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?

Most of us inherited a definition of work we never actually chose. It arrived through job postings, performance reviews, LinkedIn feeds, and the quiet dread of the Sunday-night inbox. It tells us that work means a paycheck, that more hours signal greater virtue, and that the honest answer to “who are you?” is whatever’s on our business card.

Theologian Kate Ward thinks we can do better — and that the Catholic tradition, of all places, has spent over a century building the tools to do it. In Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work, Ward uses the Church’s social teaching not to moralize about laziness or productivity, but to widen the frame entirely: what counts as work, who does it, and what it’s actually for.

This post walks through her opening argument using the classic pastoral method of See, Judge, Act — a way of reading our situation honestly, evaluating it against a deeper vision, and then asking what changes.

SEE: Naming “Workism”

Ward starts by describing the water we’re swimming in. She calls it workism: an economy and a culture that <cite index=”6-1”>values activity in the world almost exclusively by outputs that can literally be counted</cite>. Under workism, an activity only “counts” if it’s paid, and a person only “counts” if they’re producing.

The symptoms are familiar. Ward points to <cite index=”6-1”>long hours on the job, unpredictable job schedules, and the spread of side hustles</cite> — the second and third gigs we take on not out of ambition but out of necessity, dressed up in the language of entrepreneurship. Add to that the quiet, corrosive habit of answering “what do you do?” as if it were the same question as “who are you?” — and you have a culture where a layoff or a diagnosis doesn’t just cost income, it costs identity.

This is the “seeing” step: before we can judge or act, we have to be honest that this is the air we breathe, often without noticing.

A question to sit with: Where in my own life do I unconsciously treat my job as my primary source of identity and worth? Notice what happens internally when you imagine losing your job tomorrow — is the grief only financial?

JUDGE: The Catholic Social Teaching Standard

Here, Ward pivots, and it’s the heart of the book. Rather than accepting workism’s terms and merely arguing for better hours or better pay (worthwhile as those fights are), she reaches for a fundamentally different definition of work itself.

<cite index=”6-1”>Catholic theology regards work as more than what we do for pay — unpaid work is work</cite>. In Ward’s formulation, work is <cite index=”6-1”>any activity through which humans transform the world</cite> — or, put more fully, any activity in which we use our God-given abilities to transform creation, whether or not we’re compensated for it, and whether that transformation looks like a spreadsheet, a sourdough loaf, or a diaper change. This is what she calls an inclusive definition of work: paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive, waged and unwaged, all counted as genuinely human activity that participates in God’s ongoing work of creation.

This move does real theological and moral work. It means the parent managing a household, the daughter coordinating a parent’s hospice care, the neighbor organizing a mutual-aid network, and the volunteer teaching catechism are not doing something adjacent to “real work” — they are working, full stop, and their labor deserves the dignity, support, and recognition that Catholic social teaching insists belongs to all workers.

Ward is also careful to reject an older, more punitive reading of work as merely a punishment for sin. Work, rightly understood, is not primarily a curse to be endured but a vocation through which the human person is meant to flourish and to participate in creation — even as she stays realistic that work, in a broken world, is often also toilsome and unjust.

A question to sit with: What forms of unpaid work — care, household labor, community organizing, spiritual practice — do I currently ignore or undervalue, whether in myself or in the people around me?

The Five Lenses

Having reframed what counts as work, Ward organizes the rest of her book around five lenses she’ll use to examine it:

• Purpose — what work is for, and whether our activity serves human flourishing or merely output

• Care — the unpaid, often invisible labor of sustaining other people, historically and disproportionately carried by women

• Food — the labor of growing, preparing, and sharing food, which Ward treats as sacramental, since a meal represents “a larger reality” — the labor and the laborers behind it

• Art — creative and repetitive work, and the question of when making something is labor versus leisure.

• Pay — the justice question underneath it all: what people are owed for their labor, and the mechanisms (living wages, family wages, and proposals like universal basic income) the Church has weighed for getting there

Each lens lets her test the inclusive definition of work against a different corner of real life, rather than leaving it as an abstract principle.

The Sources She’ll Draw On

Ward roots all of this in Catholic social teaching’s century-and-a-half-long conversation about labor and human dignity — a tradition she reads for its substance rather than treating it as settled by hierarchy or authorship. Key touchstones include Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor), widely regarded as the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching on labor; Pope St. John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), which insisted that work’s <cite index=”6-1”>primary importance is how it shapes the worker, rather than what work produces</cite>; and the broader body of papal and conciliar teaching on solidarity, subsidiarity, and the dignity of the person. Notably, Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name in part to signal continuity with Leo XIII’s founding vision of Catholic labor teaching, now extended to the questions raised by an AI-driven economy — a thread Ward’s book helps set up.

ACT: What This Asks of Us

The “seeing” and “judging” steps are only useful if they lead somewhere. A few concrete places to start:

1. Audit your own definition of work. For one week, notice every time you (or someone else) uses “work” to mean only paid employment. Silently expand it: does the caregiving, the meal-making, the emotional labor of a hard conversation count too?

2. Name and value unpaid labor out loud. If someone in your life carries a disproportionate share of care work — a parent, a partner, a friend — say so, plainly, as a form of labor deserving recognition, not just gratitude.

3. Loosen the grip of “what do you do?” Practice introducing yourself, even just internally, by something other than your job title. Notice what else is true about who you are.

4. Ask what your work is actually for. Not what it produces, but what it’s meant to serve — your household, your community, the common good. Ward’s “purpose” lens starts exactly here.

5. Support policy and workplace practices that reflect the inclusive definition. Family leave, fair scheduling, living wages, and support for caregivers aren’t fringe issues under this view — they follow directly from taking unpaid and reproductive work seriously as work.

Ward’s larger claim is quietly radical: if we keep measuring human worth by output, we will keep burning people out and overlooking the labor — much of it unpaid, much of it done by women, much of it invisible — that actually holds our lives together. Catholic social teaching, at its best, offers a way to see work whole again: not a treadmill to survive, but one of the ways we participate in making — and sustaining — a life worth living.

Based on Kate Ward’s Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (Bloomsbury, 2026).

Chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel is almost entirely devoted to parables, mostly focusing on God’s Kingdom, or, as Matthew calls it, the Kingdom of Heaven. Parables come in a number of different forms, however, they are almost always intriguing moral stories, drawing on circumstances familiar to the audience but often containing a twist in the story which catches the listener by surprise. The first of these parables is the well known Parable of the Sower. Using imagery familiar to audience Jesus tells the tale of seeds that sprout and those that fail, due to the quality of the soil in which they are planted. The intrigue in this story is the size of the yield, beyond any that the audience would have experienced. Michael Fallon writes that they would ‘have wondered what kind of seed could produce such an unbelievable crop’. https://mbfallon.com/matthew_commentary/matthew_13,1-52.pdf

The final part of this text provides an allegorical interpretation of the parable where the seed is identified as the ‘word of the kingdom’ (Mt 13:19) and the impediments to its growth are identified as a lack of understanding, trials and the lure of riches. The one who hears the word and understands it is the one who yields the extraordinary harvest.

This focus on ‘understanding’ leads back to the middle section of the text as Jesus explains why he speaks in parables. In doing so he sets up a juxtaposition between those understand and those who refuse to hear or see because their hearts have ‘grown coarse’ (Mt 13:15) and who have, in effect, closed themselves to the word and the possibility of healing and conversion. The parables are, therefore, both an insight into the Kingdom for those open to the word and an intriguing invitation to those who are not.

Gospel Text: Matthew 13:1-23

Jesus left the house and sat by the lakeside, but such large crowds gathered round him that he got into a boat and sat there. The people all stood on the beach, and he told them many things in parables.

He said, ‘Imagine a sower going out to sow. As he sowed, some seeds fell on the edge of the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on patches of rock where they found little soil and sprang up straight away, because there was no depth of earth; but as soon as the sun came up they were scorched and, not having any roots, they withered away. Others fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Others fell on rich soil and produced their crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Listen, anyone who has ears!’

Then the disciples went up to him and asked, ‘Why do you talk to them in parables?’ ‘Because’ he replied, ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven are revealed to you, but they are not revealed to them. For anyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. The reason I talk to them in parables is that they look without seeing and listen without hearing or understanding. So in their case this prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled:

You will listen and listen again, but not understand,

see and see again, but not perceive.

For the heart of this nation has grown coarse,

their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes,

for fear they should see with their eyes,

hear with their ears,

understand with their heart,

and be converted

and be healed by me.

‘But happy are your eyes because they see, your ears because they hear! I tell you solemnly, many prophets and holy men longed to see what you see, and never saw it; to hear what you hear, and never heard it.

‘You, therefore, are to hear the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom without understanding, the evil one comes and carries off what was sown in his heart: this is the man who received the seed on the edge of the path. The one who received it on patches of rock is the man who hears the word and welcomes it at once with joy. But he has no root in him, he does not last; let some trial come, or some persecution on account of the word, and he falls away at once. The one who received the seed in thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this world and the lure of riches choke the word and so he produces nothing. And the one who received the seed in rich soil is the man who hears the word and understands it; he is the one who yields a harvest and produces now a hundredfold, now sixty, now thirty.’

See

In this text, what disposition is seen as the main impediment to understanding the word?

What are the other factors identified that prevent the ‘word’ from yielding a harvest?

The harvest yield of thirty, sixty or a hundred fold are unheard of amounts for Jesus’ audience. How might the aspect of this extraordinary harvest changed the impact of the parable?

Judge

What factors, in today’s world, would align with the allegorical explanation of the parable?

How might preconceived ideas and prejudices impact on how we see the word of God at work in our world today?

Parables make an appeal to understanding beyond traditional logic. What other types of communication might be effective in preaching the ‘word’ today?

Act

What steps can I take to ensure that my eyes, ears and heart remain open to unexpected signs of God’s Kingdom today?

How can I help others, family, friends etc. avoid becoming cynical and closed to conversion and healing?

How can I help spread the word of God today in ways that go beyond traditional logic?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-13-1-9-2024/

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/

I keep coming back to one phrase: phase change. Not just innovation, not just disruption — a genuine shift in the state of things, like water suddenly becoming steam. That’s what we’re living through right now: an AI phase change. And like any phase change, it’s not just about what’s being built. It’s about what we’re willing to hold onto while everything else moves.

Every great turning point in human history has carried this same tension: the pull forward, and the responsibility to anchor that movement in something solid. We’re feeling that tension right now, maybe more intensely than most generations before us.

What Makes This Moment Different

At the heart of it is something almost unbelievable: our ability to take an abstract idea and turn it into a working, global reality almost overnight. Intelligence. Creativity. Judgment. These used to be the things that made us distinctly human. Now they’re being coded, trained, and deployed at scale. Artificial intelligence isn’t just another tool in the toolbox — it’s the phase change that is quietly rewriting the architecture of how the world actually runs.

And it’s happening against a backdrop that’s already unsteady. Political discourse moves faster than ever and somehow says less. Social media has shrunk the distance between leaders and citizens, crisis and reaction, but it’s also squeezed out the space we used to have for slow, careful thought. Old diplomatic norms are fraying. Trust — between nations, and within them — is wearing thin.

So we’re left with hard questions. What happens when institutions lose their credibility? What actually holds a society together once trust starts to crack? And where does AI fit into all of this — is it speeding up the fracture, or could it help stabilize things?

If the alliances and systems we’ve relied on keep weakening, we have to sit with an uncomfortable question: what comes next, and who’s shaping it?

Seeing Clearly First

Catholic social teaching offers a framework that’s helped people navigate moments like this for over a century: See, Judge, Act.

To see clearly means refusing to deny. It means naming things honestly — the speed of technological change, the shifting economic ground beneath our feet, the reshuffling of global power. AI is already changing how we work, who counts as an expert, and how decisions are made, often in ways we don’t yet fully grasp.

But seeing clearly also means paying attention to the human cost. Displacement. Inequality. The quiet erosion of a person’s sense of agency over their own life. As Pope Francis put it plainly, technology that is “unaccompanied by an authentic social and moral vision” tends to amplify power without accountability — a warning worth sitting with as we hand more and more decisions over to systems we barely understand.

Judging Wisely

To judge is to bring an ethical and theological lens to what we’re seeing — not to react emotionally, but to genuinely discern.

Catholic social teaching gives us some non-negotiables here: the dignity of every human person, the priority of the common good over private gain, and a real call to solidarity with one another. These aren’t abstract ideals to admire from a distance. They’re the actual criteria we should be using to evaluate the systems we’re building.

So we have to ask the uncomfortable questions:

Does this technology build up human dignity, or quietly chip away at it? Who actually benefits — and who gets left behind? Are we building tools that serve people, or are we slowly reshaping people to fit the tools?

Thomas Merton, writing decades before any of us had heard of a neural network, warned that the greatest danger of a technological age isn’t the machines themselves but what happens to the human spirit caught up in them — the risk of a “depersonalized” world where speed and efficiency quietly replace contemplation and conscience. That warning feels almost prophetic now.

Marshall McLuhan added another piece to this: the medium is the message. The tools we build don’t stay neutral — they shape how we think, relate, and even perceive truth itself. An AI system isn’t just a faster typewriter or a smarter calculator. It’s a new environment we’re going to live in, whether we’ve thought it through or not.

And Mortimer Adler, who spent a lifetime defending the idea that some truths and goods are genuinely universal, would push back hard against the idea that ethics here is just a matter of personal preference or corporate convenience. If human dignity is real — not just a useful fiction — then it has to set actual limits on what we build and how we deploy it.

Acting Responsibly

To act is to take ownership of the future we’re already in the middle of creating.

The question isn’t whether AI will help shape the next world order. It already is. The real question is what role we’re going to play in shaping it — as passive bystanders or as people willing to bring moral seriousness to the table.

Will we let these technologies deepen division and erode whatever trust remains? Or can we steer them — even just a little, even just in our own corner of the world — toward transparency, genuine collaboration, and justice?

History has a strange habit of turning upheaval into something generative. Periods of instability are dangerous, yes — but they’re also when new forms of solidarity get born, when ethical frameworks deepen, when communities rediscover what actually matters to them. That possibility is still wide open.

More Than a Technological Question

Here’s the thing: artificial intelligence isn’t just a technological issue. It’s a spiritual one, because this phase change asks what kind of humanity we will preserve.

It forces us to ask what it actually means to be human in a world where intelligence is no longer something only we possess. It challenges how we structure power, distribute resources, and decide who and what gets treated with dignity.

We’re not just spectators watching this unfold from the sidelines. We’re participants — co-creators, in a real and weighty sense — of the world that’s emerging right now, in real time.

The boundaries we choose to cross, and the lines we insist on holding, will define far more than our technology alone.

They’ll define the future of our shared humanity — and the kind of world we leave behind.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• Where in my own life or work have I already crossed a threshold with AI without really pausing to ask whether I should?

• Who is bearing the cost of the efficiency these new tools promise — and have I taken the time to find out?

• What guardrails do I personally refuse to cross, regardless of what becomes technically possible?

• Does the technology in my daily life draw me toward deeper relationships and contemplation, or away from it?

• If trust in our shared institutions continues to erode, what small, concrete thing can I do to help rebuild it where I am?

• A hundred years from now, what will people say this generation got right — or got wrong — about this moment, and the humanity it shaped?

This is not an argument that today’s injustices are identical to slavery. They are not, and the distinction matters. But the pattern — the way technology is wielded to extract maximum value from the bodies of the most marginalized — demands our attention. That is the question this reflection asks us to face. The See · Judge · Act method, rooted in Catholic Social Teaching and used across many justice traditions, gives us a discipline for that attention. First, we look honestly. Then we evaluate morally. Then we respond.

See — Looking Clearly at What Is

The first movement asks us to resist the instinct to look away. To observe, without flinching, the reality in front of us — and to recognize its shape.

The Cotton Gin and the Gig Economy Algorithm

In 1793, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made separating cotton fiber from seeds roughly fifty times faster. It seems, on the surface, like a story of progress. But the gin did not reduce the demand for enslaved labor. It exploded. Because cotton suddenly became so profitable, slaveholders needed more land, which in turn required more people to work it. The enslaved population in the American South grew from around 700,000 in 1790 to nearly four million by 1860. The technology did not liberate — it multiplied bondage, because the economic system ensured that efficiency gains flowed entirely upward, to those with ownership. This pattern will reappear throughout this reflection.

Now consider the gig economy. Platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon Flex promise flexibility. But algorithmic management sets the prices, the routes, the ratings, and the “deactivation” decisions — often with no human oversight and no meaningful appeal. When the algorithm gets more efficient, the worker does not earn more. The company does. Drivers take on the full risk of car maintenance, health insurance, and income volatility, while the platform captures the gains. The structure is different. The logic is the same.

Slave Passes and Workplace Surveillance

The institution of slavery required a surveillance infrastructure. Printed slave passes controlled movement. Wanted posters with physical descriptions helped track down those who escaped. Armed slave patrols — an early form of American policing — operated across the South as an enforcement mechanism. The printing press and ironwork technology made this system scalable: bureaucracy in the service of bondage.

Today, Amazon warehouse workers are tracked in real time by handheld scanners that measure their “time off task.” Delivery drivers are monitored by AI-powered cameras inside their vehicles. Gig workers receive algorithmic performance scores that determine whether they continue to work, often with no human to appeal to and no explanation offered. The technology is different. The function — using data to discipline the bodies of working people — is continuous. This continues the same pattern of control.

Northern Mills, Global Supply Chains, and the Distance of Innocence

The textile mills of New England and Britain were not slave plantations. But they were the reason for them. The industrial loom created an insatiable appetite for raw cotton, which meant that Northern and British industrialists were economically bound up with slavery while remaining geographically — and, they told themselves, morally — distant from its violence. The cotton passed through many hands before it became a garment. Distance, they believed, conferred innocence.

Today, global supply chains for electronics, clothing, and food depend on labor conditions that, in many cases, include forced labor, extreme wage suppression, and dangerous working conditions — often in countries far from consumers. A smartphone contains minerals extracted under coercive conditions. A fast-fashion garment was likely sewn by a woman earning dollars a day. Technology makes global supply chains faster and more efficient. It also makes it easier for the worker to hide. Distance still invites innocence, but the system remains connected.

Slave Notices and Predictive Policing

The printing press made it possible to distribute descriptions of enslaved people who had escaped, framing Black bodies as property to be recovered. The technology of categorization — of surveillance and classification — was race-coded from the beginning. Blackness was the marker of suspicion.

Facial recognition software trained on predominantly white datasets misidentifies Black faces at significantly higher rates. Predictive policing algorithms, built on historical crime data that reflects decades of racially biased policing, systematically over-police Black and brown communities. A man in Detroit was arrested based on a facial recognition match that was wrong. The technology was presented as objective. But there is no neutral algorithm — only the values, biases, and choices of those who built it, encoded and automated at scale. The pattern is clear: classification becomes control.

Judge — Evaluating What We See

Observation without evaluation leaves us passive spectators to injustice. The second movement asks us to bring our deepest moral commitments to bear on what we have seen. This is the test of the reflection: what does the evidence demand of us?

Technology Is Never Neutral

The most persistent myth surrounding technological development is that tools are neutral — that a cotton gin is just a machine, that an algorithm is just math. But every technology is designed within a social context, deployed by people with interests, and shaped by the question: whose problems is this meant to solve? This question keeps the reflection on track. This is why the thesis matters: technology does not simply reflect power; it helps organize it.

The cotton gin was not designed to harm enslaved people. But it was deployed within a society that treated Black people as property, and so its efficiency became their suffering. The hiring algorithm was not designed to discriminate. But when it is trained on historical data from a workforce that systematically excluded women and people of color, it replicates and automates that exclusion — and does so at a speed and scale no human recruiter ever could.

To claim that technology is neutral is itself a moral stance. It is a choice to ignore context, history, and whose bodies bear the cost of “progress.” Justice requires us to reject that claim.

Human Dignity Is Not Negotiable

At the center of most justice traditions — and explicitly in Catholic Social Teaching — is the conviction that every human being possesses inherent, irreducible dignity. Not because of what they produce. Not because of their market value. But because they are human.

Slavery’s foundational crime was to deny this. It valued a person not for who they were, but for what they could extract. The plantation ledger recorded pounds of cotton picked, not names, not stories, not suffering.

The warehouse productivity score, the algorithmic deactivation, the facial recognition database — these systems do not recognize persons. They process units. They optimize outputs. And when a human being is reduced to a data point in an optimization function, something essential is violated, regardless of whether we call it slavery or not. The question justice asks is not only: is this legal? It is: Does this honor the dignity of the person? This is the moral test running through the examples.

Whose Bodies Bear the Cost?

This question cannot be answered without naming race. American slavery fell overwhelmingly on Black people, and its economic and psychological legacy has never been fully reckoned with. Today, the workers most subjected to algorithmic control, most exposed to dangerous conditions in warehouses and fields and gig routes, most likely to be wrongly identified by facial recognition software, most likely to be targeted by predictive policing, are disproportionately Black, brown, and immigrant.

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And the pattern requires explanation.

When the same population that was enslaved, then subjected to Jim Crow, then redlined, then mass-incarcerated, is now the population most harmed by algorithmic labor management and surveillance technology, we are not looking at a series of unrelated accidents. We are looking at a structure. Justice requires us to name that structure — and to resist the comforting notion that because individual engineers did not intend harm, no harm exists. The throughline is not incidental; it is systemic.

Distance Is Not Innocence

The Northern mill owner did not hold the whip. But he bought the cotton, built his wealth on it, and when abolitionists came to his door, he often argued that disrupting the cotton trade would be economically ruinous. Distance from the violence did not mean he was uninvolved in the system. It meant he could afford to tell himself that he was.

Today, we are the mill owners. We carry phones assembled by workers living in company dormitories under conditions documented and reported for decades. We order goods delivered by drivers who cannot afford health insurance. We use platforms that employ contractors with no labor protections. The reporting exists. The knowledge is available. What we do with it — that is the moral question. This is where distance becomes responsibility.

Willful ignorance, in the age of investigative journalism and supply chain transparency tools, is itself a choice. And it is a choice that has consequences for real people.

Act — Responding with Intention

The See · Judge · Act method does not end in analysis. It ends in response. But responses can happen at many levels, and no single person is responsible for dismantling every unjust system. What is asked of each of us is that we act from where we stand, with what we have, in the direction of justice. We must refuse the comfort of distance, name the systems that shape our lives, and choose actions that restore dignity rather than extract value. That is the conclusion this reflection reaches: if technology shapes power, then our response must shape it toward justice.

At the Personal Level: Ask Who Made This — and How

The abolitionist movement of the late 18th century used a boycott of slave-produced sugar as a form of moral witness. Hundreds of thousands of British households refused to buy sugar grown by enslaved people. It did not end slavery immediately. But it made visible a connection between consumer choice and human suffering that people had been encouraged not to see.

Today, tools exist to help consumers investigate the conditions under which products are made. Organizations like Good On You rate fashion brands on labor practices. Know The Chain audits supply chains in electronics, food, and apparel. The Fair Trade certification system, despite its imperfections, attempts to guarantee minimum standards for producers. None of these tools is perfect. But choosing to ask the question — who made this, and under what conditions? — is itself an act of moral seriousness.

At the Community Level: Support Worker Organizing

Amazon warehouse workers have staged walkouts and organized campaigns. Rideshare drivers in multiple cities have gone on strike for better conditions. Domestic workers — overwhelmingly women of color — have organized for basic labor protections that most workers take for granted. These are not new tactics. They are the same tactics that ended child labor, established the eight-hour workday, and made workplaces minimally safer in the early 20th century.

Supporting worker organizing means, at a minimum, paying attention. It can also mean financially supporting labor justice organizations, showing up at public hearings, amplifying worker voices in your community and congregation, and refusing to cross picket lines. The struggle for worker dignity is old. The workers fighting it today deserve the same solidarity that the labor movement’s heroes now receive in history books.

At the Civic and Policy Level: Demand Algorithmic Accountability

Technology policy is labor policy is racial justice policy. These are not separate domains. The choices encoded in hiring algorithms, facial recognition databases, and predictive policing software are policy choices — made by corporations and governments — that have profound consequences for real people.

Advocacy in this space looks like: supporting legislation that requires algorithmic transparency and independent audits for racial bias; demanding that gig workers be classified as employees with full labor protections; opposing the use of unaudited facial recognition by law enforcement; and insisting that public procurement of AI systems include mandatory civil rights impact assessments.

This is not utopian. It is the same kind of legislative advocacy that produced the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act — each of which was once called radical, and each of which is now recognized as a baseline of basic decency.

At the Institutional Level: Examine Our Own Practices

Churches, schools, hospitals, and nonprofits are not exempt. They purchase goods. They use delivery services. They deploy HR software. They invest endowments. They are embedded in the same economic system as everyone else.

Institutions can audit their own supply chains and adopt responsible procurement policies. They can review the algorithmic tools they use in hiring and evaluate them for bias. They can divest from companies with documented records of labor exploitation. They can use their public voice — their sermons, their statements, their educational programming — to name what is happening and invite their communities into response.

The question is not only: what are corporations doing? It is: what are we doing?

Closing: The Moral Imagination Required

Frederick Douglass published The North Star. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sojourner Truth spoke from platforms across the North. These were acts of moral imagination — attempts to make the invisible visible, to make the distant close, to make the abstract human.

We need that same moral imagination now. Not to equate the suffering of enslaved people with the conditions of today’s gig workers — the differences are real and matter. But to recognize that the impulse to extract maximum value from the bodies of the most vulnerable, and to use technology to do it more efficiently while obscuring it more thoroughly — that impulse is not a relic. It is contemporary. It is active. And it is calling for a response.

The See · Judge · Act method does not promise that the response will be easy, or that it will succeed quickly. History does not offer those guarantees. What it does promise is that clarity, moral seriousness, and action — even imperfect action — are better than the comfortable distance of the uninvolved.

The machine does not decide who bears its costs. We do.

Questions for Reflection and Action

These questions are intended for individual journaling, small group discussion, or community discernment. They are not meant to be answered quickly.

1. Where am I, the mill owner? In what areas of your daily life are you benefiting from a system whose costs fall on people you cannot see? What would it take to look honestly at one of those systems — and what would change if you did?

2. What does “technological neutrality” protect? When someone argues that an algorithm or platform is “just a tool,” whose interests does that argument serve? Who is protected by the claim of neutrality, and who is exposed by it?

3. What is the difference between being uninformed and choosing not to know? Given that information about supply chains, algorithmic bias, and gig worker conditions is widely available, at what point does not-knowing become a moral choice? What would it mean to close that gap — even by one step?

4. Where in your community is the organizing already happening? Worker organizing, tenant organizing, immigrant rights advocacy — this work is likely already underway somewhere near you. What would it mean to show up for it, not as a leader or an expert, but as a neighbor?

5. What would your institution need to examine? If you are part of a church, school, organization, or business, what is one supply chain decision, one technology deployment, or one investment choice that your community has never seriously scrutinized through a lens of labor justice? Who would you need to bring into that conversation?

6. What story are you telling yourself about your own role? The Northern mill owner told himself a story that placed him outside the system he was financing. What story are you telling yourself — and is it true?

This reflection draws on the See · Judge · Act method developed in the Catholic social action tradition, rooted in the work of Cardinal Joseph Cardijn and formalized in papal teaching. The method is used broadly across ecumenical and interfaith justice contexts.

Introduction

Many years ago, I was invited to join the staff of a Catholic secondary school. I went along armed with my guitar and some songs that were part of the liturgical life of the parish to which I belonged.

One song proved to be very popular. It was Jesus, Lover of My Soul, by John Ezzy, Daniel Grul & Steve Mcpherson. More than twenty years later, it was still being sung by students who thought it was not cool to sing at Mass. The song became the de facto College anthem and was even sung at the end of the annual Year 12 and Old Boys AFL encounter. Just picture it: around forty sweaty males standing in a circle, arms linked, singing “Jesus, I will never let you go.”

There is so much we can learn about following Jesus in the Gospel passage presented for this enquiry. How can Jesus be yoked to so many people except through a shared faith and a shared commitment to being accompanied by him and to learn from him? It is only by imitating him that we will be transformed and the world also. We walk together by faith and not by sight.

The Gospel

Jesus exclaimed, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, just as no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’ (Matthew 11:25-30)

The Enquiry

See

• There are three parts to this reading. What links can you make between the three parts?

• What does Jesus promise to those who follow him? How will life change for those who choose to “imitate” him?

• What do we learn about what motivates Jesus?

Judge

• What does Jesus reveal about his relationship with God? What does he reveal about how to have the same type of relationship with God? What do you think about this revelation?

• What is it like being “yoked” with Jesus? In which parts of your life do you try to imitate him?

• In which part(s) of your life do you avoid thinking “what would Jesus do?” What prevents you from seeking his presence and love in those parts of your life?

Act

• What would change in the world if people with power chose to follow Jesus?

• 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: Lauri A. Hogle (Creator), Casting all our anxiety on Jesus our healer. In Laurihogle.com, CCC 1.0

The short answer is yes — though not always in the way you’d expect.

When people dig into traditions outside their own, something interesting tends to happen: political questions about justice, authority, rights, and the common good start to look less purely political and more shaped by moral, cultural, and spiritual roots. The line between “politics” and “everything else” gets blurrier. And once that line blurs, a quieter question follows it: what do we actually owe each other?

A Monk’s Argument for Looking Outward

Thomas Merton spent much of his life inside the walls of a Trappist monastery, and yet almost no twentieth-century American voice argued more insistently that contemplative inwardness and engagement with other traditions were the same motion, not opposite ones. Merton’s late-life correspondence with Buddhist monks, his study of Sufism, Taoism, and Zen, weren’t detours from his Catholicism — he understood them as a deepening of it. He believed that real self-knowledge required encountering minds shaped by an entirely different grammar of the sacred.

That matters for politics, even though Merton rarely wrote about politics directly. His instinct was that a person who has never had their assumptions interrupted by someone else’s tradition will mistake their own categories for the only available categories. Comparative religion, in this sense, isn’t a tour of curiosities. It’s an interruption — the kind Merton thought was necessary before anyone could see their own society, or their own government, with clear eyes.

A Method for What Comes Next: See, Judge, Act

It’s one thing to have your imagination stretched. It’s another to know what to do with that. This is where the method developed by Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers movement, becomes useful — not as theology exclusively, but as a practical discipline for moving from insight to responsibility.

Cardijn’s method has three movements:

See. Look honestly at the actual conditions people are living in — not the abstraction, the reality. Who is hungry, excluded, unheard, or harmed? Comparative religion sharpens this stage considerably, because it exposes you to how differently various traditions notice suffering, and what each tends to overlook.

Judge. Evaluate what you’ve seen against a standard of justice and human dignity, not just personal preference or tribal loyalty. This is where studying other traditions does its quiet, structural work: it forces the question of whether your standard for judging is actually as universal as you assumed, or whether it’s a regional habit you’d inherited without examining.

Act. Then — and only then — respond, deliberately and concretely, in a way that serves the common good rather than merely your own side.

Cardijn built this for factory workers thinking about labor conditions. But the structure travels well into any conversation about pluralism and government, because it refuses to let people skip straight to conclusions. You have to see first. You have to judge with real standards. Only then do you act.

Why This Reframes the Political Questions Underneath

Put Merton’s contemplative widening together with Cardijn’s three-step discipline, and the stakes of comparative religion start looking less like intellectual enrichment and more like training for moral seriousness in public life.

Once someone has really sat with how different traditions wrestle with human dignity, social responsibility, and the demands of justice, political issues stop looking like a binary scoreboard. They start looking like a layered conversation about what a society owes its most vulnerable members.

This doesn’t push anyone left or right. It deepens the reflection itself — what do I believe, why do I believe it, and does it actually hold up once I’ve seen clearly, rather than just reacted?

More Room for Difference — and Sharper Conviction

One of the most common effects of studying world religions seriously is a greater comfort with pluralism. The more people understand how varied human conviction really is, the more room they tend to make for it — stronger support for religious freedom, minority rights, and the basic idea that people can disagree deeply and still share a society, still owe each other care.

It also chips away at stereotypes. It’s hard to flatten a tradition into a punchline once you’ve studied its internal debates and its moral seriousness.

Gandhi put it memorably: he didn’t want his house walled in, or his windows stuffed — he wanted the cultures of all lands blown freely through his home. Comparative religion opens exactly those windows.

But — and this is the twist worth holding onto — it doesn’t only soften people’s edges. It can sharpen them too. Encountering other traditions often clarifies what makes your own distinct. People frequently walk away with a more articulate, more defensible sense of what they believe. That’s the second outcome, not a contradiction of the first. And it matters most on questions of identity, ethics, and policy — where the real argument underneath is about whose vision of justice and human dignity gets to organize a society.

The Real Shift Isn’t What — It’s How

Comparative religion usually shifts the framework people bring to political thinking, not necessarily the conclusions they reach. It won’t tell someone exactly how to vote. It reshapes the questions underneath the vote, and the Cardijn method gives those questions a discipline to move through:

• See: Is justice, as currently practiced in my society, actually attentive to the people most affected by it — or only to the people already heard?

• Judge: Is human dignity a legal category alone, or — as Merton would press — something with spiritual weight that legal categories can only approximate?

• Act: What does it actually require of me, concretely, to help people who believe very differently from one another still live well together, still flourish together?

Those are political questions. They are also, unmistakably, religious ones. The two were never as separate as they look on a ballot.

Why This Matters Beyond the Classroom

This is why comparative religion deserves a bigger seat at the table than it usually gets. It isn’t an academic exercise tucked into a humanities elective — paired with a method like Cardijn’s, it’s training in attentiveness with a built-in path to responsibility. It teaches people to see before they judge, to judge against something larger than self-interest, and only then to act — in ways that serve the common good rather than just their own side.

Merton would add one more layer: that none of this works without a measure of humility about your own blind spots. The contemplative and the activist, in his view, needed each other. Seeing clearly and acting justly both require first admitting how much you don’t yet see.

The final takeaway is simple: studying the world’s religions does not tell you what to think. It changes how you see, how you judge, and — if you let it — how you act.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• When was the last time you changed your mind about a political issue because you learned something about a tradition you didn’t grow up with?

• Using Cardijn’s method: what is something in your own community right now that you haven’t truly seen yet — really looked at, rather than assumed you understood?

• Do you think your own political views rest on assumptions that are, underneath it all, religious or spiritual in nature — even if you’ve never named them that way?

• Is it possible to hold a conviction firmly and hold pluralism sincerely at the same time — the way Merton seemed to manage both contemplative depth and genuine openness to other traditions? What would that look like in your own life?

• If you sat down with someone from a tradition very different from your own, and walked through see, judge, acttogether on one current issue — where do you think you’d end up agreeing, and where would the real disagreement actually live?

To bring these threads together, I’ll borrow the classic “See–Judge–Act” method long used in Catholic social reflection: first, look honestly at the situation; then weigh it against deeper truths; then ask what it asks of us.

See: The Economy We Inhabit

We live inside an economy that is extraordinarily productive — and quietly exhausting.

On one hand, markets have delivered innovation, efficiency, and access to goods at a scale earlier generations couldn’t have imagined. On the other hand, that same system tends to breed anxiety, comparison, and excess. Work becomes identity. Buying things becomes a way of saying who we are. Our sense of worth gets measured, almost without our noticing, by output and acquisition.

Merton wrote about this dynamic decades before anyone had a smartphone in their pocket. He described a society that manufactures what he called the “false self” — an identity built out of status, productivity, and other people’s approval. Economic life, in his view, is never neutral. It forms us. It trains our desires, whether we ask it to or not.

Meanwhile, inequality persists in ways that are hard to defend on moral grounds. Enormous wealth sits alongside real deprivation, often not far apart geographically. The honest question isn’t only “does this system work?” but “who does it work for — and at what cost to everyone else’s humanity?”

Judge: A Theological Vision of Economy

Cathonomics argues that economic life must be judged by moral and theological standards, not solely by economic ones: the dignity of the person, the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity. Reading that argument next to the Cappadocians and Merton sharpens it considerably.

Basil the Great put it bluntly: what we hoard was never really ours to begin with. In his preaching, surplus bread, surplus clothing, surplus land belong, in a real sense, to whoever lacks them. For Basil, this isn’t a nice suggestion about charity — it’s a claim about justice. Withholding what you don’t need from someone who does is, in his sermons, described as a form of theft.

Gregory of Nyssa pushes the point further. For him, economic inequality isn’t simply an unfortunate side effect of how human systems happen to work — it contradicts something basic about who we are. If every person is made in the image of God, then radical inequality is, in a sense, a denial of that shared dignity. It’s not just bad policy; it’s a kind of theological error.

Merton comes at the same problem from the inside. The drive to accumulate, he suggests, isn’t only a structural feature of bad economies — it’s a spiritual symptom. It reflects a self-seeking search for security in possessions because it hasn’t found it anywhere else.

Put together, these three voices make a stronger claim than any one of them makes alone: the economy isn’t just a distribution problem. It’s a formation problem. It shapes who we become, for better or worse. A just economy has to be both structurally fair and spiritually freeing — fixing one without the other leaves the job half done.

Act: From Possession to Communion

If the problem lives both outside us (in structures) and inside us (in desire), then the response has to live in both places too.

Cathonomics calls for concrete change: policies and institutions that protect human dignity, restrain excess, and put the common good ahead of profit for its own sake. That’s necessary work, and it shouldn’t be skipped in favor of purely spiritual talk. But the older tradition pushes further still, toward a different way of relating to what we own in the first place: begin by changing both our institutions and our habits of desire.

The Cappadocians ask us to see wealth not as something we possess outright, but as something entrusted to us — a gift given so that it can be passed along. That reframes economic life as stewardship aimed at communion with others rather than accumulation for its own sake.

Merton adds the inward half of that same move: interior freedom. We won’t build a just economy while we’re still quietly convinced that just a little more will finally make us secure. So loosen your grip now — realize our identity isn’t something we manufacture through acquiring things, but something we receive.

In practice, that might look like:

• Examine our consumption habits and ask what they’re forming in us.

• Practicing generosity that costs us something, not just whatever’s convenient

• Support institutions and policies that put human dignity ahead of profit alone.

• Making real space for contemplation — time that isn’t justified by output

None of these is a dramatic gesture. But none of them is trivial, either. Begin practicing them now so that daily life aligns with the logic of the gift rather than with the logic of possession.

Seen through the lens of Merton and the Cappadocians, Cathonomics becomes more than an economic framework. It becomes a spiritual one. It asks not just how we should organize society, but who we’re becoming as we do it — and whether our choices are forming us for communion or for possession.

That second question may be the more urgent one — and the one we cannot avoid.

Questions for Reflection

1. Where in your own life does the “false self” Merton describes — the identity built from status, productivity, or other people’s approval — show up most? What would it cost to let go of it?

2. Basil the Great treated surplus as something owed to the poor, not something given freely out of charity. Does that distinction — justice versus charity — change how you think about your own possessions?

3. Gregory of Nyssa connects inequality directly to human dignity, almost as a theological claim rather than just a social one. Do you find that framing persuasive? Why or why not?

4. The piece argues a just economy needs both structural reform and inner freedom — fixing only one leaves the work half-finished. Which of the two feels more neglected in your own community or church?

5. Stewardship versus possession: in what areas of your life — money, time, talent, relationships — do you tend to think like an owner rather than a steward?

6. What would it look like, concretely, for you to practice “generosity that costs something” this week, rather than generosity that’s simply convenient?

7. Merton suggests our economic anxieties are often spiritual anxieties in disguise. Can you think of a time when “more” didn’t actually deliver the security you expected?

From time to time, the Sunday Gospels throw up a passage which is somewhat troubling to read. This is certainly true of this text from Jesus’ discourse on discipleship in Matthew. Surely Jesus is not setting up a choice between familial relationships and discipleship. Yet, as the preceding parts of this discourse indicate, the choice of discipleship will indeed divide families and during time of persecution family members may well turn on one another. Jesus is warning his followers that the path they are choosing is a difficult one. For the first time, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus refers to the cross, a foreshadowing of his own fate and, indeed of some of those who followed him.

The second part of the passage, verses 40-42, sets an inclusive and universal tone. Anyone who welcomes … anyone who ‘gives so much as a cup of cold water’ (Mt 10:42) … will be rewarded. The promise of reward is for anyone and everyone, without distinction. Based on hospitality rather than heritage, creed or status. All who welcome the proclamation of God’s reign will be rewarded. This inclusive tone is reminiscent of Paul’s letter to the Galatians … ‘there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Gal 3:28). Both the Gospel text and the letter to the Galatians highlight the radically inclusive focus of Jesus’ message. An invitation without restriction and a community without distinction, proclaiming the love of God whatever the cost.

Gospel Text: Matthew 10:37-42

Jesus instructed the Twelve as follows: ‘Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me. Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.

‘Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me; and those who welcome me welcome the one who sent me.

‘Anyone who welcomes a prophet will have a prophet’s reward; and anyone who welcomes a holy man will have a holy man’s reward.

‘If anyone gives so much as a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is a disciple, then I tell you solemnly, he will most certainly not lose his reward.’

See

In this text, what do the comments of familial relationships highlight?

What do we understand from the idea of taking up a cross and following in the footsteps of Jesus?

What meaning do we take from the words ‘anyone who welcomes you, welcomes me’?

Judge

In what ways do the values of the Gospel lead to conflict and discrimination today?

What aspects of our modern societies work against the call to show hospitality?

What types of people may not feel welcome in our Church communities today?

Act

What sacrifices do I need to make in order to live in fidelity to the Gospel?

What actions can I take to show hospitality to others?

What can we change, in our Church communities, to ensure all feel welcome?

Image: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/cYzn7haQAToADi866QiFU

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 They Shared

Both men agreed on something easy to miss: Buddhism isn’t primarily a set of ideas to argue about — it’s a path of inner transformation. Merton kept circling back to contemplation, awakening, simplicity, and a critique of modern materialism. Thurman, for his part, frames Buddhism as a rigorous educational tradition aimed at freeing people from ignorance and suffering.

They also agreed that experience matters more than abstract doctrine. Merton believed the deepest meeting point between Christianity and Buddhism wasn’t theology but contemplative experience itself — the “ineffable” reality that sits behind all our words about it. Thurman makes a parallel move, but from a different angle: he emphasizes clear thinking, critical scrutiny, and direct experiential insight over simple belief.

Merton’s Lens: A Christian in Dialogue

Merton’s interest in Buddhism was, at its core, interreligious and Christ-centered. He studied Zen more intensely than any other Buddhist school, found striking parallels between Zen and Christian contemplative practice, and borrowed Buddhist vocabulary — emptiness, no-self, awakening — not to replace his Christian faith but to deepen it.

Buddhism also gave Merton a mirror to hold up to the West. He admired its simplicity, its silence, its knack for cutting straight through illusion, and he hoped Christian monks could learn from Buddhist monastic discipline without ever stepping outside the Christian faith.

Thurman’s Lens: A Buddhist Teaching Buddhism

Thurman’s posture is different — he writes and teaches from inside the tradition. He presents Buddhism as an analytical, educational, and liberating system that deserves to be studied critically and practiced seriously, usually framed by the philosophical and contemplative depth of Tibetan Buddhism in particular.

He’s also more pointed in his critique of modernity. Thurman argues that Buddhism offers tools — mental discipline, education, freedom from suffering — that secular culture has largely neglected. Where Merton stays modest and dialogical, Thurman teaches Buddhism as a complete worldview, with confident claims of its own.

A Third Voice: Joseph Cardijn and the See-Judge-Act Method

There’s a useful frame for reading both men that comes from a very different corner of twentieth-century Catholicism: Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement and helped popularize what’s known as the See-Judge-Act method.

Cardijn’s method was simple but radical for its time. Instead of starting from abstract doctrine and applying it downward to life, he insisted that authentic faith and authentic action had to start from concrete reality:

• See — look honestly at the actual conditions of life, without filtering them through pre-formed conclusions.

• Judge — reflect on what you’ve seen in light of your deepest values and convictions, asking what it means and what it demands.

• Act — respond concretely, in a way that’s grounded in both the seeing and the judging, rather than in theory alone.

Cardijn developed this for young workers trying to live out their faith amid industrial labor conditions that the institutional Church often ignored. But the method generalizes well beyond labor activism — it’s really a discipline for how contemplation and conviction are supposed to meet the world, rather than remain sealed off from it.

Why this matters for Merton and Thurman:

Both men, in their own ways, were doing a version of See-Judge-Act with Buddhism itself.

• Merton “saw” Buddhism with real attentiveness — its silence, its practices, its monastic discipline — refusing to dismiss it from a position of Christian superiority. He “judged” what he saw through his Christian contemplative convictions, asking what it meant for his own tradition. And he “acted” by pursuing dialogue, writing, and even traveling to Asia to meet Buddhist teachers directly — a journey cut short by his death in 1968.

• Thurman “saw” Buddhism by immersing himself in it directly, becoming a monk and scholar within the Tibetan tradition rather than observing from outside. His “judging” occurs within Buddhist categories rather than by translating them into a different framework. And his “acting” takes the form of teaching, writing, and advocacy aimed at transmitting Buddhism into a modern, largely secular West.

Cardijn’s method also sharpens a question the original comparison leaves a bit soft: where does the “judging” stage actually happen for each man? Merton’s judgment is explicitly Christian — Buddhism gets evaluated and integrated through a Catholic contemplative lens. Thurman’s judgment happens by Buddhist standards he’s already committed to — he isn’t asking “does this fit my prior framework?” because Buddhism is his framework. That’s arguably the single clearest way to state the difference between them: not just what they saw in Buddhism, but which set of criteria they used to judge it, and what action followed from that judgment.

The Bottom Line

Merton asks: how can Buddhism help Christians pray, see more clearly, and live more contemplatively? Thurman asks: how can Buddhism be understood, taught, and practiced as Buddhism, here and now?

Their overlap is real — both prize direct experience, compassion, and freedom from illusion. But their starting points couldn’t be more different. Merton is a Christian in conversation with Buddhism. Thurman is a Buddhist speaking Buddhism’s own language to a modern audience. Run both of them through Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act method, and the difference gets even crisper: they may have seen similar things in Buddhist practice, but they judged those things by different lights entirely — and so they acted in very different directions.

Something to Sit With

• Can someone borrow deeply from another tradition’s language and practice — as Merton did with Zen — without ever leaving their own faith behind?

• Does Thurman’s “inside” approach make Buddhism more authentically transmitted, or does Merton’s “outside” curiosity make it more accessible to people who’d never otherwise encounter it?

• If Merton had lived past 1968, would his dialogue with Buddhism have stayed comparative — or might he have drifted closer to Thurman’s more committed practice?

• Using Cardijn’s framework, is it possible to truly “see” another tradition clearly if your “judging” criteria are already fixed in advance, and does that limitation apply equally to Merton and Thurman, or more to one than the other?

• Is there a real difference between practicing a tradition critically from within and appreciating it contemplatively from without — or is that distinction less clean than it looks?

Cause and Effect

The causes are familiar by now: biased training data, opaque automated decisions, concentrated power in the hands of a small number of firms and agencies, and relentless pressure to deploy AI wherever it is cheaper or faster than a human being. These causes produce concrete harms — discriminatory screening in housing and lending, overpolicing through predictive systems, wrongful denial or indefinite delay of public benefits, erosion of privacy, and a widening gap between those who can adapt to an AI-saturated economy and those who cannot.

For people without much social or economic power, the damage rarely arrives as a single dramatic failure. It arrives as a pattern — a long string of small exclusions that, taken together, push someone deeper into precarity. The algorithm doesn’t slam the door. It just keeps failing to open it.

THREE LENSES

What the Thinkers Tell Us

MORTIMER ADLER — ON HUMAN DIGNITY

Adler built his philosophy on a single, demanding premise: human dignity is universal, grounded in what we share as persons — not in our skill, speed, productivity, or measurable intelligence. That principle becomes urgent in an age of AI. If we allow algorithms to become the measure of a person’s worth, we will inevitably treat the weak, the disabled, the poor, and the digitally excluded as less significant. Adler also presses a harder question: are our schools and public institutions forming people capable of genuine judgment, or are they simply conditioning them to slot into an automated economy?

MARSHALL MCLUHAN — ON THE ENVIRONMENT WE DON’T SEE

McLuhan redirects our attention from the shiny tool to the surrounding environment it creates. AI is not merely a device; it is a new media ecology that reorganizes perception, attention, and social relationships. In his framework, the “ground” matters as much as the “figure” — and the ground of AI quietly normalizes surveillance, algorithmic dependence, and individualized information bubbles, even when the product on the surface looks convenient and neutral. The poor and marginalized are especially exposed here because they have the least power to opt out of the systems that classify, sort, and score them. They cannot simply log off.

THOMAS MERTON — ON THE SOUL OF A TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

Merton warned that technical progress becomes a form of cultural disintegration when it is not governed by ethics and humane limits. He also insisted — well ahead of most of his contemporaries — that injustices like racism and poverty are systemic, not merely personal failings. That insight fits the way AI can intensify existing injustices rather than dissolve them into neutral efficiency. From a Mertonian perspective, the response is both contemplative and political: recover interior freedom, resist the spell of expediency, and judge every technology by whether it serves love, justice, and the genuine good of the people most vulnerable to its failures.

What a Good Response Looks Like

Getting this right requires more than technical fixes. Any serious response to AI-driven injustice must begin with community participation — especially from those most likely to be harmed — before systems are ever deployed. Beyond that, it demands transparency, meaningful human review, tightly defined use cases, and a strong presumption against automating decisions that affect people’s rights, housing, income, or physical safety.

In Adler’s terms, the goal is a public culture that forms judgment. In McLuhan’s work, it is awareness of the full environment, not just the interface. In Merton’s, it is a spirituality and a politics that, stubbornly and together, refuse to sacrifice the poor on the altar of efficiency.

QUESTIONS TO TAKE AWAY

1. When an algorithm makes a consequential decision about a person’s life, who bears moral responsibility — the engineer who trained it, the agency that deployed it, the policymaker who authorized it, or some combination of all three?

2. McLuhan argued that we shape our tools and then our tools shape us. What habits of mind — about fairness, judgment, and human worth — are we slowly forming by delegating more decisions to machines?

3. Adler insisted that every person possesses dignity independent of their productivity. Does the design of our AI systems reflect that belief — or does it quietly contradict it?

4. Merton saw contemplation and justice as inseparable. Is there a form of “digital contemplation” — a practiced, intentional attention — that citizens and technologists alike need to cultivate right now?

5. If the communities most affected by AI systems were given genuine authority over their design, what would those systems look like differently?

Polanyi’s central insight was simple but radical: science is never as detached or rule-bound as it likes to claim. Behind every discovery is a person — with instincts, commitments, and a feel for what matters. He called this personal knowledge, and it’s a useful lens for thinking about artificial intelligence.

Let’s walk through it using a simple See, Judge, Act framework, as Catholic social teaching often recommends for hard issues.

See: What’s Actually Happening

Strip away the hype and the panic, and here’s what AI systems do well: they recognize patterns across enormous amounts of data, generate plausible text or images, and imitate expertise convincingly enough to fool most of us most of the time.

Here’s what they don’t do: they don’t live anywhere. They have no body, no history, no stakes in the outcome. They’ve never been embarrassed, lost sleep over a decision, or had to look someone in the eye after getting something wrong.

Polanyi has a name for the kind of knowing that comes from actually being somewhere: tacit knowledge. His famous line is that we know more than we can tell — not just more than we can say out loud, but more than we could write down even if we tried. A teacher senses a class losing focus before anyone fidgets. A musician feels when a phrase needs to breathe. A doctor notices something off in a patient’s face that no chart captures. None of that lives in a rulebook, which means none of it can be fully handed to a machine, no matter how good the machine gets at sounding like it understands.

That’s the situation. So the next question is harder.

Judge: What does this mean

It’s tempting to think of algorithms as neutral because they’re built on math. Polanyi would push back hard on that. Numbers don’t choose themselves — people decide what to count, what to optimize, what counts as an error, and whose experience gets centered in the data. Every one of those choices is a values choice wearing a technical disguise.

So when an AI system makes a recommendation, denies a claim, or drafts a decision, it isn’t reporting objective truth from nowhere. It’s reflecting the judgments — and blind spots — of the people who built and trained it. That’s not a flaw to be engineered away; it’s a feature of how all knowledge works, machine-assisted or not.

This matters because the decisions we most need wisdom for — how to treat a struggling student, whether to trust a diagnosis, how to weigh competing claims in a community dispute — are exactly the decisions that resist being reduced to inputs and outputs. They require prudence: the kind of practical judgment that’s earned through experience, not downloaded from a dataset.

None of this means AI is useless or dangerous by nature. It means AI is a tool shaped by human hands, and tools don’t bear responsibility — people do.

Act: What to Do With That

If Polanyi is right, the answer isn’t to reject AI or to treat it as an oracle. It’s to put it in its proper place: a powerful assistant for tasks that benefit from pattern-spotting and speed, used by people who stay alert to the parts of judgment that can’t be outsourced. That’s where action begins.

Practically, that might look like:

• Naming the choices baked into a system. Before trusting an AI tool’s output, ask what it was optimized for and who decided that.

• Reserving final judgment for humans in consequential decisions — hiring, medical care, sentencing, anything where dignity is on the line.

• Protecting tacit expertise rather than letting it atrophy. If a skill can be quietly outsourced to a model, the temptation is to stop practicing it — but that’s exactly the knowledge Polanyi says we can’t afford to lose.

• Treating “the AI said so” as the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• Where in your own work or life have you relied on a kind of knowing you couldn’t fully put into words? Could that knowledge be captured by a machine — or only imitated?

• When you’ve used an AI tool, did you ask what assumptions or values were built into its design? What would change if you did?

• Are there skills or forms of attention you’ve started to let go of because a tool can now do a passable job in their place? What would it cost to keep practicing them anyway?

• Who decides what counts as a “good” outcome for the AI systems you encounter — and would you agree with their definition if you saw it written down?

Polanyi spent his career insisting that knowledge always has a knower behind it — someone with skin in the game. AI doesn’t change that fact; it just makes it easier to forget. The point here is simple: AI can assist, but it cannot replace the judgment that gives knowledge its human weight. The work now isn’t to out-think the machines. It’s to stay the kind of people whose judgment is worth trusting when the machines fall short.

Introduction

Recently, an Australian political leader called for a monocultural Australia. She is not alone in promoting the view that in Australia progress can only be achieved through uniformity. It is not a view that I hold. And as I prepared this Gospel Enquiry, I found myself focusing on the gift of human dignity, which God gives to every human being,

Pope Leo XIV wrote in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, that “together … [in dialogue with all men and women of our time], we seek to identify new paths for the common good and for promoting a dignified life for all” (MH, 2).

The Gospel you are about to read provides us with the principle governing the paths we take to ensure the dignity of all people: “the presence of Christ, who comes and guides history toward its fulfilment” (MH,22).

So, may we be courageous people who trust Jesus to guide us and whose Spirit will strengthen us as we speak and act in his name.

The Gospel

Jesus instructed the Twelve as follows: ‘Do not be afraid. For everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the daylight; what you hear in whispers, proclaim from the housetops.

‘Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell. Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing. Why, every hair on your head has been counted. So there is no need to be afraid; you are worth more than hundreds of sparrows.

‘So if anyone declares himself for me in the presence of men, I will declare myself for him in the presence of my Father in heaven. But the one who disowns me in the presence of men, I will disown in the presence of my Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 10:26-33)

The Enquiry

See

• What happens in this scene from Matthew’s Gospel? What do you learn about Jesus and his mission from his instructions to his apostles? What do you learn about the society in which he and his apostles live?

• Are fear and courage relevant in this Gospel? What do you know about the apostles that tells you how they were affected by what Jesus tells them?

• Why does Jesus speak to his disciples in this way? What has he experienced about his followers that would lead him to warn them about the people they will meet?

Judge

• How have you been affected by Jesus’ instructions that you have read in this Gospel?

• What is Jesus’ ideal world like? Where and when have you experienced this world?

• What does Jesus say here that makes you feel uncomfortable about how you live your life? What does he say that gives you hope for yourself and for the world?

Act

• Based on what you have read in this Gospel, what is the change in you and in the world to which Jesus commits himself?

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

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

Image Source: Adolf Jutz (1887-1045) (Creator), Graphic of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-7:28). In the National Museum in Szczecin, Poland. muzeach.pl, PDM 1.0