly, Steffen adds that the “ethic that underwrites just war thinking may appear to be focused on the coercive force of violence, but the normative guide against using force applies not only to uses of force that are destructive and violent but to any use of force.”8 By this he has in mind active nonviolent resistance, including boycotts, demonstrations, and sit-ins. Steffen argues that just war reasoning and criteria were implicitly embedded in the thought and actions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., for even their nonviolent resistance was a use of force, which required justification as well as measured application.9

Indeed, over half a century ago, both James F. Childress and Paul Ramsey applied just war thinking and criteria to nonviolent resistance and protests.10 As Childress observed:

The “just war doctrine” offers a set of considerations for determining when war is justified, and analogous criteria must be employed in determining when civil disobedience is justified, although perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that civil disobedience is subject to the same general demands of morality as any other action rather than that it is illuminated by just war criteria. However that may be, certainly the appropriate criteria for evaluating civil disobedience coincide to a great extent with traditional just war criteria such as just cause, good motives and intentions, exhaustion of normal procedures for resolving disputes, reasonable prospect for success, due proportion between probable good and bad consequences, and right means.11

More recently, in her work on “just peacebuilding,” Maryann Cusimano Love has suggested “just-peace principles” that she acknowledges are implied in just war thinking and resemble its principles.12

All of this leads me to suggest that what the Catechism calls “legitimate defense,” along with its “strict conditions” requiring “rigorous consideration,” should encompass both armed and unarmed force. As such, just war theory is far from “outdated.” It may need to be updated, as has happened with work in recent decades on jus post bellum. But when Pope Leo laments, “When historical memory fades and the ethical principles that protect civilians and the most vulnerable are weakened” (192), what is really needed is a remembering and a stronger commitment to – through education and moral formation – the ethic behind just war.

The week’s readings are here.

What is it that makes us most afraid: pain, suffering, and loss, or the possibility of their future occurrence? What is it that makes children afraid to go into a dark room alone, even if that room happens to be their own? Could it be that what makes us most afraid is the combination of our abiding knowledge that we are vulnerable to suffering together with our ignorance of when that suffering might come upon us, where it might come from, and what it might mean?

There is little more pitiable than the sight of a young child undergoing trauma. I think immediately of the iconic image of Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year-old boy from Aleppo, sitting in an ambulance bloodied and dazed after being pulled out of the rubble of an apartment building where he and his family were living last August when it was destroyed by a government airstrike. Part of what made this image spark so much sympathy and outrage around the world was its clear depiction of this little boy’s incomprehension of what was happening to him. Surely he must have known that he was hurt, and that his apartment was gone, but the fear in his eyes was most likely the result of the shock of not knowing how this suffering came about, who caused it, and what it might mean. The look on this boy’s face strikes the hearts of so many of us not because of the magnitude of the emotion it conveys or even the egregious act of injustice to which it attests, but rather because of how clearly it reflects what is perhaps our deepest and greatest human fear: the possibility of suffering at the hands of an evil which remains beyond our ability to explain or control, but which can nevertheless take from us all that we know and love.

Aristotle famously declared that we human beings have “an unlimited desire to know” (Metaphysics, Bk. 1). Yet such a desire is not merely the expression of academic studiousness. We do want to know the chemical composition of water, or how the battle of Waterloo unfolded, but even more so I think we want to know how and why we are here, and how and why this existence of ours includes the possibility of so much suffering. For suffering gives rise to a suggestion that haunts this unlimited desire of ours: what if there is no ultimate answer to the question of why we suffer? The suggestion is a haunting one because if this question has no answer, there seems little point to pursuing the answer of any other. For if we cannot make sense of our suffering, then how significant could it possibly be that we can make sense of anything else? Such a conclusion would not render all else that we know false so much as trivial. After all, how could our existence as a whole have an explanation if our suffering did not? The absurdity of suffering would reveal all the particular objects of our comprehension to be floating upon a sea of formlessness and chaos. Reason and logic would be little more than elaborate tricks, our desire to know little more than a congential impulse.

Such is our deepest fear, I submit: that our bodies may writhe and our hearts may break, but we can never understand why. Such is the fear of the unknown evils that lurk in dark rooms, drop from dark skies, or lie hidden under piles of dark rubble. Such is the fearful condition of all humanity in the wake of sin, so the Scriptures tell us. And by telling us, they begin to redeem us from this very fear. For what could it mean to live under the reign of death but to presume that the world itself is ultimately death? To presume that disintegration, nothingness, and disorder are what frame the small, fleeting realities we experience here and now?

St. Paul tells us in the second reading for this week that “death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam.” Even if “sin is not accounted when there is no law,” nevertheless sin is in the world from the moment of the first man’s trespass, and through sin all appears to become fragmented and destined for destruction. What I take St. Paul to mean here (although it can be hazardous to say) is that the history of the human race, taken by itself and on its own terms, is a narrative with no ultimate meaning other than death. While it is true that sin only becomes intelligible in light of the law given through Moses, in a real sense human existence itself only becomes intelligible in light of what the law reveals about the world we experience as suffering: namely that it is not ultimate. And because it is not ultimate, we are not alone.

Adam’s sin severs our relationship with God, leaving us alone in the world. Yet as alone in the world, our existence loses its intelligibility. We may try to construct different platforms for making sense of why we are here, but the magnitude of our suffering always reveals them to be such fragile and vain contraptions—makeshift rafts on a wild and endless ocean. Without the knowledge that we have strayed from the God who made us and loves us, we are all like Omran Daqneesh: we can only stare, dazed and uncomprehending, at the evils which leave us bloodied and bereft. There can be no meaning to the suffering, nothing to set it right. For this reason, the law is itself the first “good news” proclaimed to a conquered humanity. Through it God proclaims his ultimate intention for his creation: life. Order, unity, meaning: these, and not their opposite, frame all the realities we encounter in this life.

There is an answer to why we are here, and an explanation to why we suffer. And so our desire to know these answers is not in vain. Our desire for justice is not an evolutionary twitch. What an amazing gift to be told that the world is not as it should be!

We feel like aliens not because we are creatures who want to understand a world that cannot be understood, but because our inability to understand the world is a sign of our alienation from the source of all understanding. Of course, it is not enough merely to be told of this alienation; we must be shown a way past it. And so it is through “the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ” that this healing overflows to all the world. Given a law that reveals the true reason for its deepest desire, humanity now receives in Jesus Christ the object of that desire. We are no longer then in the dark. We no longer suffer in a state of incomprehension and fear. We can look to God’s redemptive action in the history of his people Israel and see the final fulfillment to which He intends to lead us. And as the Lord himself says in the gospel reading, we can pursue this fulfillment without any fear of what we do not yet know. For “nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.” Jesus Christ is the light of the world, and in his cross, death, and resurrection all the darkness of death’s reign over the world is banished. Does that mean we are no longer vulnerable to the same sort of suffering we have always endured? No, but it does mean that our suffering is seen and known by One from whom all things receive their true meaning.

Do we now, beholding Christ on the cross and upon the altar, completely understand how all the tragedies and contradictions that characterize our existence will be resolved? By no means. Yet the Lord assures us that every sparrow, and even every hair on our heads, remains under His loving gaze. “So do not be afraid,” he tells us; “you are worth more than many sparrows.” Indeed, you are worth all that He has given in order to claim you for Himself.

Any teacher who has experienced a student trying to argue for why they deserve more points on an assignment can likely commiserate with the way in which education can become transactional. Reflecting theologically on ungrading (serendipitously, as I prepared to give my Midterm exam) prompted me to revisit Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” philosophy and its intersection with Heron and Rovati’s approach to teaching and assessment. Existence, Buber posits, can be encountered by the individual via two attitudes: as an “It,” an object which is separate from the self and which will be either used or experienced, or as a “Thou.” Encountering another as a “Thou” implies a relationship that lacks discrete boundaries and is contextualized within a relationship with God who is the Eternal Thou. In this philosophy, it is a choice to encounter the other as a “Thou,” and this choice transforms the nature of their relationship.

Buber’s invitation to intentionally encounter the other (in this case one’s students) as a Thou recognizes that relationality is not taken for granted; one must be aware of the nature of the other as something not to be used or merely experienced, but encountered. Buber, like Giussani, resists the instrumentalization of relationships. Ungrading aids the instructor in seeing students as Thou-s and frustrates the tendency toward “the adversarial relationship that traditional grades create” in favor of the formation of “a partnership with our students that involves them in deciding what they want to achieve in the course.” (125)

It seems that ungrading also invites students to consider who they want to be–not only as learners as they reflect on the grade they want and the intellectual and personal work they are willing to do to get there–but as human persons. When students are encountered Thou-s the instructor is better able to help them toward both the secondary end of their chosen grade and the final end of who they become (telos). In recognition of Christianity’s proclamation of the fact that “the supreme law of all human relationships is charity—gratuitous and complete love for the person and thus love for her freedom,” (123) the instructor should both embody charity toward the student and invite them to consider what living out of charity looks like in their current reality. The heart of this caritas is the freedom God offers each of us; leaning into this freedom releases the students from the framework of studying to avoid the “stick” of a bad grade or to earn the “carrot” of a good grade. Caritas asks students questions and invites students to pursue them in search of a Truth that is personal.

The encounter that takes place between persons is central to Buber’s philosophy. When one considers the study of theology as an opportunity for the conversion of both the intellect and the heart, the instructor must do all he or she can to cultivate encounters with Christ. Jesus’s exchange with the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel provides a fruitful means to reflect on encounter’s role in theology and how ungrading might encourage it. In Christ is found the answer to each question, theological or otherwise, of the human heart. Veritatis Splendor states that “the decisive answer to every one of man’s questions, his religious and moral questions in particular, is given by Jesus Christ, or rather is Jesus Christ himself” (Veritatis Splendor, no. 2). When theology invites students to encounter Christ, and they do so with open minds and hearts, it helps them probe their most pressing questions wherever they are on their spiritual journey. In the rich young man’s question of what he must do to gain eternal life teachers might hear echoes of achievement-driven students asking what they need to do to ace the exam or maintain their high GPA. Instructors quickly weary of this question, because to us, they are asking the wrong question.

Veritatis Splendor points to the real question being asked both by the rich young man and, many of us hope, by our students: What is the full meaning of my life? This question is perennial; “Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man continues, in a sense, in every period of history, including our own” (Veritatis Splendor, no. 25). John Paul II describes the pursuit of truth in this way:

“In the young man, whom Matthew’s Gospel does not name, we can recognize every person who, consciously or not, approaches Christ the Redeemer of man and questions him about morality. For the young man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life…This question is ultimately an appeal to the absolute Good which attracts us and beckons us; it is an echo of a call from God who is the origin and goal of man’s life” (Veritatis Splendor, no. 7).

The rich young man encounters Truth in the person of Christ, and this is the same truth toward which instructors encourage their students, evoking St. Ambrose’s statement: “Know, then, O beautiful soul, that you are the image of God. Know that you are the glory of God (1 Cor 11:7). Hear how you are his glory…Know then, O man, your greatness, and be vigilant” (Veritatis Splendor, no. 10). Ungrading, it seems, nudges students towards this end by helping them grapple with truth (and often Truth) through personal accompaniment.

There are two seeds of hope that Heron and Rovati’s piece planted in my pedagogy. The first is a reminder of the distinctively human work of teaching theology–something that Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot do. If theology’s heart rests in facilitating encounters with the ultimate Thou–God’s very Self, then humans who bear God’s own image are the best facilitators of this encounter. The second is the gift of being re-focused on my task as a teacher of theology. While I cannot yet fully transition to ungrading, its focus on facilitating student autonomy and freedom refreshes my teaching soul. It helps me consider how I might centralize student growth and development intellectually and personally through my course and helps guard against becoming too focused on the incidentals of teaching theology. It reminds me how to see and encounter my students, and better facilitate their encounters with Christ.

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

Starting with the book Encountering Artificial Intelligence of 2024, the AI Research Group for the Vatican Centre of Digital Culture has raised the issue of the challenges that the age of AI poses to human agency and intelligence in light of the limitations of classical modern anthropologies. Since Immanuel Kant this tradition tends to invert the hierarchy between the holistic features of our insightful “experience of reality” (intellectus, nous), and the subordinate, discursive, manipulative and problem-solving features of human rationality (ratio, dianoia).² The new book of the same group, Reclaiming Human Agency, shows how the resulting image of who human beings are has shaped disordered habits of life planning and technology design that undermine our technical, moral, and intellectual skills, hollow out our perceptual and epistemic trust, and endanger our freedom to strive for the common good. The corresponding recommendations of the last two chapters then include possible regulatory constraints on AI as well as constructive frameworks of technology design that are suitable to protect and support human agency.

The focal concept of (human) agency reminds us that the responsibility of judicious human agents, whose judgments are drawn by the natural desire for the true, the beautiful, and the good, cannot be delegated to probabilistic classifiers. The conflicting idea that AI can attain human agency is indicative of “dominant ways of understanding human persons” (53), which build on materialist, behaviorist, or functionalist traditions. Yet the latter are incompatible with the “Catholic anthropology as well as other robust anthropologies” (53). The last half-sentence of this quotation could have been deepened in the light of most recent discussions of theoretical biology and neurocognitive science, which confirm the fundamental difference between mechanical ways of motion and the vital agency of ensouled bodies (in the Aristotelian sense of this word), which is mentioned in passing (49f.).³ If we focus on this fundamental difference, the inert movements of mechanical calculating devices cannot even compete with the organismic agency of a simple bacterium. Hence, we can conclude that there is no technical path to creating truly intelligent “Agentic AI’s” (47-63). The idea of a “living machine” is a contradiction in terms, and in this sense symptomatic of a phenomenologically and conceptually confused account of the “gift of intelligence” (53).⁴

In line with Pope Francis’s statements on the contemporary “Throwaway Culture and the Technocratic Paradigm” (36ff.), the book also engages with the systemic dimensions of technological innovations and related “structures of sin.”⁵ It exposes, for example, our culture “of greed and pride” and its careless fragmentation of knowledge, which “lead to loss of appreciation of the whole, the pursuit of what is not essential and the disregard of relationships” (Laudato Si, no. 110). However, the authors hesitate to engage with the creative dimensions of systemic technologies that “enframe” our lives in such a way that they alter our view of the world.

The fact that the book puts rather little emphasis on the theoretical side of the “tie between intellect and agency” (20) strikes me as symptomatic of this hesitation. To be sure, in contrast to modern voluntarists, the authors emphasize that virtuous acts of the will are inseparable from our theoretical understanding of the world. They also leave no doubt that this is relevant in terms of the trinitarian character of human personhood and the exercise of “those features particular to the image and likeness of God: intellect and will (…) grounded in human nature” (17, my emphasis). We might even read this quotation as indicative of Augustine’s trinitarian account of the nature of the human mind (mens), which can be characterized as a connatural tri-unity of mind, knowledge, and love, or memory, intellect, and will. Arguably, this triadic structure is essential to the creative potentials of human agency, which empower us to participate “in the creative activity of God” (22f.). Yet the disclosive, intellective dimensions of this creative power remain underexposed in the 2025 book.

As contemporary discussions of the philosophy of technology show, technology is never only a means to the fulfillment of predetermined ends of the will. For example, for millennia our lives have been enframed by writing technologies and related techno-cultural infrastructures, which shaped our practical and cognitive habits and underpinned the evolution of our brains.⁶ If properly ordered, systemic technologies like these can have a disclosive dimension that transforms our nature and deepens our understanding of the world, including our understanding of unanticipated dimensions of human flourishing that technological innovations invite and afford. The authors rightly emphasize that true happiness is always an unanticipated gift and that the freedom it affords “is not limitless autonomy but a participation in God’s own triune life” (34). Yet this freedom is inextricably intertwined with the gift of our embodied intellect (noûs) as a “revelator of being.”⁷ Our intellect has the potential to disclose unanticipated dimensions of the world, including the techno-cultural environments that enframe our life, inasmuch as it permits us to participate in the creative power of the Divine Word. For this reason, Saint Augustine already associated the uncreated Word, through which everything is created and given meaning, with an original art (in the sense of τέχνη), the ars ipsa per quem facta sunt omnia.⁸ Starting with John Scotus Eriugena, this artistic dimension of the Word and, derivatively, the human intellect was later systematically elaborated by thinkers like Bonaventure and Meister Eckhart, culminating in the ars coniecturalis of Nicholas of Cusa. The most recent discussion of trinitarian anthropologies of technology builds on this premodern tradition and deepens it in light of post-phenomenological anthropologies of technology, such as Bernard Stiegler’s, which question the binary anthropologies of classical modernity. ⁹

The significance of this blind spot becomes particularly evident in chapter 9 on “The Treatment of Technology in Catholic Social Teaching” (133-149). In accordance with the tradition of CST, the authors plead for a concept of progress that focuses on “the integral development of all persons” (139) and aims to overcome the “illusion of total autonomy” (141). This requires us “to accept that technological products are not neutral,” as Laudato Si has pointed out, since “they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities [… ] Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build”(145, no. 107). However, at the end of the day, the tradition of CST, including Pope Frances’s expansion, tends to relapse to an instrumental understanding of technology: “Technology should be a tool: instrumentally valued for its usefulness in achieving other, intrinsically valuable, ends” (146).

The authors concede that, in the time of autonomous cars, machines “stop being tools; they cease to be means to an end but start to shape the ends themselves” (182). And they respond to this challenge by calling on programmers to “resist attempts to anthropomorphize the machine” (183). Yet, while the last point is consistent with the second of the “Ten rules for a digital world,”¹⁰ which build on the ten commandments, the first point might raise serious doubts. Has it ever been possible to draw a clear demarcation line between “mere technical tools” and cultural artifacts that have a disclosive, inherently symbolic or even sacramental value, such as the “Diesel engine” in David Jones famous essay Art and Sacrament?¹¹ It seems to me that the tradition of CST is at this critical point still under the influence of the binary anthropologies of classical modernity, which can be traced back, via “critical” thinkers like Kant, to the Reformation era. The innovators of this era turned sacred spaces into preaching halls, chalices into cups, altars into tables, and icons into propagandistic tools.¹² This was the starting point of a cultural upheaval that incrementally turned every sacred object into an object of manipulation in the hands of homo faber – with the exception of the modern “fetish of autonomy,”¹³ which the authors rightly expose.

Yet we are relational beings. Things have the power to shape us and make us act! This power might be the manipulative or benevolent medium of human-centered intentional acts (154-165). However, due to the systemic character of technological innovations, they ultimately escape our intentional control, both for the better and the worse. Hence, technical artifacts appeal to our responsibility in a more traditional way: They appeal to our ability to discern between demonic and eudemonic innovations – innovations that either lead to the divinization of man or the dystopia of Dante’s Inferno.

When secularized experts in the field compare ecclesial statements on artificial intelligence, such as Antiqua et Nova, with secular statements such as those of the German Ethics Council, it seems evident that this is where the blind spot of tradition-oriented (if not “pre-critical”) church statements lies.¹⁴ Yet, if we want to face the most severe challenge of our time, we must delve even deeper into the premodern tradition. Only an uncompromising Ressourcement can inspire us to overcome the instrumental understanding of technical artifacts that shaped the modern homo faber. Rather than seeing this lacuna of the book as a fatal flaw we should treat it as a place where CST can be further developed and enriched.

Endnotes

1. Paul Scherz and Brian Patrick Green, eds., Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture, Pickwick 2025. Page references in the text refer to this volume.

2. See Johannes Hoff, “Enlightenment Now! Overcoming the Functional Cognitivism of the Kantian Tradition,” in Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 11 (2024), 181-207, 192-204 DOI 10.1628/ptsc-2024-0015; and Iain Mcgilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press 2009

3. See Johannes Jaeger; Anna Riedl; Alex Diedovich et al., “Naturalizing Relevance Realization: why Agency and Cognition are Fundamentally not Computational,” in Frontiers in Psychology (25 June 2024), 1-25; Jelle Bruineberg; Julian; Kiverstein,Erik Rietveld, “The Anticipating Brain is not a Scientist: the Free-Energy Principle from an Ecological-Enactive Perspective,” in Synthese 195 (2018), 2417-2444; and Johannes Hoff, “Die Wiederentdeckung verkörperter Menschlichkeit: „Künstliche Intelligenz“ als Wendepunkt christlicher Anthropologie,” in Internationale Zeitschrift Communio (2026), 147-162.

4. See also Antiqua et Nova, no. 1; and Johannes Hoff, “The Gift of Intelligence and the Sacramentality of Real Presence. Overcoming the Dataist Metaphysics of Modern Cognitivism,” in Modern Theology 40/4 (2024), 921-947 DOI:10.1111/moth.12940.

5. John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, December 30, 1987, nos. 36–40; John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, nos. 11–24.

6. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press 1976; and Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The fault of Epimetheus, Stanford UP 1998.

7. Bruno Bérard, “Unmasking AI,” in Philo-sophia (2018), https://philos-sophia.org/unmasking-ai/.

8. Augustine, “De Libero Arbitrio, Libri Tres: “ in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Brepols 1956, Vol 74, Section 76, Part 73, III 15.42; similar yet less explicit: Augustine, “De Trinitate: “ in The Trinity, transl. by Edmund Hill, O.P., New City Press 1991, IV, 1.

9. See Johannes Hoff,Oliver Dürr, “Umrisse einer trinitarischen Technikanthropologie,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie. Sonderheft Trinitarische Technikanthropologie 147/1 (2025), 7-43 and the other contributions to this special issue; Enrico Grube; Johannes Hoff, “Imago Dei: Trinitarian Anthropology in the Age of Technology,” in Zimmerman, Jens; Moyse, Ashley; Burdett, Michael (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Theological Anthropology. Oxford, 2026 (forthcoming), and Johannes Hoff, Verteidigung des Heiligen: Anthropologie der Digitalen Transformation, Herder 2021, 70-83, 218-225, 290-298, 356-380.

10. https://www.thefuturefoundation.eu/en/10-rules

11. David Jones, “Art and Sacrament: “ in Epoch and Artist. Selected Writings, ed Grisewood Harman, Faber and Faber 1959, 143-179, 153.

12. Johannes Hoff, “The Eclipse of Sacramental Realism in the Age of Reform. Re-thinking Luther’s Gutenberg Galaxy in a Post-Digital Age,” in New Blackfriars (2018), 248-270.

13. James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition, Oxford UP 2010.

14. Kerstin Schlögl-Flierl,Armin Grunwald, “Der Mensch in der Maschine Ethische Beurteilung der Künstlichen Intelligenz,” in Stimmen der Zeit 6 (2025), 451-460.

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

Here are a few highlights:

The paper made me think about a key lesson in my ethics class, one that gets almost no bandwidth in usual discussions, and is tricky to teach, because it’s abstract. This is the fundamental idea, in the first book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that human flourishing is “rational activity.”

Both words cause confusion, but are vitally important. “Activity” is not just a means to flourishing; it IS flourishing. And “rational” doesn’t mean high-grade academic activity; it means, as I say to students, that “you know what you are doing.” There are various ways to make these teachings clear. On the importance of activity, Nozick’s thought experiment about “the experience machine” becomes ever more relevant. And on the importance of rational, it becomes pretty easy to point out that we rely all the time on the fact that people “know what they are doing” and that it is a pretty universal experience to try to escape if one finds oneself in a situation where you don’t know what you are doing.

Ribera, Jusepe de - Aristotle; from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_(Ribera)#/media/File:Ribera,_Jusepe_de_-_Aristotle_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

While many (rightly) speak about the recovery of virtue ethics in AI, and many (including our Holy Father!) speak eloquently about the tremendous dignity of the human person, both ideas really point to this central nexus of rational activity. The virtues are simply the characteristics that we need to be excellent at rational activity, to do it readily, to cooperate well with others, to avoid being blocked by fantasies or fatigue. And the magnificence of the human person involves the work of reason and, as arguably the most important “activity” we do, relationships of voluntary commitment (don’t worry I will say something about love and God later…)

Even the latter point, about relationships, can get lost in Aristotle’s “rational activity,” but that’s not even true for Aristotle. He believes (at some points) that the best and highest form of rational activity is clearly relational (politics), and (not unrelatedly) spends significant time lauding friendship as the most important of activities. If we extend this to recognize (as Aristotle did not) the importance of family relationships and the dignity of craft labor, we will certainly see that speaking about rational activity is not somehow a distraction from being made for human relationships, but among the most (if not the most) important such activity. But we also seem to miss how important it is to understand relationships as a rational activity - again probably misled by our equation of activity with “project” and rational with “stuck in your head.” What we mean is relationships where everyone acts well and knows what they are doing.

Let me just say why getting this point matters so much, and then respond to an objection. First, this matters so much because this is really the key to getting AI right. AI’s promise and danger are the same thing: instant results, without a great deal of activity. Unless we go rabidly anti-tool (i.e. much more anti-tool than the Amish), we need to recognize that labor-saving activity is not only not going away, but we all want it and use it over and over (running water, anyone?? Hugely labor-saving!). So we can’t just say, “AI just gives you the result of a paper” and presume everyone will see that the point of writing a paper is writing the paper. We need to name why rational activity is important, and (more pointedly) why THIS PARTICULAR FORM of rational activity is essential for flourishing. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo reiterates the fundamental meaning of work, not simply as a means:

work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment. In this regard, financial assistance to the poor may at times be necessary in emergencies, but it cannot become the sole response, since the goal is to enable each person to live with dignity through his or her own work. (#149)

Yet AI will change work, and we need to be more intentional about those changes. Nicholas Ogle, in a post from last week, nicely explains why AI necessitates choices about “selective de-skilling.” To use a more earthy example: my wife’s family is Italian, and they all know how to cook; they own microwaves, but they would not think highly of someone who just want “the results” and didn’t know something about “how to cook a meal.” Maybe everyone doesn’t need to know how to cook (although maybe not!). But does everyone need to know how to read in a sustained, focused way? Mass literacy is an extraordinary social achievement, but does the advent of AI mean we now don’t have to know how to read (=cook) in order to get the “result” of knowledge (=meal)? The same is true about writing, but overall, AI should prompt us to gain much more clarity about what is actually worthwhile and central activity in human lives. A colleague in moral theology, Nichole Flores, said casually in a conversation, “I just want to go running, do baking, and go to mass… with my kids.” There’s a nice statement of flourishing, though as with any example, it raises lots of questions about how all the other work we do rely on for our lives gets done! But as something that points us back to basics - what is truly worthwhile rational activity - it is provocative and instructive.

Now to the objection: doesn’t this emphasis on worthwhile rational activity privilege certain groups of people? Isn’t it “ableist”? Let’s go back to that going to Mass bit: there is certainly a way in which Aristotle’s account of flourishing has to be somewhat revised in light of the Gospel, and God’s activity (although grace builds on nature!). At this point, I might have referenced a now-disgraced Catholic who worked with the mentally ill, but the generic lesson stands well enough on the authority of many saints: we learn we are not ultimately in charge best by recognizing and relating to those who are not necessarily “succeeding” by Aristotle’s standards. Such compassion is ultimately learned only when we do not turn this service into an activity at which we can be excellent, but one that teaches us our own lack of excellence, our weakness, our own sin, our own being sustained by God’s gracious excessiveness, especially the excessiveness of Christ. As Leo writes:

It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God. We see this at many moments when our limits become tangible: when we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord. (#119)

This is because our own rational activity, while good, is dependent on and oriented toward something greater. Near the conclusion of the core chapter of his encyclical, Leo offers a wonderful description of this:

The expression “more than human” is not an exclusive domain of technological promise. For centuries, the Christian tradition has maintained that human beings are not confined by the boundaries of their own nature; rather, they are called to self-transcendence, not through an escape from reality or a contempt for their limitations, but through their fulfillment in love. Faith recognizes an openness toward the “beyond,” which originates as a gift from God. …The one who makes this passage possible can only be the Eternal One who gives of himself. Indeed, it is God himself who overcomes the “infinite” disproportion. …When we embrace the possibility of transcending ourselves through God’s grace, we do not deny our nature, nor do we become less human. …Herein lies the radical departure from Promethean dreams: what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms. … A person’s future is not calculable, but depends on one’s freedom — elevated by the inexhaustible grace of God — and on the relationships cultivated. (#127-128)

As Gaudium et Spes and John Paul both taught, the human person is ultimately fulfilled by free self-gift. This is something that is possible only by receiving, by worshipping… but even then, it is part of the gift that we are able to “know what we are doing” when we do this most worthwhile of all human activities.

At St. Mary’s University, where I teach theology, we talk a lot about “education in a family spirit.” It is one of five characteristics of Marianist universities. It appears in university marketing materials as well as applications for tenure and promotion. Reading through this article by Jason Heron and Alessandro Rovati has motivated me to interrogate that maxim a bit more closely. What does it mean to cultivate a family spirit at the university or in my classroom? What does the idea of family signify in this context?

Heron and Rovati ground their defense of ungrading in the vision of education espoused by the Catholic Church. They quote the Vatican II declaration Gravissimum Educationis, observing that education “promotes friendly relations and fosters a spirit of mutual understanding” (no. 5). They see in Pope Francis’s words a similar sensibility. Christian education requires “communion in learning, holy intercourse, habit of life, [and] interchange of affection” (Veritatis Gaudium, no. 4c). This could certainly describe what the Marianist universities mean by family spirit. Genuine learning can only take place in community. Education requires human relationship. It requires interaction, collaboration, inclusive participation, trust, and care (CMU, no. 30). Only in that context can teachers and students authentically accompany one another in the quest for truth.

Maybe the family spirit of the Marianists has helped to shift my focus in the classroom away “from coercion and performance to the centrality of fascination and freedom, risk and responsibility,” as Heron and Rovati phrase it (p. 123). This is what my experiments in ungrading have tried to do: to frame my students and me as collaborators, to invite them to greater responsibility, to prioritize learning over external metrics, and above all, to address them as free selves and whole persons grounded in community.

Of course, I have also endured the costs of the “risk of freedom,” which Heron and Rovati describe in their dialogue with Pope Francis and Luigi Giussani. I have experimented with contract grading, and it seems I am constantly in the process of revising my rubrics and policies. When I first eliminated deadlines, even my most eager students would not do the work. I have gambled repeatedly on my students’ willingness to take responsibility, and sometimes I have lost. Some students give up and walk away. Nevertheless, most do rise to the challenge, and they are touched by my desire to know them and meet them at a human level. This is what family is about, is it not?

As much as I value the idea of teaching in a family spirit, I do harbor some concerns. The language of family is quite susceptible to misinterpretation and even abuse. The Marianist universities themselves acknowledge this. Families are not all about friendship and inclusion in every moment; disagreement and hardship are part of family life as well (CMU, no. 35). I think we must be careful to avoid deploying the word “family” in the style of the toxic workplace, where the term is used to smooth over conflict, diminish accountability, and extract labor without fair compensation. Families require justice, and they must make room for differences.

Which brings me to a set of questions for Heron and Rovati. These emerge from my context as an early-career professor of theology at a small, teaching-focused, Hispanic-serving Catholic and Marianist university in the Southwest United States. I think these questions touch on some of the key epistemological and ethical issues at stake in the effort to weave together Christian theology, education theory, and the practice of ungrading.

First, how do we respond to cultural and religious diversity among our students? I am personally quite compelled by Giussani’s understanding of Christian education. It is the role of a teacher to offer a working hypothesis about the meaning of reality, to substantiate that tradition with reference to authority, and to invite students to verify the truth of it in their lived experience. We do our students no favor by pretending that all views are equally plausible, or that they should craft a worldview of their own from scratch. That does not lead to authentic freedom but “obscures how individual instincts, the dominant culture, and the loudest voices shape us” (p. 115). To avoid this false neutrality, Giussani believes we must begin with the truth of the Christian proposition and provide students the critical resources to make it their own.

But what if a student cannot make the Christian worldview their own? This is not necessarily a failure. Perhaps this student belongs to a different religious tradition. Perhaps this student has been so harmed by representatives of the Christian hypothesis that it cannot be verified in their own experience. At my university, I must assume that these students are in the room. As a teacher of theology, I must therefore frame the task a bit differently. For those who come from a Christian background and remain hospitable to its message, I do frame our work as an opportunity to make this hypothesis their own. For those who do not, I describe my courses as an opportunity to investigate a religious hypothesis that is personally important to others and culturally relevant to all of us. In all cases, I tell my students that they must interrogate whatever traditions shape them, taking responsibility for what they believe and the practices they take for granted.

How does an approach like mine fit within a Christian vision of education? Is it a sensible outcome of reverence for the person and respect for human freedom, or does it circumvent the evangelical quality of our work? As I have said, family must make room for differences. Yet one of the risks of the family metaphor is that it implies all of our members come from the same background. In today’s university, that is rarely the case. Students and professors come from all sorts of cultures and traditions, which represent for them different certainties from which to begin. Giussani argues that his approach does not close off other perspectives, for “no one can be open to other cultures and proposals without starting from a certainty.” (p. 116). I entirely agree. But with so many certainties from which our students begin, what does undergraduate teaching look like? Is there still room to begin from the Christian hypothesis, or must we diversify our starting points?

Second, what do we make of the practical challenges that Heron and Rovati point out? When done well, this work is extraordinarily time-consuming. It is also more emotionally draining than traditional modes of teaching and assessment. Most of us are struggling already under a full-time teaching load, and loads are heavier at schools that prize pedagogy. We continue to see cuts to the liberal arts, the threat of censorship is looming, there is increasing pressure to demonstrate return-on-investment in our programs, and many institutions are merrily adopting AI infrastructure with relatively little focus on mission, ethics, or investment in teachers. In short, we are attempting new pedagogical innovations while in triage mode. What are some concrete strategies for capturing the spirit of ungrading while economizing on time and resources? How might this vision of education speak to our current moment in higher education?

Another challenge worth flagging concerns accessibility and justice. Heron and Rovati rightly acknowledge the barriers that ungrading may present to neurodivergent students, online students, and students who are underprepared for college. We can do our best to place our students in touch with campus resources, including offices of accessibility, student success staff, counseling services, and so on. We can modify our policies and procedures to place all of our students on an even playing field. Still, there are larger structural issues at play. Ungrading relies on student initiative. It assumes that students have agency and are able to use it. However, there are serious constraints on their agency imposed by forces beyond our control as teachers. College students today are under immense pressure to select majors that will result in high-paying jobs. There is evidence that this pressure disproportionately affects Black and Brown students, as well as first-generation college students. At my university, students often cannot give a course their all because they work long hours to pay for tuition, serve as caregivers in their families, or manage problems concerning immigration status. Under such pressure, students regularly prioritize the courses and programs that will land them jobs and also the courses with clearer, traditional grading systems.

In short, students are not always free to choose the adventure of learning when what they need is to make it through college and begin collecting an income. Here is where the ideal vision of education laid out by Heron and Rovati meets the reality of the situation for all of us experimenting with ungrading. How can we respond? What can we learn from where our students stand?

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

Image from https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-11/pope-leo-xiv-press-conference-papal-plane-turkiye-lebanon.html

I turned to the 2025 note from two Vatican dicasteries to get a sense of what might be coming. Antiqua et Nova isn’t sex obsessed but it does offer moral wisdom that is relevant for all areas of human life. Instead of giving into a “functionalist perspective” (10) of intelligence based on what it can produce, the note urges a personalist understanding “situated within a personally lived history of intellectual and moral formation that fundamentally shapes the individual’s perspective, encompassing the physical, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual dimensions of life” (32). Though sexuality (56-63) is but one of many ethical issues engaged, the call for “authentic encounter” (57) here is rooted in the same understanding of human nature as essentially relational that animates the entire document. Risks arising in economics, war, healthcare (e.g., deception, abuse, anthropomorphism, isolation, utilitarianism, lack of transcendence, overreliance on technology, lack of respect for human dignity) also pertain to the personal realm. We are made for more and have to remember that AI is ultimately just a tool that must be evaluated in light of how it contributes to or detracts from our humanity.

When I finally read Magnifica Humanitas before sunrise on Monday morning, I found the same reticence about specific sexual issues mixed with deep concern about human dignity and embodied human persons who are made for relationship. Pope Leo decries a “culture of power” and “relational poverty” that both normalizes war (188) and encourages “new forms of slavery,” including human trafficking (175). In the face of currents of dehumanization, he lifts up the goods of attention, care, and taking time to “recognize the other as a face not merely as a function” (114).

Applied to sexual ethics, this suggests that AI tools, like cell phones or social media, are good insofar as they advance our ability to enter into empathetic and genuine relationships, and bad insofar as they impede this. And, as with any major change, it is crucial to see how our thinking is being shaped, how, for instance, interacting with chatbots shapes our interactions with humans. We want encounter, not instrumentalization, in our personal lives as well as our social, economic, and political lives. In this sense, recent Catholic teaching on AI has implications for sexual ethics, even though it offers few specific norms or judgements.

Of course, this is not what most people mean by “pelvic theology,” but I worry that use of this term minimizes sexual harm (e.g., trafficking, intimate partner violence, child sexual abuse, rape as a weapon of war, infidelity, and “bad sex”) and fails to honor the very real need for sexual virtue (e.g., mutuality, equality, fruitfulness, intimacy, self-giving, and self-respect). At least since Vatican II, Catholic sexual ethics has been attentive to much more than rules. To suggest the church has no stake in sexual ethics or that “what happens in the bedroom” is private and unworthy of serious moral analysis makes little sense. It should not, as Pope Leo suggested, divide the church or separate Catholics from one another. It is not the only “grave matter” worthy of moral concern. But who can doubt that the human capacity to harm is present in this realm, as in any other?

For sure, the church still has work to do in deepening sexual ethics and connecting it to a holistic vision of the human person and the good life. The pope might well decide that lay theologians are better messengers of Catholic personal ethics while his power can be best utilized on global socio-political problems. But the personal and the political are always connected and the church does well to help people see those connections. The latest writing from Rome on AI contributes to this project, not by foregrounding sexual ethics but lifting up a vision of a moral life devoted to seeking truth and building a civilization of love, one relationship at a time.

It was recently reported by the Pew Research Center that Americans are now “more concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI in daily life, with 82% of respondents indicating extreme or moderate concern that “people’s ability to do things on their own will get worse because of AI use,” and a majority of adults under thirty saying that “the increased use of AI in society will make people worse at thinking creatively (61%) and forming meaningful relationships with other people (58%).” While positive views of AI remain prevalent among technology experts, only 17% of the American public believes that it will have a “positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years.” It is against this backdrop of growing unease about the effects of AI on our common life that the A.I. Research Group for the Vatican’s Centre for Digital Culture has released its second volume, Reclaiming Human Agency in an Age of Artificial Intelligence. Building on its previous study, which explored a variety of theological, anthropological, and ethical issues related to AI, Reclaiming focuses more narrowly on questions related to human freedom, practical judgment, and moral action. In particular, it considers how AI can endanger human dignity by undermining or replacing human agency. The volume understandably emphasizes the growing number of threats that AI poses to the responsible exercise of human agency. Yet despite its predominantly critical posture, it admirably resists the temptation to adopt a wholly negative assessment of the technology.

In this respect, Reclaiming reflects the vision of Pope Francis (and of Catholic social thought more broadly), who observed in his 2024 address to the G7 that AI, like any other technology, “arises precisely from the use of [our] God-given creative potential.” Drawing on this insight, Reclaiming argues that our attentiveness to the unique risks of such a powerful technology must be balanced by a recognition of its potential to benefit society. When properly designed, AI can serve as “a tool that genuinely supports human flourishing and responsible action rather than eroding it” (11). By highlighting the challenges involved in preventing harmful uses of AI technologies, Reclaiming ultimately seeks to promote a human-centered design process, where AI systems are intended to “complement rather than replace human skills” (184).

Reclaiming discusses several ways in which AI can be used to promote human flourishing by supporting and enhancing human agency. Some of these applications have to do with the ability of AI systems to process data at a scale that far exceeds and outpaces the capacities of the human mind. For example, it is mentioned how AI can be used to quickly analyze vast amounts of satellite data in order to more effectively track the effects of climate change and land use (89). Similarly, the book highlights the Nobel Prize-winning program Alphafold, which uses deep learning to predict unknown protein structures, as an exemplary instance of AI augmenting human agency by “[performing] a task at which humans do not and will never excel” (185). In each case, AI “solves a problem that otherwise cannot be solved” (89), since the data is either so complex or so extensive that we lack the ability, let alone the human resources, to analyze all of it. With these applications, it is clear that AI is being used to enhance and augment, rather than replace or weaken human agency.

Other applications, by contrast, involve tasks that human beings could in principle perform but often do not, due to various practical constraints. Reclaiming notes, for example, that “AI applications have provided support for people with many kinds of disabilities,” such as text-to-speech apps that give people with blindness or dyslexia greater access to written content (2). The book also cautiously endorses tools such as Ambient AI, which uses speech recognition technology to automatically document medical appointments in electronic health records (185). While this task could just as easily be performed by a human scribe, the cost of employing such scribes has led most medical practices to require their practitioners to fill out this record themselves during patient visits, often at the cost of sustained attention to the patient. By transcribing and summarizing clinical conversations, an AI scribe frees up the practitioner’s attention and thus “supports rather than undermines the practitioner’s agency toward intersubjective engagement with the patient” (186).

This last example raises further questions precisely because it suggests that AI can support the agency of a medical practitioner in performing the (primary) task of diagnosing and treating the patient by eliminating—or at least reducing—the need for his or her involvement in the (secondary) task of keeping a medical record. As Reclaiming makes clear, however, this is only the case because “[t]here is no particular human excellence to the bureaucratic task of filling out a chart that Ambient AI replaces” (186). In other words, charting does not appear to be a task that involves “higher-order levels of thinking” or “offers valuable challenges for human development,” unlike activities more closely connected to the ends of medicine (86). While one might reasonably question whether documenting a medical appointment is as mechanical an activity as Reclaiming suggests, one can readily understand how it differs from, say, a student using an AI scribe to take notes during class. In this case, the task AI replaces is one that is not merely secondary and instrumental, but intrinsic to the practice and aims of education. By eliminating or reducing human involvement in an activity through which certain intellectual virtues (e.g., attention, interpretive judgment, and critical thinking) might otherwise be cultivated, an educational AI scribe would have the effect of disempowering rather than supporting the agency of the student.

Thus, drawing on a distinction popularized by the philosopher Shannon Vallor, Reclaiming contends that AI can support human agency not only through the “upskilling” of human agents, but also through certain forms of “deskilling” that allow them to redirect their energies elsewhere, while nonetheless preserving the virtues necessary for excellence in a given activity. On this view, deskilling is “neither good nor bad in itself” (8), but depends on the moral salience of the task being replaced. If it is a task that “[offers] great scope to judgment, creativity, empathy, practical wisdom, and critical thinking,” we should expect that deskilling will also result in a certain amount of “de-virtuing” (87). The authors recognize, however, that because the moral salience of particular skills is not always obvious, judgments regarding whether a given form of deskilling will ultimately promote or impede human flourishing can often be made only in hindsight (80). Indeed, the question of whether a given technology should be viewed primarily as an instance of upskilling or deskilling may be difficult to answer with any degree of certainty prior to its widespread adoption.

Consider how AI is now being used by radiologists to interpret X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs. There are certain ways in which AI unambiguously “upskills” the practice of radiology; for example, by enhancing the quality of images and flagging which scans need immediate attention. AI has also helped uncover “radiomic” biomarkers in diagnostic images that correlate with disease in ways that are imperceptible to human radiologists. It remains to be seen, however, how AI will reshape how radiologists approach the core task of identifying abnormalities in diagnostic scans. Technology experts have long predicted that AI will eventually eliminate the need for a human radiologist to be involved at all in this task. Others argue that AI will not replace but rather enhance the performance of radiologists by improving their efficiency and helping them attain a consistently higher level of accuracy in their scan analysis. We now have a growing body of evidence that supports this latter view.

However, a recent study published in Nature complicates the picture somewhat. While AI assistance may improve performance on average, its effects are uneven, with some radiologists even performing worse while using AI. A key finding of the study is that “radiologists struggle to consistently distinguish between accurate and inaccurate AI predictions and can be misled by inaccurate AI predictions.” Moreover, it showed that “[c]linicians who had low performance at baseline did not benefit consistently from AI assistance.” These findings raise the question of whether the full integration of AI with the practice of radiology may lead not only to beneficial upskilling, but also to a degree of deskilling that risks compromising the effectiveness of clinical medicine. Precisely for this reason, some experts have recommended using AI only as a “second set of eyes” after a radiologist has already interpreted a scan without assistance.

This mixed assessment of AI-assisted radiology reflects the broader ethical and professional challenges that accompany the integration of AI into any complex human activity that engages higher-order levels of thinking. Reclaiming rightly observes that we must consider how AI “can be used to assist and enhance the essential human skills and virtues in these tasks and not replace them” (87). Yet, as we have seen, it may not only be difficult to determine whether a certain AI application is primarily an instance of upskilling or deskilling; it may also be the case that the same technology can have different effects on different users, improving the performance of some while diminishing that of others. The authors of this excellent volume have helpfully framed the contemporary debate about AI’s effects on human agency in light of a Catholic vision of human flourishing. Yet the task of discerning how this vision should inform our judgments about specific AI applications remains in its early stages. One hopes that the members of this research group will continue to explore how the various AI technologies that are rapidly reshaping our economy and society might be properly directed toward a genuine vision of human flourishing that supports rather than undermines human agency.

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

Nikolai Ge: “What is truth?” Christ and Pilate; from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_is_truth.jpg

But in terms of content, an initial place to focus, I want to focus on the discussion of truth and communication in chapter 4. The architecture of the encyclical overall is quite clear. Although long, the encyclical ends up having three main parts: a fundamental analysis of artificial intelligence as an instance of the technocratic paradigm in chapter 3, a broader overall analysis of politics and culture in chapter 5, and then a more focused threefold application in chapter 4, to “truth, work, and freedom.” I like this structure, particularly the choice to specify particular areas of concern that are neither the 30,000-foot “civilization of love” level nor the nuts and bolts of the “new thing” level. The chapter urges us “to rediscover truth as a common good, to protect the dignity of work and to safeguard freedom against all forms of dependence and commercialization.” These are extremely important implications that proceed directly from, but flesh out, the human dignity claims that are at the forefront of the prior chapter.

The concern about un-truth is not new, the encyclical acknowledges, “yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI.” (132) Indeed, the document does not limit the concern about truth to “mixing facts with opinions,” but also quotes Pope Francis arguing that the wrongness of murder cannot be understood as a mere social convention, but “a non-negotiable truth attained by the use of reason.” (133) It further argues, in various ways, that truth is a relational, collective good - Leo points out that truth arises in contexts of social trust, is necessary for any deliberative democratic governance, and appears with a larger cultural imagination that “presents a particular vision of reality as desirable.” (136)

The core argument is then offered that truth is a common good, and thus (much like the earth and other environmental resources) requires attention to an “ecology of communication.” This involves various responsibilities:

On the level of public policy, this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data. Regarding social and cultural aspects, this requires a strengthening of intermediary organizations, serious journalism and forums for debate, where reasoned argumentation and verification carry greater weight than immediate reaction. For families and schools, there is a growing need for new educational awareness and for formation concerning the proper and critical use of digital tools, AI and online commercial and financial platforms. In universities, the principal challenge lies in the integration of knowledge, cultivating both the capacity to connect and synthesize knowledge in order to grasp complexity, and the skills necessary to verify facts.

There are some striking things said about the importance of parental choice in education and the need for age limits on technology. But it is particular worth pondering the several places which emphasize quite clearly what education is supposed to be about. Leo writes that “As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought,” and insists later in the paragraph that “a genuinely healthy attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised.” (146) I wish I could report that this is what university structures actually emphasize, but they often do not. More directly, it is folly to think that we can urge students individually to plug these things into their schedules (!!) if we do not cultivate environments that are conducive to these things. For example, the University of Notre Dame is utterly awash in screens. I don’t mean the screen in everyone’s pocket. I mean the need to put up screens flashing messages or running programs everywhere. The level of visual stimulation when I walk through the student center is bad enough, but of course, many classrooms are also full of screens, as are many other buildings. The student center adds to the problem by playing background music - not Muzak! - at levels that are too high to be background music. The same phenomena (the screens everywhere, the background music) are present in the dining hall, where most people are actually trying to engage in conversation with people (or they have their own screens and headphones!). Has no one asked, why do we need all these screens?! And this point about screens is a trivial one compared to cultivating a broader culture where focused reading and study could actually be prioritized.

Yet the most important point the pope makes is beyond these. He insists that education is about “grasping reality as a whole.” The original quote above specifically says the “principal challenge” of university education is “the integration of knowledge.” It is not collecting or transmitting knowledge as “bits”, nor “producing” knowledge as evidence of some kind of novel creativity. It is integration. But the contemporary university is structured in a way that completely militates against this integration. Disciplinary specialists are privileged in isolated departments and schools. Philosophy and theology, which are the integrating disciplines, are not taught as integrative, but their own specialized subject areas. At Notre Dame, there is an “integration” requirement in the core curriculum, but it is simply a requirement to take a class that uses materials from more than one discipline. Only this past year has the University succeeded in instituting a one-credit class for all first-year students, the Moreau Seminar, which engages classic primary texts on questions of work, friendship, meaning, roots, and other “big themes.” But that’s a bit like treating integration like an arts appreciation requirement of attending a few concerts - good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all that far, when it is overwhelmed by the standard fragmentary curriculum. Even worse, few of even these outstanding students come out of high school with a common set of literary texts or of a common historical memory on which one can rely.

What does this have to do with truth? In his prescient 1992 book Technopoly, Neil Postman relates a little trick he sometimes plays on colleagues, by asking first whether they read the Times that day, and if they say “no,” he then relates to them a study he read about saying, for example, that the best weight loss diet is normal meals plus chocolate eclairs, because there’s a special ingredient in the eclairs that causes weight loss, or, in another case, a study that jogging leads to reduced intelligence. As he reports it, if he acts well, about two-thirds of his interlocators will at least not disbelief what he is saying.

Postman tells this story for two reasons. One, he indicates that by citing the Times and some university doing a study, people “believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.” But his more important point is that “the world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us” because “we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.” This is ultimately because, “abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief” (pp. 56-58).

Hopefully the Postman story - from 1992! - illustrates well that the deepest problem with truth is the lack of some kind of comprehensive view of reality, against which falsehood clearly shows up. This is not merely a matter of AI “hallucination” - something that tends to show up only when we have a pretty strong grasp of what we doing with AI. This is a matter of cognition coherence competence, the idea that one has a map of the world in one’s head. Now, of course, we all have such maps, inevitably, and much education is now (paradoxically) devoted to debunking those maps, as if we all have grown up in some parochial monoculture that dominates our consciousness. What replaces those maps, too often, is an ideological idol. But since we give far too inadequate space in our educational system for cultivating anything like an integrated worldview, it’s very easy for people to substitute something else on the cheap. If we say we genuinely seek truth in common, we shouldn’t accept cheap imitations. Especially at universities.

Confronting this question of truth as integration as a commons problem - again, not just a matter of deciding what “I” think, but about what “we” think - is very right, and AI simply raises the bar of the challenge. Can AI be helpful in this regard? I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole about biases here, but at the very least, it’s not going to be helpful at the front end. Because AI can’t integrate - and when I say that, I mean it can’t understand what it means to “integrate” knowledge into a “true” image of “reality.” It can process Leo’s encyclical or my blog post about what integration means. But integration is a meeting of minds - a communication, in the best sense. Notre Dame continues to have at the core of its mission statement “the pursuit of truth for its own sake.” Let’s hope we all read Leo and AI - and not just say “Lord, Lord, nice words,” but actually act on them!

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.