On 8 October 1956, crowds flocked to a Minneapolis suburb to witness a marvel: Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. Step inside, and it was always a perfect seventy-two degrees, unaffected by the wildest Minnesota weather. Beneath a soaring skylight, visitors sauntered through a lush garden court abounding in exotic birds, a goldfish pond, sculptures, and a group of songbirds in a grand cage. The press called it a wonder, and for many, it truly was.

Victor Gruen, the architect behind Southdale, was a Viennese Jew and devoted socialist who fled the Anschluss in 1938 with only eight dollars and his architecture degree, or so he liked to say. Gruen never intended to invent the shopping mall. He dreamed of building the heart of a town that did not yet exist.

In 1952, Gruen unveiled a sweeping vision for 484 acres. Just 84 were reserved for shops; the rest would have developed into apartments, homes, schools, a medical center, a park, and a lake. The enclosed court at the center was never meant to steal the show. It was designed as a piazza, a welcoming public square where neighbors would cross paths as naturally as breathing. Gruen wanted to give suburban America the vibrant center he remembered from Europe's cities.

But Gruen’s vision never came to life. As Southdale rose from the ground, the Dayton Company sold off the surrounding land to outside developers. The promised park and lake vanished, replaced by rows of tract houses. Only the lucrative 84 acres of retail were built, a blueprint that would be cloned across America, each time encircled by endless parking lots.

Gruen watched this for two decades. In a 1978 speech in London, he finally said it out loud:

I want to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.~ Victor Gruen, London, 1978

Here is the heart of the matter. The market didn't turn down Gruen’s dream; it embraced the profitable pieces and left the rest behind. No one stood up to oppose the park or claimed the schools were foolish. Shared spaces just had no way to pay their own way, so they faded before they began. Southdale is not only a tale of greed. It reveals what happens when a system perfects only what it can count, with no higher purpose to steer it.

Two years later and four hundred miles south, a Trappist monk stood on a Louisville street corner. He gazed at the same kind of busy crowd Gruen had imagined, but what he saw was something entirely different.

SEE

Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest who started the Young Christian Workers, introduced the See-Judge-Act method to the Church. It became part of official teaching in John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961, §236). The steps are simple: first, look at the real situation; then, judge it using Christian principles; finally, decide what action to take. This is not a way to debate. It starts with the world as it really is, not with any theory you might have.

So: See. On 18 March 1958, Thomas Merton — cloistered, famous, and by his own admission somewhat pleased with his separateness — was standing in downtown Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut. He wrote:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. ~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Notice the setting: right in the heart of the shopping district. The same kind of crowd, the same commercial street, the same postwar shoppers Gruen had envisioned. Yet Merton caught a hidden strand of connection among them, something no architect could construct and no store could sell. Three years before, he had captured this idea in a book title: No Man Is an Island.

Set the two men side by side, and the picture sharpens. Gruen saw that our built world made community nearly impossible: no center, no square, nowhere to gather. Merton, by contrast, recognized that community is woven into our very being, present before any walls go up. One diagnosed the problem; the other named what was at stake.

JUDGE

Now comes the judging step. This is where Catholic Social Teaching moves from a set of pious notes to a real tool for analysis.

Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, standing between two systems which were both, in his reading, wrong about the human person. He rejected socialism because abolishing private property “would rob the lawful possessor” and strike at the family, the prior society. Liberal capitalism he rejected with equal force for having laid upon workers “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.” He was not splitting the difference. He was refusing a shared premise: that the human being is fundamentally an economic unit whose relationships are downstream of production.

The tradition has held that line for 135 years. John Paul II put the question with unusual bluntness in Centesimus Annus (1991, §42). Should capitalism be the model for post-communist nations? If capitalism means “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property... as well as free human creativity,” then yes. But if it means “a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality... then the reply is certainly negative.”

This is not a matter of compromise. It is about restoring the right order. The market excels as a servant yet falters as a master. The real question is not ‘market or state,’ but ‘what purpose does it serve, and to whom is it answerable?’

Which brings us to the principle that does the real work here, and the one that explains Southdale precisely. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931, §79):

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. ~ Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno §79

Subsidiarity is often mistaken for a simple plea for small government, but it is much richer than that. It is about where real life unfolds: in families, parishes, neighborhoods, guilds, unions, congregations, and city blocks. Larger bodies should lift these groups, not swallow them. Seen this way, subsidiarity critiques both socialism and capitalism for the same flaw: both erase society's middle layer. Central planning absorbs local groups into the state, while unchecked markets reduce them to consumers. In both cases, people are left alone before a vast, impersonal system, and the public square continues as a dream.

Gruen’s park belonged to no one, and the neighborhood that might have cherished it had not yet come together as a community with a voice. This was a failure of subsidiarity before it was a market failure. Without the middle layer, the market had no one to hear.

ACT

So, the answer is not to split the difference between Marx and Hayek, but to set our priorities straight. Property and business are genuine goods, as tradition has held since 1891, but only when based on the belief that creation belongs to all and private ownership is stewardship, not privilege. Solidarity is essential too, but it means a lasting devotion to the common good, not simply passing the buck to an agency. Subsidiarity binds both principles, insisting that work happen as close to home as possible.

In practice, this approach is quiet and rooted in the local. It takes shape in worker ownership and cooperatives, where those who risk also reap the rewards. Credit unions and community land trusts put capital in neighbors' hands. Parish and neighborhood groups can join forces to own, negotiate, or say no. Zoning laws can help towns rediscover their centers. The aim is shared ownership, not concentrating property in a few hands or in the state.

None of these solutions propagate like the mall model, and that is by design. They grow as neighborhoods do: by reproducing a pattern, never by stamping out identical copies.

Merton leaves us with the final, most demanding insight, for the Act step is where this custom frequently falters. He would say that no reform endures if people remain strangers. What happened at Fourth and Walnut was not a policy, but a person waking up to his connection with others. Every cooperative, land trust, and public square is a way to make that awakening real, turning the sense that ‘these people are mine and I am theirs’ into shared rules and responsibilities.

Gruen died in 1980, back in Vienna, a city with a true center. Merton died in 1968, twelve years after Southdale opened, still struggling with the illusion of separateness. Together, they left us a diagnosis: we are made for communion, yet we have built a country where communion has no home.

Stand at the corner of Fourth and Walnut. Remember the eighty-four acres that rose and the four hundred that never did. Then act—go and build the park.

Sources

Southdale Center opening and Gruen’s 1952 master plan: Minnesota Historical Society; MNopedia; Library of Congress, “This Month in Business History.” Gruen’s 1978 London remarks as widely reported. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); No Man Is an Island (Harcourt, 1955). John XXIII, Mater et Magistra §236. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891). Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno §79 (1931). John Paul II, Centesimus Annus §42 (1991).

These two approaches are partners, not twins. A person might master every interpretive rule yet never truly open the book. Another might pore over every page, but without navigation, only discover reverberations of their own beliefs.

I am convinced that reading Thomas Merton requires both approaches, but today’s readers will find the richest rewards in the careful, hands-on work of exegesis.

The Hermeneutical Habit in Merton Studies

Merton scholarship is rich, and much of it is hermeneutical. It asks the framing questions. How should we situate Merton within the Cistercian tradition? What is the relationship between the convert of The Seven Storey Mountainand the interreligious pilgrim of the Asian journals? How much weight should the private journals bear against the published work he edited and shaped? Is there one Merton or several? Do we read him as monk, as poet, as social critic, as mystic, and does choosing one distort the others?

These are important and necessary questions. They are like asking whether we read Genesis 1 as cosmology, liturgy, or argument—the answer shapes everything that follows. Without hermeneutics, exegesis turns into proof-texting, and Merton is especially easy to proof-text. He wrote about seventy books and thousands of letters over twenty-seven years, changed his mind in public, and left such a deep paper trail that almost any position can be supported by picking the right quote. The interpretive frame helps prevent that.

But guardrails are not the journey. If we linger too long on framing questions, we risk drifting away from the text itself. Debating which Merton is authentic can become a way to sidestep what any of them truly said.

Why the Break Matters: 18 March 1958

The key turning point is at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville. On 18 March 1958, Merton was in town running an errand from the abbey when he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that he loved the people around him, that his separation from them was, in some way, not real, and that “there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

One important detail: the passage most people know comes from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1966, eight years after the event. The journal entry written at the time is shorter and less poetic. The well-known version is Merton revisiting his own experience with almost ten years of perspective. This does not discredit it; instead, it clarifies the genre. We are reading a mature reflection presented as a single moment, as in much of scripture.

What matters is what happened next. The ten years between 1958 and his death in Bangkok in December 1968 were Merton’s most publicly engaged, most debated, and, for us, most useful period. This is the Merton of the Cold War Letters, Seeds of Destruction, Raids on the Unspeakable, and Faith and Violence. This is the Merton who wrote to Dorothy Day, Ernesto Cardenal, Czesław Miłosz, D.T. Suzuki, and Rachel Carson. In 1962, his superiors ordered him to stop publishing on nuclear war. He followed the order in public but still shared mimeographed material with friends, which says more about his relationship to authority than any theory of his monastic life could.

After Fourth and Walnut, Merton was no longer a monk apart from the world, but a monk who saw himself entwined with its fabric. Everything he wrote from then on came from inside that shared reality.

Doing the Exegesis: Reading Merton for Patterns

To study Merton’s later work closely, we need to ask the usual tough questions about a text. What is he really saying? Who is he talking to? What situation led to this, and what might he have said differently in another context? Where does he get it wrong?

That last question is essential. In his essay on race in Seeds of Destruction, “Letters to a White Liberal,” Merton is unexpectedly perceptive about the fatigue of a certain kind of well-meaning white moderate. At the same time, he is a white monk in rural Kentucky writing about Black experience with little direct contact and a lot of confidence. Both are true. Reading closely means holding both truths at once, not just picking the more flattering side.

But as you trace this work through his later years, unmistakable patterns begin to emerge, demanding our attention.

The Unspeakable. This is what Merton called it in the preface to Raids on the Unspeakable. It is not just another word for evil. Instead, it is more like a systematic emptiness—a lack of real meaning inside institutions and language that keep running smoothly. It is like a huge machine working with no one, it seems, making any decisions. Merton saw this in the nuclear arms race and in Adolf Eichmann’s normal behavior, which led to his sharp “Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann”: the frightening thing about Eichmann was that he was sane.

Technique. After reading Jacques Ellul, Merton became focused on how technological systems create their own demands. What we can do quietly turns into what we must do, and efficiency replaces the question of whether something should be done at all.

Mass language. Merton often wrote about propaganda and clichés—language that no longer carries meaning but instead signals group identity. He saw that words worn down like this are not just careless; they actually prevent certain thoughts from even becoming possible.

The spiritual roots of protest. Merton’s letter to Jim Forest from 21 February 1966 is his most detailed writing on activism, and I will let it speak for itself at the end of this piece. He wrote it to a young man worn out by an antiwar movement that was not succeeding. Elsewhere, he also said that activism can bring its own kind of violence ~ the rush to overwork in a good cause can destroy the inner wisdom that makes the work meaningful.

The Reader’s Half of the Work

At this point, interpretation is no longer simply academic. If we are honest in our historical reading, these patterns are not limited to their own time.

The Unspeakable did not finish with the Cold War. Today, systems make important decisions about credit, jobs, policing, and attention, spreading responsibility so widely that no single person is truly to blame. Merton saw this as a spiritual problem before a political one, and he believed it does not need villains.

Ellul’s idea of technique is now the background logic of entire industries. What we can do becomes what we actually do, and then what we must do, with the question of whether we should do it always pushed to the next step.

Mass language has now become industrial. The clichés Merton saw in newspapers and government statements are now created, tested, and spread at a scale and speed he could never have imagined. The problem he described is exactly what we see today: words that show group loyalty but say almost nothing, coming at us faster than we can think.

Merton’s letter to Jim Forest still rings true today. It could just as easily be addressed to someone you know: a person pouring themselves into meaningful work, measuring their worth by outcomes, growing weary, losing curiosity, and gradually becoming less able to help the very cause that is wearing them thin.

None of these are just allegories. Merton was not trying to predict the future. He described these structures so accurately that his words still matter long after the events he wrote about. That is also why we still read a first-century letter to a church in Corinth.

The Discipline of Application

Moving from observing patterns to applying them is where interpretation often fails, and the ways to avoid mistakes are well known.

Figure out what Merton actually said before deciding what it means for you. Read his whole later work, not just the most quoted passages—the Fourth and Walnut story has been repeated so much it has almost lost its meaning, something Merton himself would have recognized as a problem. I am as guilty as the next person on this one. Pay attention to the type of writing: a private journal, a censored manuscript, a letter to a friend, and a published essay are all different. Keep the historical distance in mind—Merton writing about nuclear war is not automatically Merton writing about climate change and technology, and pretending otherwise oversimplifies him. Also, notice his limits: his views on women, his own celibacy, and the link between his solitude and his many letters all deserve a careful look.

But after all that, the real task is to live it out. This is how we genuinely honor him. Merton did not write for lecture halls alone. He was a man who, while running an everyday errand on a city street, discovered his connection to others was unbreakable ~ and then devoted the next decade to exploring what that revelation meant for his actions on war, race, technology, and the inner lives of those willing to listen.

Hermeneutics teaches us to read Merton with care. Exegesis compels us to read him closely. What remains—the part no method can supply—is the choice of what to do next, which was always the heart of his challenge. He put it to Jim Forest this way:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, the reality of personal relationships saves everything. ~ Thomas Merton to Jim Forest, 21 February 1966

Introduction

I remember being taught that there is no salvation outside the Church, but I rejected this because my father never went to Church, yet he was always a loving father to me. I never accepted that God would not save him.

Every Sunday in the last years of his life, he drove my Mum to Mass and sat in the car with a copy of the Sunday Times. So close, yet so far? And unlike the Canaanite woman you will meet in the Gospel. She knew that Jesus had the power to heal her daughter … and she was not a Jew.

Not long before he passed away, he expressed the desire to become a Catholic. His parents had been members of the Church of England and had their children christened. In the end, he never followed through with that desire. I guess he was finding life difficult and death caught him unawares, I think.

It is an easy trap for a westerner like me to think in a legalistic way about salvation. A short visit to Lumen Gentium made me stop and reflect on the power and beauty of encountering Jesus. And I think about the experience of receiving him when I go to Communion. I have adopted the practice of thanking him for welcoming me into his Body. And I regularly ask God to make sure He has welcomed my Dad into His heavenly kingdom.

The Gospel

Jesus left Gennesaret and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Then out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting, ‘Sir, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil.’ But he answered her not a word. And his disciples went and pleaded with him. ‘Give her what she wants,’ they said ‘because she is shouting after us.’ He said in reply, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.’ But the woman had come up and was kneeling at his feet. ‘Lord,’ she said ‘help me.’ He replied, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house-dogs.’ She retorted, ‘Ah yes, sir; but even house-dogs can eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, you have great faith. Let your wish be granted.’ And from that moment her daughter was well again. (Matthew 15:21-28)

The Enquiry

See

• Follow the storyline presented in this Gospel passage. What do you learn about Jesus and his mission? How does this fit with your experience of Church?

• What happens in the life of the Canaanite woman because she reaches out to Jesus for help? What does this tell you about the impact of faith in a person’s life?

• Why does the Canaanite woman persist in her interaction with Jesus? How is this story about the relevance of Church? Or your experience of Church?

Judge

• What do you make of the reaction of the disciples to the presence of a foreigner shouting at Jesus and kneeling in front of him? What does this tell you about human motives and God’s mercy?

• My parish priest always begins his introduction to the Mass by welcoming those who are passing through. Consider the contrast between his attitude and the attitude displayed by Jesus’ disciples in this Gospel story. What have you realised about the attitude ofh Jesus towards the Canaanite woman?

• Does Jesus continue to interact with you even when you reject his invitation to follow him on the journey to Calvary? How real is his interaction with you? Do you persist in your prayer for help? Or do you give in to despair?

Act

• What have you observed in this Gospel story that is needed in the world and/or in your life?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about this transformation of the world and yourself?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Jean Germain Drouais (Creator), French painting of the woman of Canaan at the feet of Christ (1784)(, Picryl, PDM 1.0

Worth reading: Lumen Gentium, even if you just read Chapter 1: The Mystery of the Church.

The general in the audience

In April 1963, in the small town of Angicos in Rio Grande do Norte, three hundred rural workers completed a forty-hour literacy course, spread over about six weeks. Most of them had been unable to sign their names when it started.

The closing ceremony drew an unusual guest list. The President of Brazil, João Goulart, came. So did Celso Furtado, the economist behind the development agency for the northeast. And so did a general named Humberto Castelo Branco.

Eleven months later, Castelo Branco became the first military president of Brazil, installed by the April 1964 coup. The man who had designed the Angicos course, Paulo Freire, spent about seventy days in jail and then close to sixteen years in exile.

It is worth being precise about what the new government objected to, because the obvious answer is wrong. They were not frightened that peasants could read. Literacy campaigns were government policy; that is why the President showed up. What frightened them was the middle of the method.

Freire’s course did not begin with the alphabet. It began with photographs and drawings of the learners’ own town — a well, a brick, a hoe, a man’s hands — and a question: what do you see here? The words came from the discussion, not from a primer. And once a room of sugarcane workers has spent an evening deciding for itself what a well means and who owns it, the reading lesson is no longer only a reading lesson.

Freire had not invented that sequence. He had inherited it, largely from the Catholic Action movements he had worked in, which had it from a Belgian priest who wrote it down for teenage factory workers in the 1920s. Three verbs: See. Judge. Act.

Generals and bishops have historically been comfortable with two of them.

The dangerous verb

Joseph Cardijn’s method, formalized in the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne around 1925 and first set out systematically by his colleague Joseph Arendt at the first Belgian JOC congress, was built for people with no formal education and no institutional standing. Young workers gathered facts about their own conditions in notebooks — wages, hours, the girl in the finishing room dismissed for being pregnant. That was See. Then they weighed those facts against the Gospel and Catholic social teaching and reached their own conclusion. That was Judge. Then they did one concrete thing and reported back the following week. That was Act.

Pope John XXIII set out the method in an encyclical in 1961. Mater et Magistra §236 lays out “three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice”: review the concrete situation, form a judgment on it in light of those principles, decide what can and should be done. The official English translation renders the three verbs as “look, judge, act.”

Notice which of the three made people nervous. Nobody objects to workers collecting facts; facts can be filed. Nobody objects to workers doing good deeds; deeds can be praised. The disruptive claim inside Cardijn’s method is that a nineteen-year-old machinist is competent to reach a verdict — that judgment is not reserved to the people with degrees, miters, or capital.

The same holds outside religion entirely. Every serious method of learning has a version of these three moves. Kolb’s experiential cycle has concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualization, then active experimentation. Quality improvement has plan-do-study-act. Every strategy offsite has data, discussion, decisions. And in nearly all of them, the middle move is the thin one.

Schools are extraordinarily well equipped for See. That is what a curriculum is: an organized supply of things to look at. Schools are well equipped for Act, because that is what assignments and assessments are. Ask a teacher — of second graders or of second-year residents — what specific, teachable, repeatable procedure students use to get from “here are the facts” to “here is my judgment,” and the honest answer is usually: discussion, and hope.

Judge, left unequipped, collapses into one of three things:

• The sermon. The adult already knows the right answer and steers the discussion toward it. Freire’s term for this is “banking education.” Students learn to guess the teacher’s conclusion, which is a real skill, just not the advertised one.

• The gut. Everyone shares how they feel. This is warmer and equally unreproducible. Nobody can say afterward why the group landed where it landed, so nobody can revisit it when it turns out to be wrong.

• The vote. The disagreement gets counted rather than examined, and 60% of the room is now implementing something they think is a mistake.

What the middle verb has always lacked is instruments. Which is where a physicist comes in, from a direction nobody in Cardijn’s tradition was watching.

A physicist with a toolkit

Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947–2011) was an Israeli physicist who backed into management by being asked to fix a friend’s factory. He built a production scheduling method out of it, then a business novel about it — The Goal, 1984 — and then spent twenty-five years generalizing the underlying idea into the Theory of Constraints: in any system aimed at a goal, performance is set by a very small number of limiting factors, and effort spent anywhere else is mostly theatre.

The part that matters here is what he did in the 1990s. Goldratt became convinced that the real constraint in most organizations was not a machine or a budget but the way people reasoned — specifically, their inability to examine the assumptions holding a problem in place. So in It’s Not Luck (1994) he laid out a family of logic tools he called the Thinking Processes, and in 1995 he set up a nonprofit, TOC for Education (TOCfE), to put simplified versions of them in the hands of children. Not as a business curriculum. As thinking equipment.

Two of his lines are worth keeping:

Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.

The goal is a win-win solution in which no one is harmed.

The first is a Judge-phase statement. The second is a Judge-phase commitment. He was, without using the vocabulary, building exactly the instruments that the middle verb had always been missing.

Three tools, one phase

TOCfE reduced the Thinking Processes to three tools that a child can draw and an adult can use in a meeting. Each one answers a different Judge-phase question.

1. The Cloud — for when two goods collide

Judge-phase question: We each want something reasonable and we cannot both have it. What is actually forcing the choice?

Goldratt originally called it the Evaporating Cloud. Five boxes:

Read as a chain: To have A, I must have B; to have B, I need D. To have A, we must have C; to have C, you need D′. But D and D′ cannot both happen.

The first thing this does is relocate the fight. It is not at A — you already agree there, or you would not be in the same room. It is usually not at B or C either; asked directly, most people will concede the other side’s need is legitimate. The whole conflict lives between D and D′, two proposed actions. That is a much smaller argument than the one everyone thought they were having.

The second thing it does is the actual work. Every arrow rests on an unstated “because.” To satisfy C, you need D′ — because… Say the because out loud. Often enough, someone hears it and says, “Wait, is that true?” When an assumption fails, you add what Goldratt called an injection — a new action or condition that satisfies both B and C without requiring either D or D′. The conflict does not get split down the middle. It stops existing. That is why he called it evaporating: the cloud burns off rather than being cut in half.

One correction that matters, because this tool is taught wrong constantly: B and C are needs; D and D′ are actions. If your D′ box says “safety” or “fairness,” you have put a need where an action goes, and the diagram will not work. “Safety” is a need. “Require everyone to remain on site” is an action. Getting that distinction right is most of the skill.

Recess, in full:

• A — We both have a good recess.

• B — I need my turn to count. → D — I use the swing now.

• C — She needs her turn to count. → D′ — She uses the swing now.

An adult would call this trivial and impose a ruling. But when a seven-year-old fills in box C in her own handwriting — she needs her turn to count too — something has happened that no ruling produces. She has written down, in evidence, that the other party has a legitimate need. “Count to thirty out loud, then switch” is then not a punishment. It is hers.

A fifty-year-old going back to school, in full:

• A — I finish the credential, and my family is stable.

• B — We need my income. → D — Keep working full time.

• C — I need real study hours. → D′ — Cut back to part time.

The assumption on the last arrow is usually that study hours can only come out of paid hours. Sometimes true. Often not: prior-learning credit, employer tuition schemes, asynchronous cohorts, a compressed term, a shift swap. The adult learner who builds this cloud stops seeing the situation as a personal failure of discipline and starts seeing it as a structure with a seam.

2. The Branch — for when an action has a tail

Judge-phase question: If we do this, then what — and then what after that?

The Branch is a chain of “if… then…” statements built forward from a proposed action or backward from an unwanted outcome. Its most useful move is what TOC practitioners call trimming a negative branch: you like the action, you can see the bad consequence coming, so you find the specific link in the chain where the bad consequence enters, and you break that one link, rather than abandoning the action.

This is the tool that turns Judge from a verdict into a forecast. “We will ban phones entirely”—if we do, confiscation becomes the discipline system; the discipline system consumes the relationship between teacher and student; then… You have not been told no. You have been shown the third link and asked to fix it.

3. The Ambitious Target Tree — for when the obstacles are real

Judge-phase question: We know what we want, and it looks impossible. What is actually in the way, and in what order?

You state the target, then list every obstacle honestly — no editing for optimism. Then, for each obstacle, you write the intermediate objective that would mean the obstacle no longer blocks you. Then you sequence them, because most of them only make sense in a particular order.

This is the tool that carries you across the border from Judge into Act, and it is the one adults underuse most. It takes “we could never do that here” — which feels like a conclusion — and turns it into a list, a different kind of object. Lists can be worked.

Why adults need this more, not less

There is a persistent assumption that thinking tools are scaffolding for children and that competent adults have outgrown them. It is backward, for a reason adult educators have documented for fifty years.

Jack Mezirow built transformative learning theory in the late 1970s out of studying women returning to college. His sequence: a disorienting dilemma, then critical reflection on assumptions, then rational discourse with others, then a changed frame of reference. Read that sequence again next to the Cloud. Mezirow described exactly what has to happen and demonstrated that adults mostly do not do it unaided — because by adulthood our assumptions are load-bearing. A child’s assumption about swings costs nothing to revise. A forty-five-year-old’s assumption about what makes someone a good manager is holding up a career, a self-image, and a marriage’s worth of decisions. The Cloud is useful for adults precisely because it lets an assumption be examined on paper, in the third person, at one remove from the person who has been living inside it.

Malcolm Knowles’s andragogy points the same way: adults arrive with accumulated experience, need to know why before they will engage, and want to work on immediate problems rather than deferred ones. A tool you can run on tonight’s actual argument satisfies all three. A lecture on critical thinking satisfies none.

And Freire is not a separate tradition here — he is the same one. “awareness” is what happens when people acquire the standing and the equipment to judge their own conditions. He got the sequence from Cardijn’s movements; what he did not have, and what Goldratt later supplied from an entirely different direction, was a set of drawable instruments for the middle step.

Where this actually gets used with adults: workplace conflict and union negotiation, professional development, clinical teams, boards and nonprofits that keep re-litigating the same split, parish and adult faith formation, parenting programs, prison and re-entry education, counseling, and — TOCfE’s own list — special education, dyslexia support, juvenile justice, sports teams, and civic groups. Their reported reach is more than 250,000 people trained across twenty-plus countries, affecting some eight million children, with casework from Israel, Japan, Poland, Somalia, and Latin America. Those are the organization’s own figures, self-reported rather than independently audited, and should be read that way.

The weave

Laid against Cardijn’s method — and against the fourth verb I have argued elsewhere the method needs — the tools sort themselves cleanly:

The claim is narrow, and I want to keep it narrow: TOCfE did not invent a pedagogy, and it does not replace See-Judge-Act. It supplies the missing hand tools for one phase of a method that was already a century old and already worked. Cardijn gave people the right to judge. Goldratt, from a machine shop, arrived seventy years later with the equipment.

Two limits belong in the open, because both are the kind that cause harm quietly. Judge without See is ideology — a Cloud built on invented needs and imagined constraints will produce a confident, well-drawn, wrong answer, which is why the fact-gathering is load-bearing rather than a warm-up. And not every disagreement is two legitimate needs. Bullying, harassment, threats, abuse, and discrimination are not Clouds. Treating them as conflicts to be resolved tells the person being harmed that their safety is one of the negotiable boxes. Say that out loud before you hand the tool to anyone.

Coda

A general sat in a schoolyard in Angicos in April 1963 and watched three hundred farm workers receive certificates. Within a year he governed the country, and the man who taught them was in a cell.

Nobody was afraid of the letters. They were afraid of the middle verb — of a room of people who had been handed both the standing and the method to look at their own conditions and reach their own verdict.

That is the strange symmetry in this story. A Belgian priest and an Israeli physicist, seventy years and an entire universe of vocabulary apart, neither of them aiming at the other’s field, arrived at the same finding. Cardijn found it in a Brussels parish among fourteen-year-olds who had been told their observations did not count as knowledge. Goldratt found it in factories among managers who had all the data in the world and still could not decide anything. Both concluded that the binding constraint was never the supply of facts. It was the untouched assumption sitting between the facts and the decision — and that the people closest to the problem were entirely competent to go after it, if somebody handed them a way in.

Neither man’s contribution works alone, which is why they belong in the same sentence. Cardijn without instruments produces conviction that runs out of road: a group that knows something is wrong, argues, and eventually defers to whoever is most senior or most tired. Goldratt without Cardijn produces a very well-drawn diagram in a room where nobody was ever entitled to the conclusion ~ a technique for optimizing decisions that other people have already made. The right and the equipment have to arrive together.

That is the link.

And this is not, finally, a school subject. Judgment is a civic capacity. A family deciding about a parent’s care, a team arguing over a layoff, a parish council split down the middle, a town meeting on a rezoning, an engineer who can see the third link in a chain and has thirty seconds to say so — every one of those is a Judge-phase problem carried by people who were taught how to gather information and how to complete tasks, and were never taught the thing in between. We generally call the result stubbornness, or politics, or a personality clash. Most of the time, it is an unexamined assumption with no one in the room holding a pen.

The lesson, in one page

If you take nothing else from this, take the working parts. They fit on an index card.

One. Never judge on borrowed facts. Before the argument, see the step: go and get the actual numbers for your actual situation. Cardijn made teenagers write theirs in notebooks. It is still the hardest and least glamorous step, and skipping it is what turns judgment into opinion.

Two. When you are stuck between two goods, draw the five boxes. Name the shared goal, name both needs, name both proposed actions — and remember that needs and actions are different animals. The fight is rarely where the shouting is.

Three. Say the “because” out loud. This is the whole method in four words. Every arrow in the diagram, and every deadlock in your life, rests on an unstated because. Most of them have never once been spoken in the presence of the person who would immediately know they were false.

Four. Look for the injection, not the compromise. A compromise divides the loss. An injection is a new condition that makes both needs simultaneously satisfiable, so there is no loss to divide. Ask it plainly: what would have to be true for us both to get what we need? Sometimes the honest answer is nothing, and you have a real trade-off, and someone has to decide. That is not failure. You have just turned a mess into a clear choice, with everyone’s needs written down where they can see them.

Five. Before you commit, run the tail. If we do this, then what — and then what after that? Find the link where the damage enters, and break that link rather than the plan.

Six. Turn “impossible” into a list. Obstacles, honestly stated; for each one, the intermediate objective that would clear it; then put them in order. “We could never do that here” is not a conclusion. It is an unsorted list wearing a conclusion’s clothes.

Seven. Then incorporate it. A good decision that lives only in the memory of the people who made it will die with them. Write it into the schedule, the rota, the statutes, the way the room is arranged. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement — and no improvement survives that is not built into something.

Teach the seven to a seven-year-old, and you get a playground where children settle their own disputes. Teach them to a faculty, a ward, a board, or a shop floor, and you get something rarer: a group that can disagree productively about something that matters, on the record, and know afterward exactly why it landed where it did.

A century of educators have defended the right to that verdict. Fewer have handed anyone the instruments for reaching it well.

Five boxes and two arrows is not much of a toolkit. It is more than most people have ever been given.

Sources

• Angicos 50 Anos — “The experience” and chronology, Instituto Paulo Freire

• Paulo Freire — Britannica biography (1964 coup, imprisonment, exile)

• Paulo Freire and the Jocist movements — Cardijn Research

• Paulo Freire: dialogue, praxis and education — infed.org

• See, judge, act with Joseph Cardijn — seejudgeact.org

• Mater et Magistra endorses the See Judge Act (§236) — Cardijn Research.

• Eliyahu M. Goldratt, It’s Not Luck (North River Press, 1994) — the Thinking Processes, including the Evaporating Cloud

• Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal (North River Press, 1984)

• Transformative learning theory (Mezirow) — disorienting dilemma, critical reflection, discourse

• Evaporating Cloud — Wikipedia

• See, Judge, Act, Incorporate — Innovate~Educate~Collaborate

Nota Bene: I welcome readers from all educational, career, and faith backgrounds, as well as those still seeking to find out what it is all about. Being a human.

I am grateful to use the See-Judge-Act framework developed by Joseph Cardijn and the Thinking Processes introduced by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years of experience in Silicon Valley’s tech scene and in education, where I now focus on the Anthropology of Technology to understand better what it means to be a human being and the difference it makes. My work examines how we use sustainable innovations, how digital devices change our lives, and how cultures adapt to new tools. I study how technology affects our communities, workplaces, environment, schools, institutions, and daily routines. I believe technology always reflects the culture it comes from, and this belief shapes my work as both an AI ethicist and a storyteller.

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The Middle Verb And The Missing Link

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The technical cause was almost dull in its predictability. The boiler used a lap seam, two steel sheets overlapping and riveted—a standard, familiar design. Yet this method hid a flaw: a crack could quietly snake along the inner edge of the overlap, invisible to any inspector peering from the outside.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Steam boiler: This is the time to pause and reflect. By 1905, steam boilers were old news, driving mills, ships, and locomotives for decades. Engineers had mastered the science—metallurgy, pressure, fatigue. The equations were all there. What was missing was the world around the boiler: who could inspect it, by what rules, how often, who could order a shutdown, who had to keep records, and what happened to the owner who chose ignorance. Better boiler. It was a set of human arrangements. Massachusetts passed “An Act Relating to the Operation and Inspection of Steam Boilers” in 1907, two years after Brockton, and only after manufacturers had finished objecting to what they called needless government interference. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers convened a committee in 1911. The first Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code appeared in 1914: a single volume, 114 pages. That code, now much larger, still governs pressure vessels today. It exists because ordinary people in a shoe town refused to accept that the explanation was “ the boiler failed.”“”

As a historian, I began with this story for a reason: we are reenacting the same debate, falling into the same category mistake all over again.

The category error

Most writing on AI governance treats AI as a beast to be tamed. Constrain the model. Test it. Red-team it. Certify it. Watermark its output. These efforts matter, and I am glad they exist. But it is like debating lap seams while ignoring the absence of an inspection system.

In reality, an AI system is not simply a model—it is a whole assembly line. It is the model, the data someone selected, the threshold someone set, the workflow someone mapped, the interface someone designed, the target slipped into a quarterly plan, the rushed procurement, the skipped training, the escalation path that may or may not finish with a human, and the culture that either welcomes or silences the words, “this output looks wrong to me.”

A model does not deny anyone’s claim. A workflow denies the claim. A model does not decide that a teacher’s professional judgment is now advisory. A principal’s implementation decision does that. A model does not decide that four minutes per case is enough. A staffing budget decides that.

So when we say “AI governance,” we should mean the thing we can actually govern: the human practices, decisions, and organizational arrangements through which AI is adopted and made consequential. Not the algorithm. The institutional context that turns an algorithm into a consequence in someone’s life.

This shift redraws the circle of who belongs in the conversation. If governance is just about the model, only engineers get a seat, and you are left outside. But if governance is about the arrangements, then suddenly the most important questions are the ones you have been asking all along:

• What are we actually trying to achieve here, and how would we know if it worked?

• What are we no longer doing because this tool is doing it?

• Who gets to say no, and what happens to them afterward?

• When it is wrong, who finds out, and how quickly?

• Who bears the cost of the errors, and are they in the room?

• What did we stop measuring when we started measuring this?

You do not need to know what a transformer is to ask these questions. Every one is a governance question. Yet in most organizations, these questions stay unspoken.

Most AI governance material misses the mark in one of two ways. It is either packed with jargon for engineers—evaluation harnesses, model cards, drift monitoring—or it floats in the clouds, listing principles like fairness, transparency, and accountability that everyone nods at but no one can use. The real power sits with the person in the middle. Choose the tool. You are responsible for what it does. You are also somebody’s parent, and there is a version of this conversation happening at your kitchen table about homework, chatbots, and what your fourteen-year-old is talking about. You hold more influence than you think, but less authority than you wish. That gap is the heart of the problem: those who understand the system best are often the least empowered to change it.

This is not a technology problem. It is an organizational one.

A method: See, Judge, Act

There is a time-tested workplace method for this, older than AI itself. In the 1920s, Joseph Cardijn created it for young Belgian factory workers who lacked power and expertise yet not perception: See, Judge, Act. Look honestly at what is happening. Measure it against what should be happening. Then take one concrete step.

It sounds simple, but it is easy to get wrong. Most people leap from a fuzzy observation straight into frustrated action. To help, I want to borrow a discipline from Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, designed for this very challenge: how someone inside a system can diagnose it honestly and spark change without formal authority.

SEE: Find the constraint, not the symptom

Goldratt’s first step is to find the constraint. He insists—though people often forget—that a system has very few constraints, usually just one. Improving anything else does nothing. It only shifts the pile.

Start where he starts: list the undesirable effects. Not opinions ~ measurable effects. Cases are being closed faster but reopened more often. Junior staff has stopped asking questions. Nobody can explain last month’s numbers. Two people have quietly built their own workarounds.

Then trace them back. Goldratt’s Current Reality Tree is a formal tool, but you can get most of the value with a pen or pencil: draw arrows from effects to causes, keep asking why until the arrows meet. They almost always meet somewhere unglamorous. Not the model. More likely: nobody owns the override decision, or the metric rewards volume while the risk lands months later on another team, or the purchase happened before anyone defined what good looks like.

Write the constraint down as one sentence.

If you cannot say it, you have not found it yet.

In my experience, the main constraint is rarely accuracy. It is accountability latency—the gap between when a system errs and when a human discovers it. Shorten that gap, and many problems vanish. Leave it long, and no model quality will save you.

JUDGE: Surface the conflict and attack the assumption

This is where most people hesitate, thinking judgment demands technical authority or moral certainty. It needs neither. It only asks for honest naming of the conflict.

Goldratt’s Evaporating Cloud is built for this. The claim behind it is bracing: real, persistent conflicts are not conflicts of will. They are conflicts produced by a faulty assumption that everyone has stopped noticing. The way through is not compromise. It is finding the assumption and breaking it.

The AI version of the cloud shows up in nearly every organization I have seen.

To serve people well, we must move faster, so we must automate the judgment step. To serve people well, we must not harm anyone, so we must keep the judgment step human.

Framed like this, it sounds like an unavoidable trade-off. But it is not. Hidden assumptions lurk beneath: that every case needs human review, not just the crucial ones; that speed and review draw from the same pool; that high-stakes decisions cannot be flagged ahead of time; and that reviewing is slow because humans are slow, not because the interface obscures the machine’s reasoning. And humans being slow is a good thing in decision-making.

Challenge just one of these assumptions, and the conflict can dissolve without negotiation. That is a real, tangible outcome, and you do not need to be an engineer to spark it. You only need to be the person in the meeting who asks, “We are treating this as a trade-off. What are we assuming that makes it one?”

Judging has a second part, and it is not technical: By whose Standard? Fairness, dignity, due process, the right to an explanation, the right to a human. Institutions do not find these in data. They inherit them from law, professional ethics, civic and religious traditions, and from what those affected will accept. Choosing which standards apply is not an engineering job. It is one of the oldest political acts, and right now it is quietly slipping into the hands of procurement.

ACT: Make it small, make it owned, and expect the resistance

Goldratt’s following steps are: exploit (squeeze everything from the constraint before spending), subordinate (align everything else to serve it), elevate (invest only then), and repeat. Do not let inertia become the new constraint. The order matters. Most organizations leap to improve—buying tools or hiring consultants—because that looks like leadership.

(A note here: having been a consultant, a strategist for many global companies, Consultants should never provide answers; they should assist you in the discovery of the correct solution that is best for your organization. And no, I don’t put lawyers and accountants in the same batch as consultants; they are technicians, just like engineers, machinists, and skilled tradespeople. Ok I will explain in a future blog posting.)

Start with exploit. It is almost always free and unglamorous:

• Write down who holds decision rights: who can override, who must be informed, who signs off. One page. The act of writing it often reveals that no one actually knew.

• Track the reversals. Log every override and complaint, and put those numbers in front of the same people who see the efficiency stats. Right now, one is on the dashboard, and the other is buried in someone’s inbox.

• Assign ownership to a person, not a committee. Committees cannot be held accountable, which is often exactly why they are chosen.

• Run a pre-mortem. Imagine it is eighteen months from now and the story has gone wrong in the newspaper. What happened? People know. They will tell you if you ask in the third person.

• Ask the people on the receiving end. Those affected are the cheapest and most accurate source of insight in the whole system, yet they are rarely asked.

Then expect resistance, and do not take it personally. Goldratt mapped the layers of resistance, and they arrive in order: there is no problem, I disagree with that direction, that will not solve it, yes, but it will cause something worse, there are obstacles you do not see, and finally the silent fear no one names. You cannot bulldoze through these. You must address them one by one. Skip a layer, and you may win the argument but lose the chance for real change.

Outside the building

All of this works just as well at a school board meeting, a council session, or a candidate’s town hall, or in your own household. The method does not change, wherever you bring it. It is even used in classrooms to help students.

See: Ask what systems are already in use, where they are used, and what evidence supports them. In most places, this question has never been asked in public, and the answer is usually either “we don’t know” or a procurement contract no one has read. Judge: Ask whose Standard applies and what occurs when something goes wrong. Act: Ask for something small, practical, and enforceable, like a public register of automated systems in public services, a named accountable official, a real appeals process to a human with authority to reverse decisions, and disclosure when a decision about you was made or influenced by a machine.

Notice that none of these requests are technical. Notice, too, that none of them are guaranteed to you today.

The reason to demand the simple version is that it can be enforced. “Ethical AI” cannot be audited. But “Every automated denial must be reversible by a named human within ten working days.” Or whatever agreed time necessary to see the change and the cause/effect.

Back to Brockton

The 1914 code was 114 pages long. Engineers wrote it, but they were not the reason it happened. It was caused by fifty-eight funerals in a shoe town, by newspapers that kept the story alive, by legislators who were pushed to act, and by manufacturers who lost an argument they thought they would win. The lap seam was the technical cause. The real cause was the lack of an inspection system, and that absence was a choice made by no one in particular. That is often how the most important choices are made.

Right now, we are at the point in the AI story where the needed arrangements do not yet exist, and objections still ring out as “needless interference.” The systems rolling out this year in hospitals, schools, benefits offices, hiring pipelines, and courts will shape lives long before these questions are settled.

You do not need to grasp the technical model. What matters is seeing clearly, judging by a standard you can name, and acting on something small enough to finish. Then repeat, and do not let inertia become the main obstacle.

Someone needed to write the first page.

Sources for the historical account: Grover Shoe Factory disaster (Wikipedia); The Grover Shoe Factory Disaster Shakes the Nation in 1905 (New England Historical Society); The History of ASME’s Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (ASME); ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code — Engineering Landmark (ASME).

What the Cappadocians — and Thomas Merton — Knew About What Faith Owes the World

In the winter of 368, the rains failed across Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey. Crops withered, grain disappeared into the warehouses of speculators waiting for prices to climb, and people experiencing poverty in Caesarea began to starve. Basil, then a young priest in the city, did three things. He used his inheritance to help others. He preached a sermon against the hoarders so blunt it still stings to read — the bread you keep belongs to the hungry. And he built kitchens where, according to those who watched him, he tied on an apron and served the food himself, to Christians and non-Christians alike.

What he built next outlasted the famine. On land outside the city walls, Basil raised a complex that historians often call the first hospital in the Western world: wards with physicians and nurses, a hospice for travelers, workshops for job training, and a shelter for lepers, whom he was known to embrace in public. When Basil died in 379, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus stood at the funeral and told the mourners where to find the man’s real monument: “Go a little way outside the city, and see a new city.”

That is one answer to the question this essay is about. But it is not the whole of it — because for Basil and his circle, the hospital was not the starting point. It was the consequence.

Communion, not charity

The Cappadocians — Macrina the Younger, her brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus — are best remembered for language, not buildings. They gave the Church the grammar of the Trinity: one essence (ousia), three persons (hypostases), a formula the Council of Constantinople would ratify in 381.

But this was never speculation for its own sake. It was a claim about the shape of reality, and it carried ethical weight. If God is not solitary but relational, if God’s very being is communion, then faith in such a God cannot stay private. To believe in the Trinity is to be pulled into a pattern of life that mirrors it: unity without erasure, distinction without division, love expressed as mutual self-gift.

So the Church’s first obligation is not charity but participation. It is called to become an icon of Trinitarian life. Basil’s monastic communities practiced this through shared labor and shared property; his “new city” outside the walls was the same theology in stone.

Macrina, too often left out of the story, gave the vision its depth. Her younger brother Gregory wrote her life and made her the teacher in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, where she instructs him from her deathbed — a woman cast in the role Plato gave Socrates. She had turned the family estate into a community where servants and mistresses ate at the same table. Her life argues that communion with God reorders one’s relationship to wealth, status, and power. What faith owes the world is not simply action but transformation: a reconfiguration of desire that makes real community possible in the first place.

Gregory of Nazianzus, called “the Theologian,” insists this life is grounded in contemplation. One cannot speak rightly of God without being drawn into God. Yet contemplation is never an exit from the world; it is a deeper entry into it, seeing the world as held within the life of the Trinity. His insistence on both divine transcendence and divine nearness keeps the Church from collapsing into either activism or abstraction.

Gregory of Nyssa pushes furthest. In his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, he mounts what may be the only unambiguous condemnation of slavery as an institution to survive from the ancient world: to price a human being is to price the image of God, and the seller has arrogated to himself an ownership that belongs to no one. Trinitarian theology becomes the ground of social ethics.

Merton at Fourth and Walnut

Sixteen centuries later, a Trappist monk stood at a downtown intersection in Louisville, Kentucky, on an errand to the doctor, and was, as he later wrote, “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs.” That was 18 March 1958. Thomas Merton reworked the journal entry into the passage published in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) — the one that ends, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Merton’s “true self” is not an isolated interiority but a self discovered in God and therefore in communion with others. That is the Cappadocian claim in a twentieth-century idiom, and it has the same edge to it. If we really are one in God, then indifference, injustice, and violence are contradictions of our own identity. The monk in solitude is not withdrawn from the world; he stands in solidarity with it.

What it costs

In a moment marked by fragmentation, digital isolation, and hardening division, this synthesis offers a corrective. Faith does not owe the world a defensive posture or a set of doctrines detached from life. It owes the world a witness: a lived communion that reflects the relational nature of God.

That witness is demanding. It asks for communities that resist individualism without flattening persons, that practice justice without losing mercy, that contemplate without disengaging. To ask what faith owes the world is finally to ask how far we are willing to enter the life of God. For the Cappadocians, and for Merton, the answer is: everything.

Questions Worth Sitting With Using The See-Judge-Act method

1. Basil preached that the bread you keep belongs to the hungry. Where in your own life does that claim land hardest — and what have you told yourself to soften it?

2. Gregory of Nyssa argued that the slaveholder’s real sin was pricing something that has no price. What do we still put a price on today that a later generation may find indefensible?

3. Merton’s vision came in the middle of an ordinary errand, surrounded by strangers. When did you last look at a crowd and see anything other than obstacles?

4. The Cappadocians insisted contemplation and action are inseparable. Which of the two do you use as an excuse to avoid the other?

5. Macrina’s household put servants and mistresses at the same table. What table in your life is still sorted by status — and who sets the seating?

6. If your community disappeared tomorrow, would anyone outside it be able to point to a place and say, go a little way outside the city and see?

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.

I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, in “Silicon Valley,” focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology. I explore topics such as the adoption of sustainable technologies, the social impact of digital devices, and the cultural adaptation of innovations. I analyze how technologies affect social organization, labor practices, and environmental outcomes, emphasizing that technology is never neutral but culturally situated, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.

I. A mantra that was already speaking Goldratt

In February 2024, I wrote that “Innovate, Educate, Collaborate,” woven together with See–Judge–Act, makes a seamless garment of change. Rereading that piece now, I notice something I did not notice while writing it.

I warned that unverbalized fear is the fastest way to kill positive change. I said that understanding cause and effect is critical to our growth. I closed by describing the mantra as a process of ongoing improvement.

Those three phrases are not mine. They are Eliyahu Goldratt’s ~ an Israeli physicist turned business theorist who, so far as I know, never read a word of Cardijn. Still, he did hear of Thomas Merton from me, just saying, and who would probably have been amused to find himself in a Catholic Social Teaching newsletter. Unverbalized fear is the sixth and deepest of his layers of resistance to change. Cause and effect is the entire grammar of his Current Reality Tree. Process of ongoing improvement ~ POOGI to his practitioners ~ is the name he gave to the refusal of any final state.

The vocabulary had already arrived. What follows is an attempt to bring the rest of the man with it, and to ask what he adds to a method that has been working perfectly well for a hundred years without him.

The short answer is: he adds rigor where the method most often goes soft. And he cannot supply the one thing without which his rigor is dangerous.

II. The same enemy

Start with what they were against, because that is where the kinship is clearest.

Cardijn’s young workers in Laeken were not being lost to the Church by argument. They were being lost by conditions, and by what conditions do to a person’s sense of the possible. A boy of fourteen went into a factory and learned, within a year, that this was how it was for people like him. That fatalism ~ not atheism, not Marx ~ was the disease Cardijn set out to cure. The whole apparatus of the inquiry, the cell, the review of life, exists to break the conviction that reality is fixed.

Goldratt’s plant managers had the same disease in a suit. The market is what it is. The union will never accept it. Head office won’t approve it. You can’t have low inventory and high service levels; pick one. He titled a book It’s Not Luck precisely to say: your results are caused, and causes can be found, and what can be found can be changed. He called the belief that things are complicated the great alibi.

Both men were fighting the same lie in two dialects. If that seems a thin basis for weaving them together, notice that it is the only basis on which any method of change can begin. You cannot teach See–Judge–Act to someone who believes there is nothing to be done. You cannot innovate, educate or collaborate your way out of a situation you have accepted as given.

III. The near-identity

Goldratt organized his Thinking Processes around three questions:

What to change? What to change to? How to cause the change?

Set them beside See, Judge, Act, and the correspondence is almost embarrassing.

I want to resist making too much of this too quickly, because a tidy table is exactly the kind of thing that lets a practitioner stop thinking. The correspondence is real, but the two triads are not doing identical work, and the places where they diverge are more useful than the places where they line up.

Where does Innovate–Educate–Collaborate sit in this? Not as a fourth column. The mantra was never a sequence — I said in 2024 that innovation requires knowledge, that education thrives on collaboration, that collaboration fuels innovation. That is a loop, not a line. The three words are better understood as the dispositions that make each of Cardijn’s three moments actually happen. Educate is what See requires of us. Innovate is what Judge produces when it is done honestly. Collaborate is the only form in which Act is real. TaAct them one at a time.

IV. See, and Educate: the inquiry and the tree

The See step fails predictably. A group gathers, names what is wrong, and produces a list. Housing is unaffordable. Young people are leaving the parish. Wages are stagnant. Nobody comes to meetings. The list grows, everyone feels the weight of it, and then somebody proposes a solution to whichever item was named most loudly.

Goldratt’s name for the items on that list is undesirable effects, and his central methodological claim is that they are not a list at all. They are the visible tips of a small number of causes — often one. His Current Reality Tree is the discipline of connecting the effects by verified cause-and-effect arrows until the structure resolves into a core problem, usually something nobody had named, and usually something the group is itself doing.

This rests on the first of the four pillars he set out in The Choice: inherent simplicity. Any real-life situation, however complex it looks, is once understood embarrassingly simple. He borrowed the conviction from Newton — natura valde simplex est et sibi consona, nature is exceedingly simple and conformable to herself — and he meant it as a working assumption, not a metaphysics. Complexity is a measure of our ignorance of the system, not a property of it.

Cardijn’s inquiry was reaching for the same thing without the diagram. The point of the inquiry was never to catalog grievances. It was to get the young worker to trace a fact back to its cause, then that cause to its cause, until he arrived somewhere he could actually stand and push—facts first, then connections, then the thing beneath the facts.

And here is why Educate belongs to this step rather than to some separate stage of instruction. Neither man will let you hand the answer over. Goldratt’s rule for building a tree with a client was that you never tell them the core problem; you ask questions until they say it themselves, because a conclusion someone reaches is a conclusion they will act on, and a conclusion they are given is one they will discuss. Cardijn’s version is the whole architecture of the JOC: by the worker, for the worker, with the worker. He did not send educated men to explain the situation to workers. He formed workers who would do the seeing themselves. Subsidiarity is not a nicety here. It is the mechanism.

So the Current Reality Tree is not an analytical instrument that happens to be built in a group. It is a teaching instrument that happens to produce an analysis. That is exactly what the inquiry was. Education, in this method, is not preparation for seeing. It is seeing, done together, out loud. ( This is key and very important)

One practical rule follows, and it is the hardest one to enforce: no solutions in the room during See. The moment a proposal is on the table, the group stops looking and starts defending. Cardijn’s cells knew this instinctively. Most parish and community meetings I have sat in violate it within four minutes. Just stop!

V. Judge, and Innovate: the cloud

Judge is where the method most often collapses, in one of two directions. Either it becomes verdict — we look at the situation, we condemn it, we feel righteous, nothing moves. Or it becomes citation — we produce the relevant paragraph of Rerum Novarum or Laudato Si’, agree that it is excellent, and adjourn.

Goldratt’s contribution here is the single most useful thing he built, and I think it is the one a Cardijn practitioner should learn first. He called it the Evaporating Cloud.

The structure is simple. Take the conflict at the heart of the core problem. Name the two actions in tension. Name the requirement each action is meant to satisfy. Then name the objective that both requirements serve — because if the two sides did not share an objective, there would be no dilemma, only a fight. You now have a diagram with an apex and two arms, and beneath every arrow sits an assumption.

The second pillar of The Choice is that every conflict can be removed—not compromised. Goldratt claims that a genuine conflict between two necessary conditions of a single objective cannot exist in reality; if it appears to, one of the assumptions holding the arrows in place is false. Find the false assumption, name it, and the cloud evaporates. What replaces it he called an injection: the new element that makes the dilemma dissolve rather than be split.

That injection is what I have been calling Innovate.

I want to be precise about this, because it changes what innovation means in the mantra. Innovation is not the brainstorm. It is not thinking outside the box, a phrase I have used myself and now regret. Innovation, in this method, is the specific and disciplined Act of locating a false assumption under an apparent necessity, and it can only happen inside a well-formed judgment. Proper judgment is where innovation is born. They are not two steps. Judgment is the labor; innovation is what is delivered.

Cardijn did exactly this and had no diagram for it. The conflict of his day was presented as ontological: the interests of capital and the interests of labor are opposed, and you must choose a side. The liberals resolved it by denying the workers’ arm. The Marxists resolved it by denying the owners’. Cardijn refused the frame. He put at the apex something neither side had put there — the dignity of the worker as a son or daughter of God, worth more, as he liked to say, than all the gold in the world — and from that apex the conflict looked different. Not resolved by compromise and dissolved, because the assumption that a man’s worth is a function of his output turned out to be false.

That is an evaporating cloud, drawn forty years before Goldratt drew one.

It also explains a phrase I have used for years without fully unpacking it: that we do not solve our problems, we outgrow them. Jung said it first. Goldratt gave it a procedure. A problem that is outgrown is not a problem that was solved on its own terms; it is a problem that stopped existing when the assumption sustaining it died.

Two disciplines keep this honest. First, the Future Reality Tree: having found an injection, map forward and check that it actually produces the effects you want. Second — and this is the one practitioners skip — the Negative Branch Reservation: map forward and look for the harm your good idea will cause. Every serious social intervention has a negative branch. The Judge step in Catholic Social Teaching has a proper name for the discipline of looking for the damage in what you intend: it is called examination of conscience, and it belongs in the planning meeting as much as in the confessional.

VI. Act, and Collaborate: the layers of resistance

The Act step fails when a good decision meets people who were not part of making it.

Goldratt mapped this with unusual patience. He identified six layers of resistance, and the discipline is that they must be worked in order, because an objection at layer four cannot be answered with an argument aimed at layer one:

1. We do not agree on what the problem is.

2. We do not agree on the direction of the solution.

3. We do not agree that your solution actually solves the problem.

4. Yes, but your solution will cause new problems.

5. Yes, but there are obstacles in the way of doing it.

6. Unverbalized fear.

Read that list as a description of a well-run cell meeting, and it reads perfectly. Read it as a description of most attempts at change, and it explains the failures. We arrive at layer two with our solution and are met with a layer-one disagreement, so we repeat the solution more loudly. Someone raises a negative branch at layer four, and we hear obstruction rather than a contribution. And layer six — the vague unease of a person about to do something entirely new, which turns to anxiety, then denial, then rejection — is never spoken, because nobody made a room in which it could be.

The reframe Goldratt offers is worth stating flatly: resistance is information. An objection at layer four is a free negative branch analysis. An objection at layer five is a free prerequisite tree. The person raising it is doing your work for you.

That reframe is only available if you already believe something about the objector, which brings us to the third pillar of The Choice: people are good. Goldratt meant it as an operating rule, not a sentiment. When someone behaves badly in a system, do not look at their character; look at what the system is measuring them on. Please tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. Blame is not merely uncharitable; it is analytically lazy, because it terminates the inquiry at the exact point where it should continue into the structure.

Cardijn is saying the same thing in a different register when he insists that the young workers of Belgium were not being de-Christianised by wickedness but by conditions. Catholic Social Teaching has a term for what Goldratt is pointing at — structures of sin — and the convergence is close enough to be startling. Both men locate the fault in the arrangement rather than the soul, and both do so not to excuse anyone but because that is where the leverage is.

This is what Collaborate actually means here, and it is more demanding than “working together.” It means that the people affected build the tree, name the conflict, and raise the objections; that their resistance is treated as data rather than as friction; and that power and ownership are genuinely shared, because a change that people did not help design is a change they will have to be managed into. That is subsidiarity, and it is also just good engineering.

VII. Never say “I know”

The fourth pillar of The Choice is a discipline against ourselves: never say “I know.” Goldratt’s five focusing steps end with an instruction that has always struck me as the most spiritually serious sentence in his work — go back to step one, and do not let inertia become the constraint. The system you improved has changed. Your analysis is now out of date. Begin again.

Cardijn built the same refusal into the method and called it the review of life. Act, and then come back and see again. Not evaluation as an audit function, but as the reopening of the cycle. Neither method has a terminal state. Neither offers the satisfaction of arrival.

This matters more than it looks. A method with an end state becomes an ideology, and both of these methods were built by men who had watched ideologies eat movements. The review of life and the process of ongoing improvement are the same structural safeguard: an insistence that the last answer is provisional and the next inquiry is already due.

VIII. The seam that will not close

Now the difficulty, and I do not think it should be smoothed over, because a practitioner who misses it will do damage.

Goldratt’s method requires a goal. Every Current Reality Tree is built against a goal — an undesirable effect is only undesirable relative to something you are trying to achieve. Every cloud has an objective at its apex. And Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints does not, and cannot, generate that goal. It takes it from the owner of the system. For the firms he consulted to, the goal was stipulated: to make money now and in the future. Everything else — throughput, inventory, operating expense — was defined in relation to it.

This is the source of both the method’s power and its danger. The Thinking Processes will optimize whatever goal you feed them, with the same elegance and the same force. Feed them a goal that treats persons as inputs, and you will get a beautifully reasoned tree that arrives, by valid steps, somewhere monstrous. There is nothing inside the method that objects.

Cardijn’s Judge step is precisely the thing Goldratt does not have. In See–Judge–Act, Judge is not “what to change to.” Judge is the moment at which the goal itself is put under scrutiny — held up against the Gospel, the natural law, the dignity of the person — and that criterion is received, not chosen. It comes from outside the system. It is not available for optimization. This is why the Judge step cannot be replaced by a cloud, only sharpened by one.

So the honest account is not that the two methods are the same thing in different words. It is this: Goldratt supplies the rigor that Cardijn’s method needs and lacks. Cardijn supplies the goal that Goldratt’s method needs and cannot produce. They are not rivals, and they are not duplicates. They are load-bearing in different directions.

There is a second limit worth naming. Goldratt’s world is one in which all suffering is a system defect awaiting a correct diagnosis. There is no room in a Current Reality Tree for the young worker whose life cannot be optimized, for irreducible loss, for the cross. A Cardijn cell had to sit with people in that condition, and the method held because it was never only a method. Anyone importing the Thinking Processes into pastoral or community work should know that they will carry a great deal and then, at a certain point, carry nothing at all.

IX. The seer: why this matters when you read Merton

There is a hole in Goldratt’s system that he never seems to have noticed. Somebody builds every Current Reality Tree. Every list of undesirable effects is a list of the things that struck this group of people as undesirable. The four pillars discipline the analysis; nothing in them disciplines the analyst. Goldratt assumes an honest observer and moves on.

Merton’s entire life’s work is the claim that there is no honest observer by default.

The false self, in Merton’s account, is not merely a spiritual liability. It is a perceptual one. A person living from the self he has constructed to secure others’ approval cannot see other people; he can only see how they confirm or threaten the construction. Run that through this method, and the consequence is severe. If I build a Current Reality Tree from the false self, my undesirable effects will be the things that threaten my standing, my core problem will be reliably located in somebody else, and the tree will be logically impeccable and completely wrong. The instrument was never calibrated.

This is why Merton belongs in the weave, and it is why the process matters when we study him rather than merely admire him.

Merton’s own tree. Notice first that his central claim is structurally identical to Goldratt’s first pillar. Merton does not offer a list of social ills. He argues that a very large number of undesirable effects — racism, the logic of deterrence, the violence latent in consumer society, the emptiness that makes totalitarianism possible — trace back through cause and effect to one thing: societies of false selves build structures that serve the false self’s agenda. That is a Current Reality Tree with a single entity at its root. It is inherent simplicity applied to the soul. Catholic Social Teaching has a name for the middle of that tree — structures of sin. Merton is telling us where the tree is rooted.

Notice second what he does to the Judge step. You cannot build a just society with unjust souls is not a devotional sentiment. It is a negative branch reservation on every purely structural injection ever proposed. The activist who has not confronted his own will to dominate will reproduce inside his own organization the injustice he set out to remove. Merton is instructing us to map that branch before we act, every time. Most reform movements find it only in the wreckage.

Three ways of reading Merton badly, and what the process does about each.

Merton as anthology. He is the most quotable spiritual writer of the century, which is a hazard rather than a gift. The corpus is enormous; it spans thirty years, and it is heavily mediated — by his censors, by his own revisions, and by the fact that the journals were withheld from publication for twenty-five years after his death. In 1962 the Abbot General forbade him to publish on war; Peace in the Post-Christian Era went out instead as six hundred mimeographed copies marked “not for publication,” and did not appear properly until 2004. To quote Merton flat, without date or circumstance, is therefore a category error, and it is precisely what the See step forbids. Facts first: what did he write, when, under what constraint, and what had already happened to him by then? The Merton of The Seven Story Mountain in 1948 and the Merton of 1966 are not the same man, and that difference is the material, not an embarrassment to be smoothed over.

Merton as contradiction. Students who do notice the difference often conclude that he is unreliable — that he kept changing his mind, that he wanted the hermitage and the world at once. Read the corpus as an evaporating cloud, and it resolves. The conflict is stated plainly enough: to be faithful he must withdraw; to be faithful he must engage. Both arms serve one objective, and everyone around him — his abbot, his censors, his readers, his own early writing — pressed him to compromise, to take a percentage of each. He refused the split and spent decades hunting the false assumption underneath it. The injection, when it came, was that contemplation is not the alternative to engagement but the condition of seeing anything worth engaging. Fourth and Walnut is the moment the cloud evaporates. That is not a man contradicting himself. That is a man doing the Judge step slowly, in public, over thirty years — and a student with the diagram in hand can follow the work instead of scoring the inconsistencies.

Merton as consolation. This is the serious one. Merton is a pleasure to read, and reading him produces a sensation of depth that is easily mistaken for the thing itself. The accumulation of contemplative vocabulary is one of the more sophisticated projects the false self can undertake, and Merton would have said so about his readers, having said harder things about himself. Nothing internal to the reading protects against this. The process does: Merton studied in company rather than alone, judged against the dignity of actual people rather than against our taste for him, acted upon, and then reviewed. Read privately, he becomes an aesthetic. Read inside See–Judge–Act, he does what he was for.

Never say “I know.” Goldratt’s fourth pillar is a discipline against the certainty that terminates inquiry. Merton wrote the prayer version of it: I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. An engineer and a monk arriving from opposite directions at the same refusal. In Goldratt it protects the analysis; in Merton it protects the analyst. A study group that can say that sentence honestly about its own conclusions has the only qualification that finally matters.

So the account in the previous section needs a third clause. Goldratt supplies the rigor that Cardijn’s method needs and lacks. Cardijn supplies the goal that Goldratt’s method needs and cannot produce. Merton supplies the seer — the sustained work on the observer without which the rigor is merely efficient and the goal merely stated—rigor, goal, and the person holding the instrument. Remove any one and the remaining two will eventually produce something worse than nothing, because they will produce it competently.

X. A working cycle

For those who want to run this rather than read about it. One loop, three movements, and the mantra as the disposition each movement demands.

SEE — the disposition is Educate. Before a single fact goes on the wall, ask each person aloud what they need out of this for their own standing, and write the answers down; the false self does its work early and in silence. Then gather the people actually affected ~nobody analyses on their behalf. Collect facts, not opinions ~ what happened, to whom, how often. Write each undesirable effect on its own card. Then connect them with cause-and-effect arrows, reading each aloud as “if this, then that,” and keep going until several arrows converge on something nobody had named. That is your core problem. Enforce one rule without exception: no solutions in this room. Expect this to take longer than you planned and to be the reason everything afterward works.

JUDGE — the disposition is Innovate. Find the conflict inside the core problem. Draw the cloud: two actions, the requirement behind each, the shared objective above both. Then state, out loud, the assumption under every arrow. Ask of each: is this actually true, or have we never questioned it? Before you settle the apex, submit the objective itself to the tradition — is this what human dignity requires, or only what our interests require? Then look for the injection that makes the conflict disappear rather than the compromise that splits it. Map the future forward, and hunt deliberately for the negative branch. If you cannot find any harm in your own proposal, you have not looked.

ACT — the disposition is Collaborate. List the obstacles honestly and turn each into an intermediate objective; the sequence of those objectives is your plan. Then work the six layers in order with the people who must live with it, and treat every objection as a contribution to the design. Watch for layer six, which will not announce itself: make a room in which someone can say “I am afraid of this” without losing face. Start small, and let an early visible success do the arguing.

Then return. Review honestly, in company, against what you actually said you would achieve. The situation has changed and so has your understanding of it. Do not let inertia become the constraint. Go back to See.

XI. Woven from the top throughout

The garment in John’s Gospel is described with an odd precision: the tunic was seamless, woven from the top throughout, and the soldiers would not tear it. Cardinal Bernardin later took the image for the consistent ethic of life, and I have taken it for this weave, perhaps too easily.

It is worth noticing what actually makes such a garment seamless. Not that the threads are identical ~ they plainly are not. A Belgian priest who buried his father after an industrial accident and an Israeli physicist who taught factory managers to think are not the same kind of thread and were not spun for the same purpose. What makes the garment whole is that it is woven from a single point of origin, and that one set of threads runs the entire length.

That is the warp, and in this weave the warp is one thing only: the conviction that the person in front of you has a dignity that is received rather than earned, that is not a function of output, and that is not available for trade. Cardijn spent his life laying that thread. Merton spent his life warning that we cannot see it with the eyes we currently have. Everything else ~ the inquiry, the cell, the mantra, the trees, the clouds, the layers ~is weft. Weft is not lesser. Without it there is no cloth, only a warp on a loom, which is what a great deal of well-intentioned Catholic social thought amounts to. But weft alone is a heap of thread.

Innovate, Educate, Collaborate. See, Judge, Act. What to change, what to change to, how to cause the change.

Three triads, one loom, and only one of them can tell you what the cloth is for.

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.

I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, in “Silicon Valley,” focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology. I explore topics such as the adoption of sustainable technologies, the social impact of digital devices, and the cultural adaptation of innovations. I analyze how technologies affect social organization, labor practices, and environmental outcomes, emphasizing that technology is never neutral but culturally situated, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.

After the series of parables found in chapter 13, Matthew’s Gospel enters a new phase. In this one Jesus seems intent on having his followers gradually building an understanding of his true identity and purpose. Some commentators have proposed that Matthew’s Gospel is structured in five sections, reflecting the five books of the Torah (Pentateuch). The end of chapter 13 ushers in the third of these sections. The story of the storm on the lake is preceded by the feeding of the five thousand and the brutal death of John the Baptist. These two stories reflect both the miraculous and the terrifying, two dimensions that will come together in the story of the storm on the lake.

The disciples are sent out on the boat on their own. Jesus remains behind to pray. The day turns to night and the storm builds on the lake. The darkness and the storm together are portents of chaos and evil. The image of the boat in the storm is a frequently used symbol for the Church under persecution. The disciples are fearful and even when Jesus appears, walking on the water, they are in despair. Peter alone responds when Jesus calls out to them. He uses the title ‘Lord’ (Mt 14:28) which reveals the post-resurrection understanding of Jesus’ identity. Peter, himself walking on the water at Jesus’ behest is once again afraid and calls out to Jesus ‘Lord! Save Me!’ (Mt 14:30) a cry which aligns Jesus’ actions with the saving work of God. Jesus holds on to Peter and as they return to the boat, the storm subsides, the danger has passed and those present worship Jesus as the ‘Son of God’ (Mt 14:33).

Gospel Text: Matthew 14:22-33

Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side while he would send the crowds away. After sending the crowds away he went up into the hills by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, while the boat, by now far out on the lake, was battling with a heavy sea, for there was a head-wind. In the fourth watch of the night he went towards them, walking on the lake, and when the disciples saw him walking on the lake they were terrified. ‘It is a ghost’ they said, and cried out in fear. But at once Jesus called out to them, saying, ‘Courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.’ It was Peter who answered. ‘Lord,’ he said ‘if it is you, tell me to come to you across the water.’ ‘Come’ said Jesus. Then Peter got out of the boat and started walking towards Jesus across the water, but as soon as he felt the force of the wind, he took fright and began to sink. ‘Lord! Save me!’ he cried. Jesus put out his hand at once and held him. ‘Man of little faith,’ he said ‘why did you doubt?’ And as they got into the boat the wind dropped. The men in the boat bowed down before him and said, ‘Truly, you are the Son of God.’

See

What is Jesus doing before he comes to the disciples on the lake?

How does the storm, in the darkness of the night, impact on the disciples?

What do we learn from Peter’s experience of walking on the water with Jesus?

Judge

What circumstances present as ‘storms’ in our own experience?

What is the impact of fear on ourselves?

How does faith in Jesus affect our disposition when facing ‘storms’ on our own lives?

Act

What can we do to remain assured when faced with significant challenges?

How can our community of faith provide support to those who are experiencing challenging times?

What steps can be taken to ensure all people are welcome and supported in our community?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-14-22-36-2022/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

Thomas Merton’s Wisdom for an Age of Emerging Technology

Adult education, using the See–Judge–Act method: Politics~Religion~ Catholic Social Teachings

An Often-Forgotten Starting Point: 1899

Before we dive into Merton, Buddhism, or AI, we need to trace the roots of the traditionalist and progressive split in American Catholicism—a rift far older and more intricate than most realize.

In 1899, Pope Leo XIII, who had written Rerum Novarum eight years earlier and started modern Catholic Social Teaching, sent an apostolic letter called Testem Benevolentiae to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore. The letter addressed what the Vatican called “Americanism”: the idea that the Church should adapt its practices and spiritual focus to fit American values like democracy, religious freedom, and individual initiative. The immediate cause was actually small—a French translation of a biography of the American priest Isaac Hecker, with a preface that praised this adaptive spirit. Leo’s letter warned against putting “active” virtues above “passive” ones, downplaying spiritual direction and authority, and changing Catholic teaching just to gain modern approval. American bishops, including Cardinal Gibbons, said no one really held the views being criticized. Historians still debate whether “Americanism” was a real movement or just a so-called “phantom heresy.” Whether real or not, the letter set a pattern that American Catholicism still follows: the Church can write boldly about justice in the modern world one decade, and then warn just as strongly against letting the modern world change the Church in the next.

This moment is a true crossroads: Leo XIII set Catholic Social Teaching’s sights on workers and the poor, yet also became the first pope to push back against reshaping Church teaching for modern libertarian democracy. The traditionalist-progressive debate did not begin in the 1960s—it has echoed since Leo XIII’s era, long before Vatican II or Merton entered the scene.

A Note Before We Begin

Earlier class notes drew a line between Catholic traditionalism and Calvinism. While that’s doctrinally fair, it misses the heart of the matter. The real contrast lies between traditionalist and progressive Catholics—two distinct temperaments wrestling with the same teachings since the days of the Americanist controversy. Today, we’ll use this lens, plus two more key ideas:

1. A clearer picture of the traditionalist–progressive divide itself, and how each side actually relates to Catholic Social Teaching (CST).

2. Thomas Merton, a figure who resists being filed neatly into either camp, and whose life shows why that resistance matters.

3. Buddhism deeply influenced Merton, shaping not just his subjects but the very way he thought. This outlook offers fresh insight as we grapple with technologies like AI.

4. Technology itself is part of this story. Catholic Social Teaching is not just something from the past. In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (”Magnificent Humanity”), which focused entirely on artificial intelligence and human dignity. He timed it to match the anniversary of Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, the same Leo XIII whose 1899 letter we discussed earlier.

Today, we will connect; we’ll weave together a century-old warning, a living Church debate, the story of a monk who walked his own path, the legacy of social teaching, and the technology that now shapes our everyday existence between Progressives: Two Catholic Temperaments “Traditionalist” and “progressive” are not official labels, but they capture real differences in how Catholics approach their faith. Most people fall somewhere in between, yet these categories shape how Catholic Social Teaching lands in parishes and in Church documents alike.

Catholic traditionalists usually focus on keeping continuity with the Church’s life before the Second Vatican Council. They prefer the older (1962) form of the liturgy, clear doctrine, strong moral positions on sexual ethics and the value of life, and a clear hierarchy. Many are cautious about changes since Vatican II (1962–1965), seeing some as weakening Catholic identity. In terms of Catholic Social Teaching, traditionalists often support subsidiarity (protecting families, local communities, and other groups from being taken over by the state) and human dignity (especially as reasons to oppose abortion and euthanasia). They tend to see CST’s stronger claims about labor, redistribution, migration, and economic reform as matters for debate, or even as modern ideas from secular politics rather than settled Church teaching.

Catholic progressives usually highlight the Church’s ability to grow and respond to new situations, seeing Vatican II as a new beginning rather than a break. They focus on solidarity (the duty of the strong to support the weak, as a matter of justice) and the common good. They see documents like Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti as central to the tradition, not just optional extras. Progressives are more likely to connect Catholic Social Teaching directly to policies like a living wage, universal healthcare, welcoming migrants, and strong climate action. They often view traditionalists’ hesitation on these issues as a selective or comfortable way of reading the faith.

Each side levels a critique at the other—critiques that deserve our careful attention:

• Traditionalists worry that progressive Catholicism risks collapsing the faith into secular politics — trading transcendence, sacramental life, and doctrinal clarity for a generic social-justice program that any secular NGO could sign onto.

• Progressives worry that traditionalist Catholicism risks reducing the faith to personal piety and private moral rectitude — strong on liturgy and sexual ethics, quiet on structural sin, economic injustice, and the material suffering of the poor.

Both groups cite authentic Catholic sources and may selectively emphasize aspects of the tradition. Catholic Social Teaching does not align exclusively with either side; it has developed over a century through contributions from both traditionalist and progressive popes.

Thomas Merton moved within this debate but, true to form, never let himself be boxed in by either camp.

SEE: What Is Actually Happening

Catholic Social Teaching employs a three-step method, developed by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn and widely adopted: See, Judge, Act. First, observe reality honestly. Next, evaluate it using the Gospel and reason. Finally, take action. We will use this framework tonight.

What do we observe?

The poor. Global poverty has not vanished—it has simply changed its disguise. Automation and AI are already erasing certain jobs, and those hit hardest are often the same people who were already on the margins, not the executives or engineers behind the machines.

Creation. The climate and biodiversity crises continue to unfold. Now, the data centers powering AI gulp down vast amounts of electricity and water, quietly adding a new layer to an already urgent environmental emergency.

A new kind of encounter. For the first time, ordinary people spend much of their day talking to something that sounds like a person but isn’t. Pope Leo XIV has spoken about this, warning that AI systems can imitate voices, faces, and even relationships in ways that touch “the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.”

Concentration of power. Just a handful of companies now steer the infrastructure, data, and future of this technology. Catholic Social Teaching has always watched closely who holds power—and how they wield it.

A crowded, distracted inner life. Long before smartphones, Merton warned of the “mass mind”—a flood of manufactured opinions and noise that drowns out our ability to think for ourselves. His warning rings truer than ever today.

This is where we begin. But before we weigh what it all means, let’s meet the judge.

Who Was Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk at Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani and became one of America’s most influential Catholic spiritual writers. He entered monastic life in 1941, seeking silence and escape from the world, immersing himself in strict discipline—Latin prayers, enclosure, a rhythm traditionalists would admire. Yet, to Merton’s own surprise, this very tradition drew him not away from the world’s pain, but directly into its heart of racism, nuclear war, and economic injustice from within a cloistered monastery, often through letters and manuscripts that faced restrictions from his superiors. In 1963, he wrote Letters to a White Liberal, arguing that ending racism in America required a genuine change of heart in white America, not just minor reforms. Merton does not fit neatly into either camp: his monastic life was deeply traditional, while his social and political writing addressed issues—such as racial justice, nuclear disarmament, and interreligious dialogue—that are now considered progressive.

Merton’s central insight: contemplation and social justice are not rivals, nor do they belong to separate camps. The contemplative aims to see reality as it is, unclouded by ego or culture. He spoke of the innermost self as a point “which belongs entirely to God” and is never ours to control. In an age of data profiles and engagement scores, this means our true identity cannot be bought, sold, or optimized.

Merton’s Other Teachers: Why Buddhism Shaped How He Thought

This side of Merton is often missed, but it is far more than a footnote. He did not study other religions from afar. In his final decade, he formed real friendships with Buddhist teachers, reshaping not just his ideas but his entire way of thinking.

He corresponded for years with the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. In 1966, the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited Merton at Gethsemani; Merton later called him “my brother,” describing them both as monks and poets living out the same vocation in different traditions. In 1968, on a long journey through Asia, Merton spent three full days in conversation with the Dalai Lama, who later remarked that in Merton he had met a Christian monk who could speak with Buddhists as something like a fellow contemplative teacher. Merton died in Bangkok later that same trip, at a conference on dialogue between Christian and Buddhist monastics — the subject occupied him literally to his last day.

What did Merton actually gain from these encounters—and why does it matter for our conversation about CST and AI? Seeing without grasping. Buddhist practice, particularly Zen, trains individuals to observe thoughts, cravings, or fears as they arise, without being controlled by them. Merton found this approach complemented and deepened the Christian contemplative tradition he practiced. He emphasized that this was not about merging religions, but about maintaining a “scrupulous respect” for the differences between Buddhist and Christian teachings, while recognizing that both traditions can teach each other to view reality honestly.

A wariness of the marketable, constructed self. Buddhist teaching warns against clinging to a fixed identity, echoing Merton’s Christian idea of the “false self”—the mask shaped by ambition, image, and outside approval, not the “true self” rooted in God. Both traditions caution us not to mistake this mask for our real nature. This lesson is especially urgent tonight. Merton’s Buddhist practice sharpened his discipline: slow down, watch your thoughts before acting, question their urgency, and only then judge. This rhythm—observe, discern, act—mirrors the See-Judge-Act method in Catholic Social Teaching, and it is the very discipline often missing when we interact with fast-moving technologies like AI, which are built to erase the pause between impulse and action.

JUDGE: What Catholic Social Teaching Actually Says

CST is not one document but a developing tradition, running from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) through John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris, Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus, Francis’s Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, and now Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026). Four convictions run through all of it:

Human dignity. Every person is made in the image of God and has worth that cannot be earned, revoked, or measured by productivity — including by an algorithm’s measure of “engagement” or “value.”

Solidarity with people experiencing poverty. Not charity as an optional extra, but an obligation: the strong owe something to the weak as a matter of justice, not generosity. CST calls this the “preferential option for the poor” — when a policy, a technology, or an economic choice is evaluated, its first test is its effect on those with the least power to protect themselves.

Creation care. Especially since Laudato Si’, CST treats ecological degradation and poverty as a single connected crisis, not two separate issues. Francis called this an “integral ecology” — you cannot heal the earth while ignoring people experiencing poverty who suffer first and worst from its degradation, and vice versa.

Rights and responsibilities. CST insists that rights (to work, to a fair wage, to participate in society, to truthful information) always come paired with responsibilities (to the common good, to truth, to one another). A right without a corresponding responsibility, in this tradition, is an incomplete idea of the human person.

How each temperament receives these four convictions

As noted in Section 1, traditionalists typically emphasize dignity and subsidiarity, while progressives focus on solidarity and the common good. Neither approach is incorrect, but both are incomplete. Catholic Social Teaching, in its entirety, does not allow selective application. For example, a traditionalist who defends the unborn but overlooks unfair wages is not applying dignity consistently. Similarly, a progressive who supports structural justice but neglects liturgy, prayer, and personal transformation misses the foundation of CST: a relationship with God, not merely a set of policies.

Merton as a bridge beyond the divide

Merton stands as a bridge across this tension. He was formed by the most traditional monastic life he could find, yet from within those walls, he spoke out on race, war, and interfaith dialogue—topics that unsettled traditionalists and inspire progressives today. Merton shows that the traditionalist/progressive split is not written into the tradition itself. In his life, contemplation and conscience fueled each other.

Judging artificial intelligence by these standards

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas applies this whole framework directly to AI. The main point, in the pope’s own words, is that artificial intelligences “do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,” and do not truly understand love, work, or responsibility. The real danger, he says, is not the technology itself but the vision behind it—whether it is created to serve everyone or just to concentrate wealth and power in a few companies. He calls for AI to be, in his words, “disarmed” of its ability to increase inequality and to imitate human relationships in ways that harm real ones.

Applying the four convictions directly:

• Dignity — an AI system that manipulates, deceives, or replaces human judgment without consent fails the dignity test, regardless of how useful it is.

• Solidarity — if AI increases productivity for shareholders while displacing workers with no transition support, that is a solidarity failure, not merely an unfortunate side effect.

• Creation — the energy and water costs of AI infrastructure are not a footnote; CST would insist they be weighed against the good the technology actually delivers.

• Rights and responsibilities — the right to work and to true information carries a responsibility on developers and users alike: to build honestly, disclose clearly, and use the tools without abdicating one’s own thinking.

AI is one of the rare modern issues where traditionalist and progressive Catholics might actually stand shoulder to shoulder. Traditionalists’ worries about family, human bonds, and the dignity of work echo progressives’ calls for economic justice and checks on corporate power—all reflected in the same encyclical.

ACT: What This Asks of Us

Catholic Social Teaching insists that reflection must become action; otherwise, “See” and “Judge” are just words on a page. Here are some practical steps, inspired by Merton, his Buddhist friends, and Magnifica Humanitas:

On a personal level, try the discipline Merton learned from Zen: carve out daily moments for real silence and face-to-face connection, to balance a world ruled by screens and artificial chatter. Before letting AI finish a task for you, pause—like a contemplative before a thought—and ask if you’re giving up your own judgment or attention in ways you might regret.

Within your community, back policies and groups—like unions, retraining programs, and local organizations—that give displaced or vulnerable workers a real say in how automation unfolds, not just a payout after the fact. This is solidarity in action: changing the system, not just handing out charity.

As a citizen, ask who holds the reins of the AI systems shaping your community—whether in banks, hospitals, or schools—and if everyday people have any voice. Catholic Social Teaching’s subsidiarity principle says decisions belong as close to home as possible. When far-off companies call the shots on local jobs, that’s exactly the kind of power grab CST warns us about.

Spiritually, Merton’s answer to the noise of his age—shaped by Buddhist friends and Christian tradition—was not escape, but a return to the world with new clarity. This practice of observing without clinging, then judging, then acting, is open to both traditionalist and progressive Catholics, no matter their stance on technology.

Key Quotations for Use in Teaching

(Each may be quoted briefly and attributed; longer passages should be paraphrased rather than reproduced.)

• Thomas Merton, on the inner self: it is a point of truth “which belongs entirely to God” and is never at our disposal (New Seeds of Contemplation).

• Thomas Merton, on confronting racism in America: he called for “a profound change of heart” rather than mere goodwill (Seeds of Destruction, 1964).

• Thomas Merton, on Thich Nhat Hanh: he called him “my brother,” noting they were “both monks” and “both poets” (1966 essay).

• Pope Leo XIV, on AI and human communication: “Faces and voices are sacred” (2026 World Day of Social Communications message).

• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (2026): human grandeur has “a splendor... no machine can ever replace.”

• Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891): the founding document of modern CST, written in response to industrial-age labor conditions — worth reading alongside Magnifica Humanitas as bookends of the same tradition, 135 years apart.

Questions for Group Discussion

1. Where do you see yourself between the traditionalist and progressive instincts described in Section 1 — and has that changed over your life?

2. Merton was formed by a highly traditional monastic life yet reached socially progressive conclusions. Does his example challenge the idea that these are opposite ends of a single spectrum?

3. Merton insisted his dialogue with Buddhism was not about blending traditions, but about learning a way of seeing more clearly while remaining fully Catholic. Where do you see value in learning from another tradition’s spiritual discipline without adopting its beliefs?

4. Pope Leo XIV says the challenge of AI is “not technological, but anthropological” — about who we are, not just what the machine does. Do you agree that the deeper question is about us rather than the technology?

5. Which of the four CST principles — dignity, solidarity, creation, rights-and-responsibilities — feels most neglected in how your own community, whatever its temperament, is currently adopting AI tools?

6. What would it look like, practically, for your parish, workplace, or family to “act” on this teaching this month?

For Further Reading

• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Seeds of Destruction, and Zen and the Birds of Appetite

• Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (published posthumously)

• Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)

• Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020)

• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (2026) — full text available at vatican.va

They met three times over five days. No cameras, no press, no audience. Merton wrote in his journal that he felt he was speaking with “a very solid, energetic, generous, and warm person.” The Dalai Lama would later say that it was Merton who first showed him what the word “Christian” really meant. Two contemplatives, from traditions separated by continents and centuries, discovered they were guarding the same fire: the conviction that the human interior life is sacred, and that it can be lost.

Five weeks later, Merton was dead — accidentally electrocuted in Bangkok hours after giving a talk on monasticism. The conversation was cut short. But their exchange points to a larger thesis: what happens to the human soul when its attention becomes someone else’s product?

That question sits at the heart of who you and I are today: Buddhist wisdom and Catholic social teaching help us judge the AI attention economy by asking what it does to human attention, dignity, and community.

Emptiness and the self we’re sold

In Mahayana Buddhist thought, emptiness (śūnyatā) is not nothingness. It is the insight that persons and things have no isolated, fixed, independent existence — everything arises dependently and cannot be grasped as a permanent possession or identity. That insight sharpens the central critique of an economy that profits by telling us we are what we click, consume, and display. Catholic teaching arrives at a parallel conviction from a different starting point: the human person cannot be reduced to function, data, or output. The Vatican’s 2025 document Antiqua et Nova makes this explicit — our worth rests on being created in the image of God, not on what we produce.

Presence as resistance

Buddhist presence means being awake to reality as it is, without being dragged around by craving or distraction. In an AI-saturated world, that becomes a counter-practice against systems built to capture attention. Catholic social teaching adds a sharper edge: sustained attention is not merely a wellness goal but a moral and social good, because our capacity for truth, freedom, and relationship depends on it. When apps monetize attention, they shape our habits before reflection has a chance to act. Antiqua et Nova insists AI must remain a tool — never a substitute for the human mind.

Compassion, community, and the common good

Buddhist compassion and Catholic solidarity meet at a shared conviction: the well-being of one is bound up with the well-being of all. This raises real questions about the tools we use. A mindfulness app that promises to reduce suffering while harvesting user data presents a genuine tension worth weighing — not an automatic verdict, but not an innocent transaction either.

Sangha — in its broad, contemporary sense, a community of shared practice — reminds us that awakening is nurtured socially, not as a private self-help project. It maps closely onto the Catholic idea of the common good: the social conditions that allow people to flourish together. Seen together, a digital tool that isolates users while extracting value from their loneliness runs counter to both. One that builds genuine community can serve both.

The poor and the power to opt out

Catholic social teaching is clearest when the issue is power. Technologies are not neutral if they widen inequality, manipulate consciences, or deepen the digital divide. The poor are often least able to opt out of surveillance, compulsive design, and “free” services that monetize their attention — and the environmental costs of AI infrastructure fall disproportionately on poorer regions. This is why, Antiqua et Nova argues, any evaluation of AI must begin with human dignity and the common good.

A synthesis worth practicing

Here is the constructive proposal: emptiness teaches non-clinging, compassion directs that freedom toward others, and sangha shows that liberation is communal. Catholic social teaching adds that communal flourishing must be ordered to the dignity of every person — especially the vulnerable. Together, they offer a clear test for technology: use it with more sobriety, favor tools that protect attention rather than monetize it, and build communities where contemplation, service, and justice reinforce one another.

Merton and the Dalai Lama had no smartphones to argue about. But they understood that contemplation is not an escape from the world — it is how we return to it free enough to love it. So the attention economy is bidding on precisely that freedom.

Introduction

If you could read my mind, you would find yourself in the presence of Vivien Burr, Susie Scott and Fr Gerald A. Arbuckle, SM. A strange mix of people, to be sure, but very much a part of my mind at present, and for reasons that relate to the Gospel you are about to read.

Vivien Burr is a social psychologist and works in the Department of Psychology at the University of Huddersfield. Susie Scott is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex. Both have written about identity as a social construct and this is why I link them with Fr Gerald and the Gospel reading.

For most of my life, I have been a social constructionist, at least by default. And I have been a Catholic for much longer than that. But religion (in my case, Catholicism) is a social construct. Fr Gerald has written about the existence of differing Catholic identities in the Church. And while I do not know anything about the religious beliefs and practices of Burr and Scott, I do know that they acknowledge the part that religion plays in society.

More important than this is Fr Gerald’s emphasis on Jesus’ appeal to people’s imaginations through his storytelling and through miracles that reveal the amazing power of God, as you will find in this Gospel. I am sure that there is a strong relationship between Cardijn’s See, Judge, Act method, which is used here, and the lesson about faith that Jesus teaches through his solidarity with the poor. All is gift and there will always be more than enough for each and every person who relates with God.

The Gospel

When Jesus received the news of John the Baptist’s death he withdrew by boat to a lonely place where they could be by themselves. But the people heard of this and, leaving the towns, went after him on foot. So as he stepped ashore he saw a large crowd; and he took pity on them and healed their sick.

When evening came, the disciples went to him and said, ‘This is a lonely place, and the time has slipped by; so send the people away, and they can go to the villages to buy themselves some food.’ Jesus replied, ‘There is no need for them to go: give them something to eat yourselves.’ But they answered ‘All we have with us is five loaves and two fish.’ ‘Bring them here to me’ he said. He gave orders that the people were to sit down on the grass; then he took the five loaves and the two fish, raised his eyes to heaven and said the blessing. And breaking the loaves handed them to his disciples who gave them to the crowds. They all ate as much as they wanted, and they collected the scraps remaining; twelve baskets full. Those who ate numbered about five thousand men, to say nothing of women and children. (Matthew 14:13-21)

The Enquiry

See

• What is the major difference between the apostles’ attitude towards the thousands who came to listen to Jesus and that of Jesus himself? Have you ever, like the apostles, made excuses to avoid helping people in need?

• How are those who choose to follow Jesus impacted by their decision (Look at the people who are fed and the apostles.)? What experiences have you had that validate the Gospel story?

• Why does Jesus resist the pressure to conform to his apostles’ lack of concern for the people who have travelled to listen to him?

Judge

• Do you accept that Jesus fed thousands of people with just a few loaves and some fish? Or do you find yourself looking for an acceptable interpretation?

• What would life be like if we looked at the world in the way that Jesus does?

• What do you find difficult to accept in this story and use it to shape your life in imitation of Jesus?

Act

• What have you observed in this Gospel story that is needed in the world?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about this transformation of the world and yourself?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Fr Lawrence Lew OP (Creator), Jesus feeds the Five Thousand, Detail from a medieval stained glass window in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London., Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Suggested Reading:

Arbuckle, G.A. (2013). Catholic identity or identities? Rebounding ministries in chaotic times. Liturgical Press.

Burr, V. (1993). Social constructionism (2nd edition). Routledge.

Scott, S. (2015). Negotiating identity: Symbolic interactionist approaches to social identity. Polity Press.

Darwen was a cotton town, and Gandhi’s boycott of British cloth had helped devastate it. Over ten thousand people were unemployed in Darwen alone. Whole streets of mill workers had lost their livelihoods, in part because a man five thousand miles away had asked India to stop buying what their hands made.

They cheered him anyway. Not because the boycott had done no harm, but because Gandhi had come to see that harm directly.

Gandhi had come precisely to look at what his boycott had cost them — to see it, face to face. He was up by half past six the next morning, meeting groups of unemployed workers before most of the town was awake. In those meetings, something unexpected happened: the workers extended him sympathy, and he returned it. One unemployed weaver reportedly put it plainly: if she were in India, she said, she would be saying the same thing Gandhi was saying.

What passed between them was a recognition that rarely survives an economic dispute: you are not your job, and neither am I. The workers were not reducible to the mills that had discarded them. Gandhi was not reducible to the boycott that had hurt them. For a weekend in Lancashire, two sides of a structural injustice looked past the structure and saw persons. That recognition is the whole vision of what follows, compressed into a single visit.

That forgotten moment is the whole vision of what follows: a claim that human worth survives economic injury, technological pressure, and the stories systems tell about us.

Three words that never traveled alone

Hindu ethical life turns on three Sanskrit terms. Atman — usually translated as “self” or “soul” — refers to the deepest layer of a person, what remains when every role, memory, and possession is stripped away. Dharma covers duty, cosmic order, and “the right thing to do here, for someone like me, in this situation,” all at once. Seva means selfless service — action without attachment to reward.

None of the three stands alone. In classical formulations, the deepest self is discovered through dharmic action and selfless service, not instead of it. The contemplative life and the active life are one path, seen from two angles.

Catholic Social Teaching arrives at a strikingly similar place by a different road. Christianity grounds human dignity in being made in the image of God; most schools of Vedanta ground it in consciousness itself. Yet both converge on the same conclusion: personhood cannot be flattened into function. A person is not their output, their usefulness, or their role — which is exactly what those Lancashire workers and Gandhi managed to see in each other.

The two traditions also share a structural insight. The Church’s language of “structures of sin” — developed by John Paul II in 1987 — acknowledges that injustice can be built into systems in ways that outlast any individual’s bad intentions. Nobody in Darwen intended those workers’ ruin; an imperial economic structure produced it anyway. Dharma reaches the same judgment: a social order that fails the vulnerable violates dharma itself, not just breaks a rule.

And now, the machines again

Lancashire’s looms have been replaced by something faster. AI systems now sort job applicants, price insurance, moderate speech, and decide what we watch and read. Workplaces increasingly measure people against the pace set by machines. And when an algorithm makes a consequential call, the human “in the loop” is often a signature at the end of a process nobody meaningfully reviewed.

Both traditions have something precise to say here. The Vatican’s 2025 document on AI, Antiqua et Nova, warns against equating human worth with productivity — almost exactly the danger Atman was built to guard against. If your account of human worth is functional, and AI can out-produce you, you have handed the machine the grounds to call you obsolete. But if worth was never based on output to begin with, the unemployed weaver and the out-written writer stand on the same unshaken ground.

And both traditions refuse to let responsibility migrate from persons to systems. “The algorithm decided” is not an acceptable final answer in either one. Someone conscious has to stand behind every consequential act and answer for it — just as Gandhi stood, at half past six in the morning, before the people his decisions had cost.

The workers of Darwen could not stop the forces reorganizing their world. But they refused to let those forces tell them what a person was worth. That refusal is available to us too, and it is the answer this essay has been building toward.

Questions to sit with

If AI can already out-produce us on many tasks, and human worth was never based on output to begin with, does AI actually threaten human dignity, or does it just expose which of us secretly believed our worth was our work?

Think of one algorithm that touches your life — a hiring tool, a feed, a lending model. Who, specifically and namably, is the human who answers for what it does? And if you can’t name anyone, what does that tell you?

Drawn from a session on Hindu ethics and Catholic Social Teaching. Sources include Thomas Merton’s essays on Gandhi, John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), the Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova (2025), and Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026).

In the summer of 1942, a French government minister arrived in a small Protestant village on a remote plateau in south-central France, carrying an order. He wanted a list — the names of every Jew hiding in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, so the Vichy police could round them up.

The village’s pastor, André Trocmé, didn’t have a list. What he had was a congregation of farmers and shopkeepers who had, without ever holding a vote or drafting a plan, spent two years quietly taking in refugees fleeing the Nazis — sheltering them in barns, forging their ration cards, walking them over mountain passes into Switzerland when the danger got too close. Trocmé told the minister, in effect, that the village didn’t traffic in categories like that. It knew human beings, not Jews and non-Jews.

The police came back more than once, once with buses meant to haul away everyone they found. They searched for weeks. They found almost no one. By the time the war ended, this single village of about 5,000 people had sheltered roughly 5,000 refugees, most of them Jewish children, at a time when hiding a single Jewish family could get you shot.

What’s striking, when you look closely at how the people of Le Chambon told the story afterward, is how little they talk about heroism. Trocmé’s wife, Magda, resisted the idea that they’d made some grand moral decision at all — as she put it, help arrived at the door, and you didn’t have time to deliberate, because the only real question underneath it was whether you believed the people asking were your brothers. There was no committee. No manifesto. Just an accumulation of small, stubborn refusals, repeated daily, by people who had decided in advance — long before the crisis ever arrived — what kind of people they were going to be.

That’s the piece of the story worth sitting with. Le Chambon wasn’t full of trained activists or professional dissidents. It was full of ordinary villagers whose capacity to resist had been built quietly, in advance, out of conviction rather than adrenaline, which meant that when the moment actually came, resistance didn’t require a decision. It had already been made.

Two decades later and an ocean away, a cloistered monk who’d spent his life trying to escape the world entirely arrived at the same conclusion by a very different road.

Thomas Merton spent his life behind monastery walls, and yet he wrote urgently for the citizens’ obligation to resist injustice. That isn’t a contradiction — it’s the point. From the silence of the Abbey of Gethsemani in the 1960s, Merton argued that Christians, and really anyone with a functioning conscience, could not stand by while cruelty got written into law and normalized in culture. His case is plain: resistance is a moral obligation that follows from taking human dignity seriously.

That argument lands differently now than it did in 1965. In a country as polarized and worn down by cynicism as this one, Merton’s claim remains uncomfortable — and still worth sitting with because it clarifies why resistance matters now.

Conscience, Not Fashion

Merton didn’t think resistance should start with a feeling. He was wary of protest as self-expression, protest as identity, protest as the thing you do because everyone in your circle is doing it. His question wasn’t “Does this appeal to me?” It was closer to: what does honesty and love for the people around me actually require here? That shift from impulse to obligation matters for what comes next.

In New Seeds of Contemplation, he frames moral obedience as something outside personal preference — doing right isn’t optional or “left open to subjective caprice,” as he put it. That’s a high bar. It means resistance has to be tested against something more durable than mood.

He was also blunt about the trap that protest movements fall into. Merton’s friend and biographer, Jim Forest, recalled him warning that people involved in protest can slide into rage while quietly believing they’re the model everyone else should follow — and that, without real compassion, a protester can end up circling their own self-righteousness rather than confronting the injustice itself. It’s a sharp warning, and one plenty of activists across the political spectrum would recognize in themselves if they were honest.

For Merton, resistance was a spiritual discipline before it was a political act — something that had to be built on humility and an actual willingness to listen, including to people you disagree with. That emphasis on inward discipline also shapes his idea of freedom. That is why it could function as a duty rather than a fashion.

Inner Freedom Isn’t an Escape From Politics

Merton’s emphasis on interior freedom — the phrase appears frequently in his writing — is sometimes misread as monastic withdrawal, a way of opting out of the mess of public life. It’s closer to the opposite. He believed people who haven’t done the work of freeing themselves from propaganda, tribal fear, and manufactured outrage aren’t actually capable of acting responsibly in public. Freedom on the inside, in his framing, is the precondition for citizenship that means anything. From there, responsibility becomes unavoidable.

That freedom comes bundled with responsibility, not less of it. Merton pushed toward what he called an almost total sense of mutual obligation — the idea that each of us is answerable for the others, not just for ourselves. Democracy, in that view, isn’t a mechanism of voting and rights sitting off to the side of our lives. It’s a web of people owing each other something. When that web tears through structural racism, militarism, exploitation, or a culture that’s stopped bothering to tell the truth, citizens have a duty to respond. Not as partisans trying to score a win, but as people trying to protect something held in common.

Nonviolence as a Weapon, Not a Retreat

Merton was heavily shaped by Gandhi and by what he saw happening in the civil rights movement, and he was insistent that nonviolence is not passivity. It’s not turning the other cheek and hoping things improve. He described a nonviolent life, grounded in truth and conscience, as genuinely active resistance to injustice — a force, not an absence of one. That distinction matters because nonviolence also shapes how resistance treats opponents.

But he was equally clear that nonviolence isn’t a clever tactic you deploy while secretly loathing your opponent. It asks for something harder: a real change of heart. Merton wrote about freedom as relational — that your own freedom only becomes fully real when it’s brought into right relationship with someone else’s. Resistance built on that idea refuses to dehumanize the other side. It aims at conversion, not humiliation, because that is the kind of resistance his argument requires.

That’s consistent with how Merton engaged the more radical wing of the Catholic peace movement. He was a mentor and correspondent to Daniel Berrigan and sympathetic to the broader draft-resistance movement of the era ~ the Catonsville Nine action, where activists burned draft files in 1968, happened within months of his death and squarely within that milieu ~ while still cautioning, in letters and essays, against movements that curdled into hatred or worked against their own stated values. In that same spirit, he turned to a critique of the nation itself.

The “American Myth”

Merton’s sharpest domestic critique was aimed at what he called the American myth: the idea that the United States is exceptionally innocent, uniquely righteous, somehow exempt from the moral compromises that mark every other nation’s history. He wrote that this self-delusion about collective innocence is baked into how Americans think about who they are — a kind of national daydream of moral superiority that makes it hard to see the country clearly.

That myth, in his view, obscures a real inheritance of guilt tied to colonization, slavery, segregation, and imperial violence abroad. And it makes resistance harder to sustain because dissent gets recast as betrayal rather than what Merton thought it actually was: loyalty to something truer than national self-image. Seen that way, the problem is not only historical but ongoing.

His alternative wasn’t comfortable. He insisted that all of us are caught up in history the same way everyone else is — implicated, tangled in the same difficulties as the rest of humanity, carrying the same weight. Waking up from the myth means accepting a share of responsibility for the structures that hurt people. And from that acceptance, he thought, resistance could grow — not as rage, but as something closer to atonement.

What This Sounds Like in 2026

Merton was writing sixty years ago, but the shape of what worried him is recognizable now. The concerns he named still show up in public life.

Truth is eroding. Disinformation and the normalization of lying wear down the foundations democracy needs to function. Merton warned against a public that hands its judgment over to a distant, faceless power elite and drifts into passivity as a result. That is why his warning still matters: resistance begins by refusing that drift.

Force gets glamorized. Endless war, aggressive policing, and a culture that treats domination as strength were exactly what Merton pushed back against. His counsel was to love people rather than an abstract idea of “peace,” and to let that love produce a real hatred of injustice, tyranny, and greed.

Injustice is structural, not incidental. Racial, economic, and ecological inequality show how deeply violence gets built into ordinary systems, not just individual acts. Merton noted that when nonviolence seems to fail, it’s often because the surrounding society has stopped speaking any language but violence.

Polarization flattens people into enemies. Political identity has hardened into tribal loyalty, where the person across the aisle stops being a neighbor and becomes a threat. Merton was explicit that nonviolence isn’t a license to hate a class, a nation, or a group — it can’t be, or it’s not nonviolence.

Read against that backdrop, Merton’s claim that resistance can be a democratic duty stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like a fairly sober diagnosis. When institutions drift toward injustice, and citizens drift toward apathy, responsible protest becomes less about rebellion and more about reclaiming a democracy from the inside. That logic points toward what a Mertonian resistance might actually look like.

What a Mertonian Resistance Might Actually Look Like

Pulling these threads together, a few hallmarks stand out:

• Rooted in discernment, not reaction. Resistance that starts from reflection holds up better than resistance that starts from adrenaline.

• Compassionate toward opponents. Refusing to flatten people into caricatures, even the ones you’re resisting.

• Nonviolent in method and spirit. Aimed at waking up conscience, not crushing an adversary.

• Willing to absorb real cost. Social disapproval, legal risk, and personal sacrifice were never incidental to Merton’s picture — they were often the point.

• In solidarity with people already pushed to the margins, whose voices are often the first to be excluded from the official story.

• Honest about the myth of innocence in every camp, including your own — resisting the temptation to claim you’re the pure one in the conflict.

Merton’s own life is the clearest argument for all of this. A cloistered monk who wasn’t supposed to have opinions on foreign policy ended up writing and corresponding relentlessly about war, race, and justice, because he’d concluded that staying silent in the face of evil isn’t holiness. It’s complicity. Wearing a habit or a collar doesn’t change that. Maybe a lesson for all of us.

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As a historian, my note on sources: quotations above are drawn from Merton’s published work, principally “New Seeds of Contemplation”, along with his letters, essays on nonviolence, and later writing on war and American identity. Some from memory as I write, and some I check, but not always, just letting you know, but I am pretty confident the spirit of Merton is there. Where a passage is paraphrased rather than quoted directly, that’s a deliberate choice on my part to represent Merton’s ideas accurately without lifting long stretches of his original text. If you want the primary language, those books and collections of letters are widely available and worth reading in full. My suggestion is to get reading, life is short.

This text concludes the series of parables in chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel with three brief similitudes. The first two, the hidden treasure (Mt 13:44) and the fine pearls (Mt 13:45-46) are very alike in their emphasis while the third, the parable of the dragnet (Mt 13:47-50) provides a very different perspective. The common theme is the kingdom of heaven, to which all three images are likened. The text concludes with a focus on understanding, which has been critical throughout the chapter, and a curious ‘mini-parable’ about a householder who ‘brings out from his storeroom things both old and new’ (Mt 13:52)

The first two parables in this text have the shared meaning of recognising the immense value of the kingdom of heaven, a worth which his unsurpassed and of greater value than all that we are and all that we have. The Gospel reminds us that the kingdom of heaven should be sought and embraced, no matter what the cost. The parable of the dragnet includes two powerful images. The first is a universal gathering, inclusive of all. A reminder to Matthew’s first century audience that the Gospel is for all people, not just the children of Israel. Then there is a sorting between the ‘wicked and the just’ (Mt 13:51). A judgement based on actions, not on race, religion or status.

The concluding verses return to the importance of understanding. It juxtaposes the idea of a scribe who is an expert in the law with that of a disciple who seeks to learn. The reference to things old and new is, most likely alluding to the tradition of the Hebrew scriptures, the Torah and the new revelation of God in Jesus. These two, properly understood, draw from and inform one another to provide a more complete understanding of Jesus’ message.

Gospel Text: Matthew 13:44-52

Jesus said to the crowds, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns and buys the field.

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls; when he finds one of great value he goes and sells everything he owns and buys it.

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet cast into the sea that brings in a haul of all kinds. When it is full, the fishermen haul it ashore; then, sitting down, they collect the good ones in a basket and throw away those that are no use. This is how it will be at the end of time: the angels will appear and separate the wicked from the just to throw them into the blazing furnace where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.

‘Have you understood all this?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ And he said to them, ‘Well then, every scribe who becomes a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out from his storeroom things both new and old.’

See

What similar point is emphasised in the first two parables?

What does the parable of the dragnet convey about the kingdom of heaven?

What is the basis for keeping or rejecting the catch from the dragnet?

Judge

What does the phrase about a scribe becoming a disciple suggest about the process of learning in life?

What does this text indicate about the relationship between the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and the New Testament?

In what other areas should the dimensions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ be brought together?

Act

What steps can we take to ensure that we value the kingdom of heaven above all else?

What actions can we undertake to ensure that the universal and inclusive character of the kingdom of heaven is evident in our communities?

What do we need to do to ensure that traditional approaches and new ideas can work well together in our communities?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-13-44-46-2023/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

What Catholic Social Teaching Actually Is

Catholic Social Teaching is far more than a list of talking points. It is a way of threading faith through the fabric of everyday life—at work, in the voting booth, and around the dinner table. At its core, it urges us to care for those who struggle and to seek a common good that reaches beyond our own interests.

Much of this probably rings a bell. It is what many of us learned as children: love your neighbor, stand up for what is right, and help create something better than what you inherited.

Catholic Social Teaching gives that instinct a name, a story, and a structure. Faith, it turns out, is not just something you believe; it is something you put into action.

‘See, Judge, Act’ is a hands-on framework for making Catholic Social Teaching real, helping us close the distance between theory and practice. The Church offers this simple, three-step process: See, Judge, Act.

See. Notice what is truly happening—in your family, your neighborhood, your country, and the world. Listen most closely to those whose voices are often drowned out or overlooked.

Judge. This is not about judging people. It means holding what you have seen up to the light of the Gospel. What would Christ say about this? What do the Church’s teachings on human dignity, justice, and the common good call us to do?

Act. Do not let it stop at thoughts or words. Take a step, even a small one. Offer a hand to a neighbor. Speak out for fairer policies. Support those who work tirelessly to lift up people with low incomes.

Where This Came From

This method is not a modern idea conjured from nowhere. It has deep roots. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught that good moral decisions require prudence: real wisdom, honest reflection, and careful attention to reality as it truly is, not as we wish it to be.

But it was a Belgian priest, Joseph Cardijn, who transformed that idea into a movement. Cardijn grew up watching his father labor to the point of exhaustion. As a young priest, he noticed how many working-class Catholics felt left behind by the Church. In response, he founded the Young Christian Workers (JOC), bringing together ordinary laypeople—factory workers, apprentices, teenagers—to see their own lives through the lens of the Gospel and act on what they discovered. Later, Pope Paul VI made him a cardinal in 1965. Cardijn served as an advisor at the Second Vatican Council, where his influence can be seen in the Council’s teaching on the vocation of the laity.

Cardijn’s whole approach rested on one conviction: real change does not come from outsiders arriving with prepackaged solutions. It grows from people who take time to understand others’ lives and walk alongside them. He put it memorably:

“A young worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.”

This is more than sentiment. It is a bold claim about dignity that can reshape everything: our economics, our politics, and even the way we greet the person bagging our groceries.

Vatican II shared this conviction, declaring that laypeople are not spectators in the Church’s mission but active participants. In practical terms, the responsibility belongs to us.

What It Is Not

It is important to be clear about what Catholic Social Teaching is not.

It is not Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism ties the Gospel too closely to political power or national identity, and in doing so, it risks reducing Christ’s message to something that serves only one group, one flag, one agenda.

Catholic Social Teaching moves in the opposite direction. Every person, no matter where they were born or what passport they carry, has dignity because they are made in the image of God. Our concern cannot stop at “our own people.” It must extend to the whole human family.

Human vs. Fully Human

Here is where an important distinction appears: the difference between simply existing as human and truly living as one.

To be human is to exist. To live as fully human, in the Christian sense, is to recognize that we owe something to one another. It means seeing the stranger not as a threat or a rival but as a neighbor, a brother, a sister. Thomas Merton, writing from his monastery in Kentucky, captured that recognition in a single line:

“Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.”

That awareness is the turning point. It changes how we see poverty, immigration, health care, work, and the daily choices that shape our relationships. It pulls us out of comfort and into compassion, out of isolation and into solidarity.

Where This Leaves Us

Ultimately, Catholic Social Teaching invites us to help build a world that truly reflects God’s love—a world where no one is forgotten, and everyone has a seat at the table. A quiet Swiss town in 1884, with a few people brave enough to face a wounded world. It continues today, as ordinary people choose to see with clarity, judge with wisdom, and act with courage.

The throughline across all of these: it’s never the technology itself — census machines, radios, printing presses — that does the theological damage. It’s a movement’s willingness to let a technology stand in for discernment. Merton’s actual proposed remedy (silence, the local, the “poverty of spirit”) wasn’t invented against AI. It’s the same remedy the Confessing Church, the desert fathers, and Merton himself reached for against radio, bureaucracy, and Cold War calculation. That continuity is probably the most useful thing these examples add to the essay: it reframes AI not as a new problem but as the newest costume for a very old one.

There’s a difference between loving your country and asking your country to stand in for your faith. Christian nationalism blurs that line — and for Catholics, that blurring comes at a real cost. The point of this reflection is simple: under the See-Judge-Act method, the fusion of Christian identity with national power fails the test, and Catholics are called to a wider allegiance.

SEE: What’s Actually Happening

Christian nationalism isn’t a fringe idea anymore. It shows up in policy debates over immigration, education, and the environment, and in political movements that claim divine backing for a specific partisan agenda — presenting disagreement not just as wrong, but as un-Christian. The issue is not only its reach, but its claim to define Christian faith through political power. A 2024 Public Religion Research Institute survey found that roughly two-thirds of Americans are either skeptical of Christian nationalism or reject it outright, while close to a third qualify as adherents or sympathizers. A separate Pew study found that most Americans who’ve even heard the term view it unfavorably.

Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, has warned that the term itself creates confusion by conflating two distinct realities: devotion to one’s nation and devotion to the Church. His point is simple and worth sitting with: a Christian loves his country, but always within a larger love for God and neighbor — never as a substitute for it.

Here’s what that confusion looks like on the ground:

• Christian language and symbols are used to justify excluding migrants or minorities.

• Political causes get framed as having divine sanction, not just policy merit.

• National identity gets fused with religious identity, so that loyalty to one becomes a test of the other.

• The cross, meant as a universal sign of salvation, begins to function instead as a tribal marker.

JUDGE: What Catholic Teaching Actually Says

Catholic Social Teaching gives us several clear principles that Christian nationalism runs straight into. The conflict is basic: Christian nationalism asks political loyalty to do what Catholic teaching reserves for God and neighbor:

The universal destination of goods — Creation belongs to the whole human family, not to one nation’s exclusive claim.

Solidarity — We are one human family before we are any nationality; a politics that divides along national or ethnic lines runs counter to our baptismal unity.

Subsidiarity — Political power exists to serve human dignity, not to enforce religious conformity on citizens who don’t share the majority faith.

The common good — Real human flourishing depends on cooperation that crosses religious and national lines, not competition that hardens them.

Several thinkers sharpen the point further.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and contemplative, wrote plainly in New Seeds of Contemplation: “Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” That’s the failure mode of Christian nationalism — it doesn’t submit to God’s reign, it shapes God into a national mascot. Merton’s spiritual project was about transcending tribal identity through contemplative openness to God; nationalism does the opposite, reducing faith to a tool of political power.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis for his resistance, is the sharpest warning of all. He wrote against the “German Christians,” who fused their faith with Nazi ideology and demanded loyalty to the Führer as an article of belief. His concept of “cheap grace” — forgiveness without conversion, blessing without discipleship — describes what Christian nationalism offers: a gospel that flatters national pride without requiring the costly obedience of following Christ. As Bonhoeffer put it, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” That is about as far as you can get from a movement promising earthly triumph and political power.

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher and Catholic convert, argued that Christianity transcends every political system even as it informs them through reason and natural law. For Adler, a healthy democracy needs citizens capable of recognizing truth beyond majority opinion — a recognition rooted in faith but accessible to anyone through reason. Reducing Christianity to one nation’s political program betrays both faith and reason at once.

And there’s a reason Pope Pius XI established the Feast of Christ the King back in 1925: he saw this danger coming. When nations refuse to recognize Christ’s authority over public life, the encyclical Quas Primas warns, discord between peoples inevitably follows. Christ’s reign was never meant to be national. It’s universal, or it isn’t Christ’s reign at all.

Five Reasons to Reject It — In Plain Terms

1. It gets the order backward. Country second, God first — never the reverse. Christian nationalism asks God to serve the nation instead of asking the nation to serve God’s people.

2. It shrinks the Gospel to fit a border. Christ died for every nation, not one. A faith that only really works for “us” isn’t the faith the apostles preached.

3. It turns the cross into a weapon. A sign of sacrificial love gets repurposed as a marker of who’s in and who’s out.

4. It’s cheap grace with a flag. It offers the comfort of national belonging without the cost of actual discipleship — no conversion required.

5. It divides the one family it should unite. Solidarity across nations, races, and creeds is not optional for Catholics; it’s baptismal.

ACT: What This Looks Like in Daily Life

Following the same method Cardinal Joseph Cardijn used to train young workers, and Pope John XXIII later built into Catholic Social Teaching through Mater et Magistra (1961), conversion has to start personally before it becomes communal.

Start with yourself.

• Notice where national pride has quietly taken the place of Gospel values in your own thinking

• Spend time in contemplative prayer — Merton’s path — to loosen the grip of tribal loyalty.

• Reread the Church’s actual teaching on solidarity, subsidiarity, and the universal destination of goods, rather than relying on secondhand summaries.

Then take it into your community. Bring this reflection to a parish adult education group or a small faith-sharing circle. Support policies and organizations, like Catholic Charities, that protect the dignity of migrants and refugees regardless of nationality. Speak up, clearly and charitably, when Christian symbols get used to justify excluding someone. Reach out across religious and political lines instead of retreating into like-minded enclaves. Pray for every nation, not just your own — a small daily habit that keeps Christ’s universal reign in view. Cardijn liked to remind his young workers, “We are always at the beginning.” Rejecting nationalism isn’t a one-time decision; it’s a daily choice to love past tribe, to see with the eyes of faith, and to live as a citizen of something larger than any flag — the City of God.

• Bring this reflection to a parish adult education group or a small faith-sharing circle.

• Support policies and organizations, like Catholic Charities, that protect the dignity of migrants and refugees regardless of nationality

• Speak up, clearly and charitably, when Christian symbols get used to justify excluding someone.

• Reach out across religious and political lines instead of retreating into like-minded enclaves.

• Pray for every nation, not just your own — a small daily habit that keeps Christ’s universal reign in view.

Cardijn liked to remind his young workers, “We are always at the beginning.” Rejecting nationalism isn’t a one-time decision; it’s a daily choice to love past tribe, to see with the eyes of faith, and to live as a citizen of something larger than any flag — the City of God.

This reflection draws on the See-Judge-Act method developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn and incorporated into Catholic Social Teaching by Pope John XXIII in Mater et Magistra (1961).

This period in history, between 1933 and 1945, is probably the closest real-world precedent to what my blog post today describes, and it’s rarely invoked in AI-ethics writing. The “German Christians” movement fused nationalist identity with church structure, and Goebbels’ propaganda ministry subsidized a cheap mass radio — the Volksempfänger, literally “people’s receiver” — precisely so a single voice could reach every household. It’s the “common tongue” of Babel made into hardware. The Confessing Church’s response, the 1934 Barmen Declaration, rejected not doctrine but the fusion itself— the claim that national identity and revelation were the same voice. That’s structurally identical to what Merton (and this essay) mean by refusing the “mask of nationalism.”

See: The Monk in the Machine Age

Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk who bridged contemplative spirituality with prophetic social criticism, would have recognized something hauntingly familiar in our current technological moment. Writing from his hermitage at Gethsemani in the 1960s, Merton warned against what he called “the collective illusion” — the tendency of societies to construct massive edifices of self-justification that obscure rather than reveal truth. Today, the fusion of Christian nationalism with artificial intelligence and emerging technologies represents that same illusion in digital form: a Tower of Babel where religious identity is weaponized through algorithmic power.

Merton’s critique would cut through superficial debates about AI ethics to expose the deeper spiritual crisis: the idolatrous conflation of technological mastery with divine mandate, wrapped in the language of Christian restoration.

The New Babel: Technological Utopianism as False Transcendence

The original Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1-9) warns against humanity’s attempt to “make a name for ourselves” through technological achievement that reaches the heavens. Merton understood technology not as inherently evil, but as dangerously susceptible to what he called “the religion of power” — the belief that human will, properly organized and equipped, can construct paradise on earth. That warning helps frame the new Babel posed by Christian nationalism’s embrace of AI and emerging technologies.

Christian nationalism’s embrace of AI and emerging technologies creates a paradoxical new Babel, where technological ambition serves spiritual illusion rather than genuine faith.

The Algorithmic Chosen People: Just as the Babel builders sought unity through a single language and monolithic project, Christian nationalist movements increasingly deploy AI-powered tools to create echo chambers that reinforce tribal identity. Social media algorithms become the new “common tongue” — not facilitating genuine communication but manufacturing consensus through filter bubbles and engagement optimization. Merton would see this as the “mass mind” he warned against: individuals surrendering contemplative discernment for the comfort of the crowd.

Surveillance as Providence: When Christian nationalist rhetoric frames AI surveillance technologies as tools for protecting “Christian civilization” or maintaining moral order, it performs a theological sleight of hand Merton would immediately recognize. It turns God’s omniscience into a technological project controlled by human actors. This is the ultimate expression of what Merton called “the world of inert objects” — treating both technology and human beings as instruments rather than mysteries.

Data-Driven Dominionism: Seven Mountains Dominionism and similar Christian nationalist theologies teach that Christians must “take dominion” over cultural institutions. AI offers an intoxicating promise: the ability to model, predict, and shape human behavior at scale. Merton would recognize this as Promethean overreach disguised as divine commission — the attempt to force the Kingdom of God through technical mastery rather than kenotic love.

Discern: The False Self in the Age of Digital Identity

Central to Merton’s spirituality is the distinction between the “true self” (our identity grounded in God’s love) and the “false self” (the constructed identity we create through achievement, status, and social performance). AI and social media intensify the false self.

Christian nationalist movements online often exhibit what Merton called “the mask of nationalism” — a collective false self that mistakes cultural power for spiritual authenticity. This appears in several ways:

• Performative Piety: Social media’s attention economy rewards the most extreme expressions of religious-political identity. AI recommendation algorithms amplify outrage and tribal signaling, creating what Merton would call a “festival of violence” — not physical violence necessarily, but violence against truth, nuance, and the patient work of genuine spiritual formation.

• The Quantified Soul: When Christian nationalism embraces metrics-driven approaches to faith (attendance numbers, political victories, cultural influence scores), it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what Merton called “the hidden wholeness.” You cannot algorithm your way to the Kingdom of God. The attempt to do so creates what Merton described as “the spiritual man turned inside out” — all external performance, no interior life.

• Identity as Brand: AI tools allow for sophisticated micro-targeting and identity curation. Christian nationalist messaging can be tailored to different audiences with unprecedented precision. But this creates what Merton would recognize as the ultimate spiritual danger: believing your carefully constructed public persona is your actual identity. The contemplative knows the self is discovered in silence, not manufactured in the marketplace.

The Illusion of Control: AI and the Temptation of Omnipotence

Merton consistently warned against what he called “the illusion of power” — the belief that controlling outcomes is humanity’s highest calling. AI represents perhaps the most seductive version of this illusion yet created.

Predictive Analytics as False Prophecy: When Christian nationalist organizations use AI to model election outcomes, identify persuadable voters, or predict cultural trends, they engage in a form of technological divination. Merton would ask: What happens to faith when we believe we can calculate the future? What happens to providence when we think we can engineer it?

Automation of Discernment: AI systems promise to help identify “threats” to Christian civilization — flagging content, people, or ideas deemed dangerous. But Merton knew that genuine discernment requires what he called “the poverty of spirit” — the willingness to be wrong, to be surprised, to encounter the other without preset categories. Algorithmic sorting is the opposite of this poverty; it’s the rich self, drowning in its own certainty.

The Gnostic Temptation: There’s something deeply gnostic about the belief that reality can be mastered through the right technical knowledge. Christian nationalism’s embrace of AI often carries this gnostic flavor: we possess the hidden wisdom (the right data models, the correct algorithms) that will allow us to transcend the messiness of incarnate, embodied existence. Merton, steeped in the sacramental tradition, would see this as a profound betrayal of the Incarnation itself.

The Violence of Efficiency: When Systems Replace Persons

One of Merton’s most powerful insights was that modern technological society tends toward what he called “the collectivization of violence” — not necessarily through physical force, but through systems that treat persons as objects to be managed, optimized, or eliminated from the equation.

AI amplifies this tendency dramatically:

Dehumanization at Scale: When Christian nationalist rhetoric identifies enemies (immigrants, religious minorities, political opponents) and AI systems are deployed to track, categorize, or restrict these groups, we witness what Merton called “the Unspeakable” — evil so systematized it becomes banal. The monk who protested the Vietnam War would certainly protest the fusion of religious tribalism with AI-powered discrimination.

The Tyranny of Optimization: AI systems optimize for specified goals with remorseless efficiency. But human flourishing cannot be optimized. Love cannot be optimized. Mercy cannot be optimized. When Christian nationalism uncritically embraces AI, it risks what Merton warned against: mistaking efficiency for goodness, order for justice, and control for peace.

Automated Propaganda: AI-generated content, deepfakes, and bot armies allow for unprecedented manipulation of public discourse. Christian nationalist movements that deploy these tools — even “for good” — participate in what Merton called “the big lie.” They corrupt language itself, making genuine communication impossible.

Action: Contemplation as Resistance: Merton’s Alternative Vision

So what would Merton propose as an alternative? Not a reactionary rejection of technology, but a form of contemplative resistance that keeps the person primary and communion possible.

The Recovery of Silence: In an age of algorithmic noise, Merton would advocate for deliberate disconnection as a spiritual practice. Not permanent withdrawal, but rhythms of silence that let the true self emerge from beneath the digital static. Christian nationalism’s constant agitation-and-outrage cycle depends on our perpetual connectivity; contemplation breaks this cycle.

The Primacy of the Local and Embodied: Merton would counsel a return to the particular, the local, the embodied — all the things AI abstracts away. Christian nationalism operates through digital networks and grand narratives; authentic faith is lived in specific communities with specific neighbors. You cannot love an algorithm or be loved by one.

Seeing Through the Illusion: Merton’s concept of “the awakened life” meant seeing through collective delusions to reality itself. In our context, this means developing what we might call “algorithmic literacy” — understanding how systems shape perception without being captured by them. It means asking: What is this technology making easier? What is making it harder? Who benefits? Who is erased? These questions prepare the way for the wisdom of uncertainty that follows.

The Wisdom of Uncertainty: Against AI’s promise of prediction and control, Merton would advocate for what he called “the wisdom of the desert” — the recognition that uncertainty, unknowing, and vulnerability are not problems to be solved but the ground of authentic faith. Christian nationalism’s alliance with technological certainty is, in this sense, a profound failure of faith.

Nonviolent Resistance: Merton was deeply influenced by Gandhi’s satyagraha — truth-force as an alternative to coercive power. In the digital age, this might mean refusing to participate in algorithmic amplification of division, choosing truth-telling over tribal loyalty, and building technologies that serve genuine human connection rather than manipulation and control.

The Cross vs. The Algorithm: Theological Stakes

Ultimately, Merton would frame the issue theologically: Christian nationalism’s embrace of AI represents a crisis of Christology. It replaces the way of the Cross — self-emptying, suffering love, vulnerable presence — with the way of the algorithm: optimization, prediction, control.

The Cross is foolishness to those who seek power (1 Corinthians 1:23). It cannot be modeled, optimized, or efficiently administered. Christ’s weakness confounds the strong; his poverty shames the rich; his silence indicts our noise. AI, for all its capabilities, cannot comprehend this scandal.

Christian nationalism, by contrast, seeks a Christianity of power — what Merton would call “Constantinian Christianity,” the ancient heresy of confusing the Gospel with empire. AI has become the newest tool in the empire’s arsenal, now wrapped in the language of cultural renewal and religious restoration.

But Merton knew: genuine Christianity is always marginal, always prophetic, always in tension with systems of power. The monk in the hermitage, not the algorithm in the data center, shows us the way.

Conclusion: Scattering the Builders

God scattered the builders of Babel not as punishment but as mercy — preventing them from completing a project that would have sealed their alienation from both the divine and each other. The confusion of languages was not a curse but an invitation to the more difficult, more beautiful work of genuine communication across difference.

In our digital age, Thomas Merton would counsel a similar hope: that the very incoherence and overreach of Christian nationalism’s technological ambitions might wake us from the collective dream. That the algorithmic Tower of Babel, in its excess and obvious idolatry, might finally reveal what Merton spent his life trying to show us:

That authentic Christianity cannot be programmed.
That the Kingdom of God cannot be engineered.
That love is not data.
That mercy is not efficient.
That the truth will not trend.

The contemplative path Merton illuminated offers not an escape from technology but a way through it — a way of being fully present in the digital age without being captured by its illusions. It requires the hardest work of all: descending from the towers we’ve built, abandoning our projects of self-justification, and meeting each other — and God — in the vulnerable, unoptimized space of genuine encounter.

In that space, the algorithm’s noise fades. The false self dissolves. And we discover what Merton always knew: that we are already, always, incomprehensibly loved — not for what we achieve or control or build, but simply because we are.

The digital Tower of Babel will fall, as all such towers do. The question Merton would ask us is: Will we be humble enough to let it fall? Or will we, like the original builders, scatter only when we must — driven apart by the collapse of our own certainties?

Choose the scattering, Merton would say. Choose the wilderness over the city, the hermitage over the empire, the silence over the algorithm’s endless chatter. There, in the poverty and foolishness the world despises, you might finally hear the still, small voice that no machine can simulate and no system can contain.

“We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of humans, and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation.” — Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

Introduction

Jesus is a master storyteller, indeed, the model for all storytellers. He uses elements from life, familiar to his listeners, to teach them and us about God.

They (We) are challenged to recognise God’s presence in the small and ordinary things in life and to have faith in the goodness of God.

At a time when world leaders are hell-bent of destroying the good will of people and nations, we can step aside and observe the tiny, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and the everyday tasks of ordinary people and recognise the Spirit of God building the kingdom of heaven.

Let us give thanks to God for the stories Jesus shares with us. May God’s Kingdom come. May God’s Will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven.

The Gospel

Jesus put another parable before the crowds: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everybody was asleep his enemy came, sowed darnel all among the wheat, and made off. When the new wheat sprouted and ripened, the darnel appeared as well. The owner’s servants went to him and said, “Sir, was it not good seed that you sowed in your field? If so, where does the darnel come from?” “Some enemy has done this” he answered. And the servants said, “Do you want us to go and weed it out?” But he said, “No, because when you weed out the darnel you might pull up the wheat with it. Let them both grow till the harvest; and at harvest time I shall say to the reapers: First collect the darnel and tie it in bundles to be burnt, then gather the wheat into my barn.”’

He put another parable before them: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.’

He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through.’

In all this Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables; indeed, he would never speak to them except in parables. This was to fulfil the prophecy: I will speak to you in parables and expound things hidden since the foundation of the world.

Then, leaving the crowds, he went to the house; and his disciples came to him and said, ‘Explain the parable about the darnel in the field to us.’ He said in reply, ‘The sower of the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world; the good seed is the subjects of the kingdom; the darnel, the subjects of the evil one; the enemy who sowed them, the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; the reapers are the angels. Well then, just as the darnel is gathered up and burnt in the fire, so it will be at the end of time. The Son of Man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that provoke offences and all who do evil, and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth. Then the virtuous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Listen, anyone who has ears!’ (Matthew 13:24-43)

The Enquiry

See

• What do you observe about the world described by Jesus through the parables he uses in this Gospel passage? How similar to or different is it from the world that you experience?

• What impact do Jesus’ stories have on the world then and now? Are people more hopeful or more despairing because of his stories?

• Why does Jesus tell these stories? What has been forgotten by his followers that they need to be reminded about by him?

Judge

• What do you think about Jesus’ message? Is it something you need to hear? Or is our world too far off course for his message to be relevant?

• What would the world be like today if people needed his message?

• What is there about his parables that you find hard to accept?

Act

• What change do you want to bring about in the world and in yourself?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about this transformation in yourself and in the world?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Fr Lawrence Lew OP (Creator), Parable of the Mustard Seed, Stained glass window from the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington DC., Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A reflection on eschatology, elite capital, and Christian nationalism based on Brian Fraga’s article in National Catholic Reporter entitled Tech billionaire Peter Thiel takes on popes, delves into end-times theology

When the Antichrist Comes for Regulation: Peter Thiel, the Papacy, and the Theology of Silicon Valley Power

I want to start with a sentence that sounds like it belongs in a satire, not a news report: a tech billionaire has spent the last several months touring lecture halls near the Vatican to talk about the Antichrist, while also suggesting that the actual pope might be working, in effect, for the Chinese Communist Party.

That’s not a premise from a novel. It’s Peter Thiel’s recent public theology, as reported by the National Catholic Reporter and a growing stack of outlets in mid-2026. See the URL link at the end to read the article yourself.

On its face, this reads like eccentric-billionaire theater — the kind of thing you’d scroll past. But sit with it for a minute, and the deeper point comes into focus: this is a live case study in how apocalyptic theology, elite capital, and modern media can fuse into a political theology that treats liberal, social democracy itself as a spiritual threat.

If you care about Catholic social teaching, contemplative spirituality, or the ethics of technology, this is worth your attention ~ buckle up we are going on a ride ~ not because Thiel speaks for Catholicism (he doesn’t; he’s a Protestant who describes his own faith as “small-o orthodox” and somewhat unconventional), but because his ideas are increasingly operative in the networks shaping American politics and Catholic media, and those networks shape what gets defended as truth and power.

What’s Actually Going On

A few things have happened in close succession:

Thiel publicly suggested that Pope Leo XIV’s calls for AI regulation effectively served Chinese interests. He’s also floated, in the pages of the conservative journal First Things, that Pope Francis could be read as an Antichrist-like figure. In the same essay — titled “The Pope and the Antichrist” ~ he was disarmingly candid about his own motives, writing that the subject interests him “mostly because nobody else is talking about it.”

That wasn’t a one-off provocation. Since last fall, Thiel has been delivering a four-part lecture series on the Antichrist, first to a paying audience in San Francisco and then, this spring, at a closed-door event just blocks from the Vatican. The venues were invitation-only and bound by non-disclosure agreements, which tells you something about how carefully this is being staged. The series proved controversial enough that the Catholic universities initially rumored to be hosting it — including the Angelicum, where the future Pope Leo XIV wrote his doctoral thesis ~ publicly denied any involvement.

His core theological worry, as he’s described it, is that the Antichrist won’t arrive as a single evil figure but as a system: either a “one-world government” or a wave of “Luddites” trying to slow technological progress. He actually forgot the Soylent Green” people. In that frame, global governance, AI regulation, and papal diplomacy stop being ordinary policy disagreements and start looking like symptoms of something darker.

Theologians quoted in the NCR piece don’t mince words about what this produces. Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University described Thiel’s Cold War framing bluntly: it’s “the mentality of us being in a war, that whoever is not working with us is working for the enemy.” Fordham’s David Gibson put it more pointedly still, suggesting Thiel reaches for his most extreme comparisons whenever anyone dares set a limit on what he wants. Even Daniel Rober of Sacred Heart University, who was careful to note Thiel doesn’t owe the pope any deference, said Thiel’s real influence — on figures like Vice President JD Vance — “ought to inspire more concern than Thiel’s own thought.”

And that Vance connection isn’t incidental. Yes, the plot thickens. Thiel helped launch Vance’s political career, pouring millions into his Senate run and employing him at his firm, Mithril Capital, before that. In his 2026 memoir, Communion, Vance credits Thiel as a significant figure in the spiritual journey that eventually led him into the Catholic Church. This is the throughline the article is really pointing at: not just what one billionaire believes, but how those beliefs get translated into governing style through the people he’s mentored.

Three Threads, One Fabric

1. Eschatology as political fuel. Christian nationalism has long drawn energy from end-times narratives, because apocalyptic language converts ordinary politics into sacred warfare. Opponents aren’t just wrong; they’re spiritually dangerous. Compromise isn’t prudence; it’s collaboration with evil. Thiel’s rhetoric fits that pattern closely — AI regulation and papal diplomacy aren’t policy options in his telling, they’re warning signs. This isn’t unique to him. Scholars of American Christian Nationalism have described an entire “end-times economy” of media, conferences, and publishing that keeps validating alarms regardless of what actually happens in the world. What Thiel adds is Silicon Valley credibility and Catholic intellectual packaging wrapped around the same basic move, making the stakes harder to dismiss. Where have we seen this movie before?

2. Elite capital as infrastructure. Ideas rarely shift political systems on their own. Ideas backed by billions can build the scaffolding around them — think tanks, journals, campaigns, and mentorship networks that slowly rewire a movement’s imagination. Oh, the robber barons of old, what they would have given for today’s social media. Thiel funds National Conservatism conferences and has deep ties to First Things; he mentored Vance’s translation of apocalyptic intuition into governing rhetoric; and he lends a techno-optimist gloss to ideas that might otherwise be dismissed as fringe. In this frame, liberal democracy isn’t just seen as inefficient — it’s treated as structurally hostile to truth, which raises the stakes of who gets funded and amplified.

3. Media ecosystems normalizing cosmic war. Thiel’s essays and lectures circulate through outlets already primed to receive apocalyptic narratives — and the “South Park” parody of his Antichrist obsession last season is its own evidence of how mainstream this has become. Substack newsletters, YouTube channels, and Christian-nationalist media create feedback loops: the more the liberal order gets described as corrupt or demonic, the more authoritarian solutions start to look reasonable. Disputes over AI, immigration, education, and religious liberty cease to be ordinary political questions and become episodes in a cosmic drama. We can’t buy this type of entertainment, but sadly, the movie is all too real.

Why Liberal Democracy Becomes a Theological Threat

Put those three threads together and liberal democracy stops being merely disliked — it becomes theologically dangerous, in this worldview, for a few specific reasons: it treats Christianity as one comprehensive doctrine among many, which integralists see as a betrayal of truth; it protects religious liberty for “false” doctrines, which some read as enabling apostasy rather than respecting conscience; and it insists on compromise and procedural fairness, which apocalyptic narratives can recast as weakness or complicity. The stakes, then, are not just institutional but spiritual.

Strip it down, and the implicit equation looks like this: liberal democracy equals institutionalized indifference to truth, which equals an opening for the Antichrist, which equals a spiritual threat to the Christian nation. That’s not just a political preference. It’s the political theology at work here ~ a way of reading history and power that can justify illiberal measures in the name of defending Christian civilization.

A Mertonian Counter-Reading

For those of us formed by Thomas Merton, Catholic social teaching, and contemplative practice, this trajectory should set off a real alarm ~ I mean, wake up and smell that coffee friend, not because apocalyptic language is inherently illegitimate, but because we’ve seen how easily it gets co-opted by empire, and how quickly that co-optation can distort Christian witness.

Merton’s own eschatology offers a sharp contrast. He resisted using biblical apocalyptic texts to predict future events or manufacture fear, leaning instead on a “realized eschatology” — the conviction that the Reign of God is already present, here and now, in Christ. His Christian attitude toward war and peace was rooted in that already-established Reign and expressed through nonviolence and solidarity with the marginalized. His contemplative discipline didn’t lead him to withdraw from the world; it led him toward a prophetic critique of idolatry — especially the idolatry of technological promise, militarism, and national self-absolutization.

Where Thiel’s eschatology fuels suspicion of global institutions and the concentration of power in elite hands, Merton’s fuels resistance to empire, identification with victims, and hope that “all shall be well” — precisely because God’s mercy is larger than our catastrophes. If Thiel’s political theology treats liberal democracy as a threat, Merton reminds us that any political order — including a Christian-nationalist one — becomes demonic the moment it absolutizes itself, worships technology or nation, and abandons the poor. That is the real stakes question for Christians now.

Questions Worth Sitting With

For anyone teaching, writing, or ministering in this landscape, a few questions seem generative:

• How do we help people read apocalyptic language critically ~ distinguishing genuine Christian hope from fear dressed up as prophecy?

• What kind of media literacy ~ tracing funding networks, recognizing fear-based framing, questioning “cosmic war” narratives ~ belongs in adult faith formation now?

• How do we articulate Catholic teaching on human dignity, religious freedom, and the common good in ways that directly answer integralist and Christian-nationalist claims?

• What would a genuinely Mertonian response to AI look like — neither Luddite nor techno-utopian, but alert to idolatry, power, and the vulnerability of the poor?

Why This Matters

Thiel isn’t the whole story of Christian nationalism, and he isn’t even its most visible face. But he’s a paradigmatic node — a place where money, media, and theology converge to produce a political imagination that’s gaining real ground in Catholic and conservative circles, and that makes the stakes of his influence impossible to ignore. That’s why this story matters: it shows how apocalyptic language can move from private speculation into public influence.

Sitting with this case helps clarify three things: how eschatology gets mobilized to justify authoritarian politics, how elite capital builds infrastructure for movements that would otherwise stay fringe, and how media ecosystems normalize the idea that liberal democracy isn’t just flawed but spiritually dangerous.

For those of us committed to a gospel-centered, socially engaged, contemplative Christianity, the task isn’t to retreat into purity or cynicism. It’s to name the dynamics honestly, offer real theological alternatives, and build communities where hope isn’t fear in disguise — where the Kingdom is lived as a gift, not wielded as a weapon.

If this was useful, I’m considering turning it into a short facilitator guide for adult education groups — See-Judge-Act style, with discussion questions, short readings, and reflection prompts. Let me know if that’s something you’d use and like just email me, leave a comment, or text me..

Further reading:

• National Catholic Reporter, “Tech billionaire Peter Thiel takes on popes, delves into end-times theology” (July 2026)

• National Catholic Reporter, “Thiel brings his Antichrist lectures to the Vatican’s doorstep, and Catholic institutions back away” (March 2026)

• Coverage of Thiel’s Rome lecture series from CNN, PBS/AP, and Bloomberg (March 2026)
  Thomas Merton on realized eschatology and political theology, especially A Vow of Conversation and related essays

• The NCR article by Brian Fraga:
  https://www.ncronline.org/news/tech-billionaire-peter-thiel-takes-popes-delves-end-times-theology?fbclid=IwY2xjawTFKEBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETEycTFCNHllSEhSalhnVmpXc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqoeHnM2qCkrqverLtLwtqZ4BZfdUMhi3xBzrkVIrOpl3lIoY_bWfmDuEJ-M_aem_b5LdPsGlearf0MqXxwH-NA

Merton wrote extensively against nuclear strategy in the early 1960s, engaging with RAND Corporation systems analysis — the Cold War’s own “predictive AI,” game theory used to model acceptable casualties. Merton’s target wasn’t the bomb alone, but the mindset that believed apocalyptic outcomes could be rationally optimized. That’s the same critique the essay extends to AI-driven political modeling; Merton had already made this argument once, against a different machine.

A few months ago, I watched a friend ask an AI chatbot whether she should leave her job. It gave her a tidy pros-and-cons list. It was helpful, in a way. But it couldn’t tell her anything about who she wanted to become — and that’s not a glitch to be fixed in the next model update. It’s a permanent limit. Decisions like that have always belonged to a different kind of thinking than the kind machines are good at.

This is where the world’s religious and ethical traditions earn their keep. Not because they have technical opinions about transformer architectures, but because they’ve spent millennia asking the questions AI can’t answer: What do we owe each other? What deserves our attention? What kind of life is worth living? If we’re going to build and live alongside increasingly powerful machines, we need more than engineering guidelines. We need a wider moral vocabulary — and these traditions hand us one, already tested across generations.

Here’s what four very different sources — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and secular humanism, plus one restless 20th-century monk — actually offer us.

Christianity: the person is not a product

Christian ethics keeps returning to one stubborn idea: every human being carries an irreducible dignity that no system gets to overrule. That has sharp implications for AI. A hiring algorithm that quietly filters out people by zip code, a chatbot that replaces a counselor instead of supporting one, a surveillance tool that treats a neighborhood like a dataset — these aren’t just policy problems. They’re failures to see the person in front of you as more than a record in a database.

The practical question this tradition pushes us toward isn’t “does this system work?” It’s “does this system still let us recognize the human being on the other end of it?”

Islam: You will answer for what you build

Islamic ethics frames human beings as khalifah — stewards entrusted with the world, not owners free to do whatever turns a profit. Nothing here is morally neutral, including code. A facial recognition tool sold to a regime, a lending algorithm that quietly redlines the poor, a weapons system that removes a human from the decision to kill — stewardship ethics insists someone is accountable for these outcomes, and that accountability doesn’t dissolve just because “the algorithm decided.”

This is a useful gut-check for anyone building or deploying AI: if you can’t explain who is responsible when it goes wrong, you haven’t finished designing it.

Buddhism: notice what you’re becoming attached to

Buddhist thought is less interested in rules and more interested in what’s happening inside us as we use these tools. Mindfulness practice asks: Is this technology reducing suffering, or just giving my craving a faster delivery mechanism? An infinite-scroll feed engineered to be unputdownable, a companion app designed to deepen loneliness rather than ease it, the low hum of anxiety that comes from checking a notification every four minutes — Buddhist ethics names these clearly as forms of attachment dressed up as convenience.

It’s a useful lens for both designers and users: not “is this technology good or bad” but “what is this doing to my attention, my craving, my peace of mind?”

Secular humanism: you don’t need a god to need ethics

It would be a mistake to assume only religious traditions have something to contribute here. Secular humanism arrives at strikingly similar conclusions through a completely different route — human reason, empathy, and our shared interest in flourishing, with no appeal to revelation or the sacred. Its core commitments are dignity, autonomy, fairness, and a refusal to let any person become a means to someone else’s end.

Humanist ethicists have been some of the most active voices in AI policy precisely because their framework doesn’t depend on theology to argue that an algorithm shouldn’t decide who deserves parole, or that consent matters when a system uses your data to shape your behavior. This tradition is a reminder that the conversation about AI ethics isn’t a religious-versus-secular divide — it’s a much larger, shared human conversation, and nonreligious people bring real moral weight to it.

Thomas Merton: the contemplative’s warning

I want to single out Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer, because he saw this coming before most people had a name for it. Merton spent his life warning against what he called the “mass mind” — the way modern systems flatten people into roles, functions, and statistics, and the way a frantic, technologized life can drown out the quiet attention a person needs to actually know themselves or God.

Merton wasn’t anti-technology in some simple way. He was anti-distraction — wary of anything, including useful tools, that fills the silence we need in order to think clearly and love well. His questions land differently than the others above: not “is this just,” not “who’s accountable,” but “is this letting me become more fully myself, or just more efficient?” In an age of AI companions, AI productivity coaches, and AI everything, that’s not a small question.

So what do we actually do with this?

None of these traditions hands us a finished AI policy. What they hand us is a sharper set of questions — and, taken together, they give us a fuller diagnostic than any single one alone:

• Dignity (Christianity, humanism): Does this system still let me see the person, not just the data point?

• Accountability (Islam): If this goes wrong, who answers for it — and have we actually designed for that?

• Attention and craving (Buddhism): Is this reducing suffering, or manufacturing a new kind of hunger?

• Inner life (Merton): Is this helping me become more myself, or just more managed?

• Reason and fairness (humanism): Would this hold up if I had to justify it to someone with no stake in defending it?

No single tradition gets the last word, and that’s the point. The disagreements between them are as instructive as the overlaps. Taken together, they leave us with one closing question: will we let efficiency be the only question we ask about a powerful new tool?

Questions for discussion

1. Which of these five lenses — dignity, accountability, attention, inner life, or fairness — feels most absent from how AI gets built and sold today?

2. Merton worried about the “mass mind” decades before smartphones existed. Where do you see that warning showing up in your own relationship with technology right now?

3. Islamic stewardship ethics insist that someone is accountable even when “the algorithm decided.” Where in your work or community life have you seen accountability quietly disappear behind a piece of software?

4. Secular humanism reaches many of the same conclusions as religious traditions without appealing to the sacred. What does that convergence suggest about the source of these ethical intuitions?

5. If you could build one of these five questions into the design process of every new AI product, which would you choose — and what would actually change?