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

That wound is the loss of the interior life. What is it about the culture that drives us to be more like Ayn Rand than a disciple of Christ?

SEE: What Is Actually Happening to Us?

Look around honestly. We live in what Han calls the “achievement society” — a world that no longer coerces us with commands from the outside but compels us from within. We scroll, produce, optimize, perform. We are not just busy; we are constitutionally busy, unable to stop without feeling guilt or anxiety. Burnout is not an accident of this system. It is its logical endpoint.

Merton saw a version of this long before the smartphone existed. Writing from the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he watched a world growing louder, faster, and more fragmented, and he named what it was producing: the false self — an identity stitched together from the ex’s expectations, from roles, from the compulsive need to appear rather than to be. This false self, he insisted, is not just a private spiritual problem. It is a social wound. Cultural systems shape inward division, and inward division spills outward — into hostility, conformity, and violence.

Han gives us updated language for exactly what Merton was describing. Transparency, acceleration, compulsive self-production: these are the contemporary mechanisms by which the false self is manufactured and maintained. Both men, in different registers, point to the same catastrophe: a life turned outward and emptied inward.

JUDGE: What Does This Mean, and Where Does It Lead?

Reading Han and Merton together reveals that Merton is far more radical than he is usually given credit for. His call to silence is not a devotional nicety for monastics. It is a form of protest — a refusal of the systems that deform attention, desire, and identity, and a direct challenge to the forces that erode interior life.

Here the two thinkers converge most powerfully, and here they also begin to diverge in ways that matter.

Where they agree: Both distrust a culture that substitutes productivity and performance for genuine interior life. Both treat contemplation not as escape but as a way of becoming more fully human. And both understand that the person who has lost inwardness is more vulnerable — more easily captured by conformity, consumerism, or the crowd.

Where they part ways: Han is a diagnostician. He is extraordinarily precise about what is wrong with late modern life, and his concept of “radical negativity”— the idea that silence, emptiness, and withdrawal are acts of resistance—is genuinely illuminating. But his void remains philosophically ambiguous. It tells us what we need to stop doing, without fully naming what we are being emptied toward.

Merton’s apophatic theology fills that gap exactly. For Merton, the darkness of contemplation is not an end in itself ~ it is a threshold. The silence is not mere absence; it is a spiritually generative emptying ordered toward communion with God. His “darkness” is disciplined by revelation, prayer, Prayere Christian tradition (think Patristics here), especially the conviction that God is known by unknowing without being reduced to silence. Where Han’s void exposes what modern life cannot tolerate, Merton’s void is a doorway into what human life most deeply needs.

In concise terms, Han diagnoses the sickness of accelerated modern life, while Merton names the cure ~ a contemplative return to the true self in God.

This difference also shapes how each thinker handles religious tradition. Merton engaged deeply and carefully with Buddhism and other traditions, always insisting on genuine dialogue without flattening real differences. Han tends to move more abstractly across traditions, drawing on Eastern thought without anchoring himself in any single one. That is a limitation worth naming, especially for readers approaching these questions from within a faith community.

ACT: What Are We Going to Do About It?

The point of this conversation is not merely academic. If Han and Merton are right — and together they make a compelling case — then one conclusion follows: silence, contemplation, and resistance to performative life are not optional extras, but necessary responses.

Recover contemplative practice as a form of resistance, not retreat. Silence, prayer, and prayerlessness are not luxuries for the spiritually advanced. They are, as both men argue, acts of counter-cultural resistance in an age that profits from our distraction and exhaustion.

Take the false self seriously as a social, not merely a spiritual, problem. The pressure to manufacture an identity for public consumption is not a personal weakness. It is a structural feature of digital capitalism. Naming that honestly — in our communities, our schools, our parishes — is the first step toward freedom. Why is this so difficult in the US?

Let Han make Merton legible, but let Merton deepen Han. For anyone using these thinkers in Christian education or spiritual formation, this pairing is particularly valuable. Han provides contemporary language for pressures that Merton identified in spiritual terms. But Merton supplies what Han often leaves implicit: a theological center, a horizon of transformation, and the insistence that silence is ordered not to emptiness but to love. Together, they clarify not only what is wrong, but what we are invited toward.

Questions for You To Ponder

1. Where in your own life do you feel the pressure to perform, produce, or be perpetually available? What would it cost you — concretely — to resist that pressure for a single day?

2. Han argues that burnout is not a personal failure but a systemic one. Does that reframe how you think about your own exhaustion, or that of people around you?

3. Merton distinguished between the false self (constructed for others) and the true self (found before God). Which of the two feels more familiar to you on an ordinary Tuesday?

4. Both Han and Merton insist that contemplation is not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it. Do you believe that? What would it look like in your own life or community?

5. Merton’s apophatic tradition holds that we approach God by letting go of our images and certainties about God. Does that feel liberating or unsettling — and what might that response reveal?

6. If silence is a form of resistance, what are you resisting when you choose it — and what are you protecting?

A Reading Guide: Merton and Han in Conversation

Thomas Merton — Where to Begin and Where to Go Deeper

Merton wrote prolifically, and not everything is equally relevant to the themes in the blog post. Here is a sequenced path.

Start here:

New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) is the essential Merton — the one book to read if you read only one. It is where his thinking about the true and false self is most fully developed, written in a lyrical voice without sentimentality. It directly addresses the kind of identity fragmentation Han diagnoses in secular terms.

The Seven Story Mountain (1948) is his autobiography and remains the most widely read entry point, though it is more narrative than theological. Read it to understand the man before reading him as a thinker.

Go deeper with these:

Contemplative Prayer (Prayer is compact and serious — Merton at his most apophatic, engaging darkness, dread, and the stripping away of consolations. This is where he sounds most like Han’s philosophical void, except that his void has a destination.

No Man Is an Island (1955) develops the social and ethical dimensions of contemplation. This is the book that shows why interior division spills outward into violence and conformity — the argument that resonates most directly with Han’s social critique.

Raids on the Unspeakable (1966) is prophetic and strange, a collection of essays and prose poems written in direct protest against the dehumanizing forces of modernity. Merton is a social critic, not just a spiritual guide—extraordinarily relevant today.

The Wisdom of the Desert (1960) — Merton’s translation and commentary on the Desert Fathers — provides the deep roots of the contemplative tradition he is drawing on. Brief, beautiful, and surprisingly readable.

For the interreligious dimension:

The Asian Journal (1973, posthumous) and Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) show Merton in genuine dialogue with Buddhism — careful, attentive, never collapsing real differences. This is where his approach contrasts most sharply with Han’s more abstract use of Eastern thought.

Byung-Chul Han — The New Book and the Essential Background

The Tonality of Thought (2025, translated by Daniel Steuer) is Han’s most personally revealing work. Based on lectures he gave in 2023, it is built around a striking self-description: his books, he says, are not repetitions but variations on themes — like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, though articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. His thinking, he explains, is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit, then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”

His central summary of his entire philosophical project appears here: “If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears.” The more we immerse ourselves in digital communication, the more we lose the sense of touch and the physical presence of the Other. That theme — the disappearance of genuine otherness, of friction, of the encounter with what resists us — runs through everything he has written and connects directly to Merton’s concern about the false self, which is ultimately a self sealed off from real encounter with God or neighbor.

The essential Han reading list, in order of relevance to the Merton conversation:

The Burnout Society (2015) — short, dense, and the best starting point for Han generally. The core diagnosis of the achievement society is why it produces exhaustion rather than flourishing.

Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023) — Han’s most direct engagement with contemplation, leisure, and the value of doing nothing. The most obvious companion to Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.

The Scent of Time (2017) — on the loss of temporal depth, ritual, and the kind of time that allows genuine experience. Connects to Merton’s understanding of liturgical and contemplative time.

The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) argues that modernity has gutted the symbolic practices that once gave life coherence and meaning. Deeply relevant to Merton’s monastic framework.

In the Swarm (2017) and Infocracy (2022), Han discusses digital life, transparency, and the erosion of public discourse. More political, but useful for understanding the social consequences of the internal collapse, both men describe.

A Suggested Reading Sequence for the Two Together

If you want to read them in genuine dialogue, rather than one after the other, this sequence works well, at least it did for me, just saying:

1. Han, The Burnout Society — establish the diagnosis.

2. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation — encounter the spiritual response

3. Han, Vita Contemplativa — see Han reaching toward what Merton already inhabits

4. Merton, Contemplative Prayer — the apophatic depth Han approaches but does not enter

5. Han, The Tonality of Thought — Han on his own roots and preoccupations

6. Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable — Merton as prophet and social critic

7. Merton, No Man Is an Island — the social ethics of the interior life.

By the end of that sequence, you will have a very clear sense of where the two men illuminate each other and where they genuinely diverge — and why that divergence matters.

There is a question almost no one in the AI industry is asking, and it might be the most important one: Who is this for, and what kind of human life should it serve?

Not “What can it do?” Not “How fast can it run?” Not “How much revenue will it generate?” But rather — what kind of human life, human judgment, and human dignity should artificial intelligence actually serve?

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher and educator who spent decades insisting that great ideas belong to everyone, not just to elites, has been dead since 2001. But his thinking feels strangely urgent right now, because AI debate keeps getting stuck on technical questions when we really need moral ones.

SEE: What Is Actually Happening

Take a moment to look honestly at where AI is being deployed today.

Hiring platforms use algorithmic screening to eliminate candidates before a human ever reads their name. Predictive policing tools rank neighborhoods — and by extension, people — by calculated risk scores. Students outsource essays to large language models and call it research. Social media feeds are curated by systems optimized not for truth or connection but for engagement, which often means outrage. Surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition track people in public spaces without their knowledge or consent.

At the same time, AI is doing genuinely remarkable things. It is helping doctors catch cancers earlier. It is giving people with disabilities new ways to communicate. It is making legal and educational resources available to people who could never afford a lawyer or a private tutor.

The technology itself is not the problem. The problem is that we are deploying it without asking the right questions first: What should it serve, and what should it never override? We are asking, can we, and we are measuring success almost entirely by speed, cost, and efficiency — as if those were the only values that matter.

There are other costs that rarely appear in the spreadsheet: the environmental toll of the massive data centers required to run these models, the privacy of people whose information was scraped to train them, and the subtle but real erosion of human judgment when we hand our thinking to a machine.

JUDGE: What Mortimer Adler Would Say About All This

Adler’s life work was built on a single stubborn conviction: human beings are different in kind, not just in degree, from everything else. That distinction is the source of moral status. It is what makes a person a person and not a product.

His 1967 book The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes was written to push back against reductionist accounts of human nature — the idea that we are nothing more than complicated mechanisms. That argument is even more pressing today, when AI systems can produce fluent prose, generate realistic images, and hold conversations that feel almost human. When machines can imitate the outputs of intelligence, we are tempted to forget that imitation is not the same as thought.

For AI governance, this matters enormously. If we treat the ability to process language or recognize patterns as equivalent to human understanding, we will end up treating human beings as interchangeable with machines — or, worse, valuing people only by what they can efficiently produce. Adler gives us language to resist that: Personhood, he insists, is prior to efficiency.

His educational philosophy deepens the concern. Adler believed the purpose of education was to cultivate the powers of understanding, reasoning, and dialogue — the distinctively human capacities that allow people to think for themselves, question assumptions, and engage seriously with ideas. Learning, for him, was active and communal, not passive and solitary. It required real conversation, genuine disagreement, and the willingness to change your mind.

If that is right, then an AI system that does your thinking for you is not an educational tool. It is an obstacle to education. It may produce something that looks like learning while quietly undermining the real thing.

From an Adlerian perspective, the current moral risks of AI are not side effects to be managed after the fact. They are failures of governance — failures to protect real persons and real communities from real harm. When AI amplifies bias, it harms people who are already vulnerable. When it generates fabricated content with the same fluency as true content, it erodes the shared basis of public discourse. And when it is used for manipulative targeting or covert surveillance, it degrades the freedom and dignity that make a human community possible.

None of this is inevitable. But none of it will be prevented by technical fixes alone. It requires moral judgment, which is precisely what Adler spent his career insisting could not be outsourced.

ACT: What Good Governance Actually Looks Like

Adler’s framework suggests not just a critique but a direction. Here are five principles worth fighting for:

1. Keep humans responsible for high-stakes decisions. AI can inform, flag, and assist, but a human being must be accountable for decisions that affect other people’s lives — employment, housing, healthcare, criminal justice. Automating those decisions is not efficient. It is the evasion of moral responsibility.

2. Prohibit or tightly restrict uses that degrade dignity. Blanket surveillance, manipulative behavioral targeting, and automated systems that sort people by worth or risk should face the highest bar of scrutiny. Some uses may need to be prohibited outright. Others require strict oversight, transparency about how they work, and meaningful recourse for people they affect.

3. Require explainability, auditability, and bias testing. If an institution cannot explain why its AI system made a particular decision, that system should not be making that decision. Regular bias audits should be required, not optional, and the results should be public.

4. Treat AI outputs as provisional until verified by human reason. This is Adler’s educational principle applied directly. AI can generate a first draft, surface a pattern, or summarize a body of evidence — but a human being must interpret, verify, and take responsibility for what gets used. The output of a machine is not the same as the judgment of a person.

5. Build AI literacy that teaches people to question, not just consume. Schools, universities, churches, civic organizations, and workplaces all have a role here. The goal is not to make people afraid of AI, or to pretend it does not exist, but to form people who know how to engage it critically — who can ask whether a source is reliable, whether an output is accurate, and whether a use is just.

In Adler’s spirit, the governing thesis is this: AI should not be governed by what it can imitate, but by whether it supports the full development of human persons in truth, freedom, and moral responsibility.

That is not a technical standard. It is a human one. And it is the standard we most urgently need.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. When you use AI tools in your daily life — for work, school, or personal tasks — are you using them to deepen your own thinking, or to replace it? How can you tell the difference?

2. Adler argues that human dignity is grounded in what is distinctively human, not in measurable productivity or intelligence. How does that principle challenge the way AI is currently being used in hiring, healthcare, or education?

3. The See-Judge-Act method asks us to look honestly at reality before making moral judgments. What aspects of AI’s current impact do you think are being ignored or underreported in public conversation?

4. Who in your community is most vulnerable to harms from AI — from algorithmic bias, surveillance, or the erosion of human judgment in high-stakes decisions? What would it look like to center their experience in AI policy?

5. If Adler is right that real education requires active inquiry, dialogue, and the willingness to change your mind, what does that mean for how AI should — and should not — be used in classrooms?

6. What is one concrete thing you, your institution, or your community could do to ensure AI is serving human flourishing rather than replacing it?

This Gospel text begins with an expression of Jesus’ compassion for the people in their suffering. In earlier chapters of the Gospel it is Jesus himself who responds to this suffering through his ministry of healing (Mt 4:23, 8:3, 9:33). Now, it is the turn of the apostles to continue this ministry, just as they had observed, while following Jesus. The text includes the often quoted reflection on Mission that ‘the harvest is rich but the labourers are few’ (Mt 9:37). The Mission of the disciples is to be twofold – proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is close at hand, just as Jesus had done at the beginning of his ministry (Mt 4:17), and healing the sick, cleansing lepers etc. which had also been central to Jesus’ ministry.

One of Matthew’s key concerns, in writing this Gospel, seems to have been to show that Jesus truly is the Messiah (Christ) promised to the people of Israel. This is often done through quoting texts from the Hebrew Scriptures as being fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus. In this Gospel text, there are two echoes of that motif. First, the naming of the twelve apostles, with the number twelve symbolically corresponding with the twelve tribes of Israel. Second, the instruction to go only to the ‘lost sheep of the House of Israel’ (Mt:10;6) rather than the territory of the Gentiles or Samaritans. Underlining the privileged position of the people of Israel to be given the Messiah is a strong indication of Matthew’s purpose. This restriction on the mission of the apostles seems to be at odds with the evident practice of Jesus and his disciples and, most notably with the final commissioning of the disciples where they are told to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Mt 28:19).

Gospel Text: Matthew 9:36-10:8

When Jesus saw the crowds he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest.’

He summoned his twelve disciples, and gave them authority over unclean spirits with power to cast them out and to cure all kinds of diseases and sickness.

These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James the son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, the one who was to betray him. These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them as follows:

‘Do not turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town; go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. And as you go, proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. You received without charge, give without charge.’

See

What does the commissioning of the apostles suggest about Jesus’ approach to his mission?

Before commissioning the apostles, Jesus is affected by the situation of the crowds. How does his compassion for their plight influence his actions?

Jesus likens the crowds to ‘sheep without a shepherd’. What does this observation suggest about the religious leaders in their community?

Judge

Who, in our own world, are the labourers who are being called to the harvest?

Who, in our society today, are ‘harassed and dejected’ and in need of our compassion?

Who, in today’s world, are failing to be a ‘shepherd’ to those who are harassed and rejected?

Act

What actions am I called to in bringing God’s Kingdom to fruition in my own circumstances?

How do I help others recognise that God’ Kingdom is near to them?

How can I engage others in works of healing and compassion?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-9-35-10-1-5a-6-8-2024/

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/

*A See–Judge–Act Reflection on* Magnifica Humanitas

There is something almost head-scratching about a papal encyclical on artificial intelligence — the oldest institution in Western civilization issuing formal teaching on the newest technology in human history. But *Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence* is not a panic document, and it deserves more than a quick scroll and a dismissal. Beneath its technical concerns about algorithmic bias, labor displacement, and weaponized disinformation lies a much older question: *What does it mean to be human, and can anything take that from us?*

That question deserves theologians with deep roots. Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton — the German Jesuit who remapped Catholic anthropology from the inside, and the Kentucky monk who turned his hermitage into a window onto the world — are two of the best conversation partners we have for sitting with it. Neither of them knew the internet, let alone large language models. But both of them knew something more important: they knew the shape of the temptation we face whenever a powerful new system offers to do our thinking for us.

SEE: What Is Actually Happening?

Before we judge or act, we have to look honestly at what is in front of us.

AI is not one thing. It is a family of technologies — machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, predictive analytics — that share a common logic: pattern recognition at scale. These systems have become woven into the texture of everyday life faster than any previous technology. They curate what news you read, score your creditworthiness, assess your job application, translate your words, write your emails, and increasingly inform decisions about your medical treatment, your parole hearing, and your children’s school placement.

*Magnifica Humanitas* notices this panorama and identifies several genuinely serious concerns: the concentration of AI power in a small number of corporations and states; the erosion of privacy through mass surveillance; the manipulation of public opinion through algorithmically personalized misinformation; the precarity of labor in an economy where automation threatens not only factory workers but knowledge workers; and the risk that AI systems will simply encode and amplify the biases of the societies that built them — especially toward the poor, the marginalized, and the Global South.

None of this is hysteria. It is a reasonable description of what is already happening. And the encyclical is right to name it.

But — and this is where Rahner and Merton become essential — none of it means that *AI is the problem*. The problem is older, and it lives closer to home.

JUDGE: What Does Faith Say About This?

Rahner: The Person Is Never Finished

Karl Rahner spent his career insisting on something that sounds simple but has enormous consequences: the human being is not a fixed essence but a dynamic, historical becoming. We are not objects that happen to think. We are subjects — always in motion, always exceeding ourselves, always oriented toward what Rahner called the *Heilige Geheimnis*, the Holy Mystery — a horizon that recedes every time we approach it.

He named this capacity *active self-transcendence*: the structural restlessness of the human spirit that drives us beyond any given state of knowledge, freedom, or love toward something more. Even a mundane act like learning something new is, in Rahner’s framework, a small enactment of transcendence — the self going beyond where it was. As he put it simply, “Learning always involves self-transcendence.”

This anthropology has two important implications for AI.

First, AI has no intrinsic power to abolish human transcendence. It is a tool — sophisticated, consequential, even dangerous when misused, but still a tool. It cannot close the horizon. It cannot reach into the space between the human spirit and the Holy Mystery and fill it with silicon. What it *can* do is make it easier for us to live *as if* that space did not exist — to accept a flattened, manageable, computable version of ourselves and call it enough.

Second, this means the real theological question is not “What is AI doing to us?” but “What are we allowing AI to do to us?” Rahner’s framework turns our gaze back to the human agent from the machine. The encyclical’s worry that AI reduces persons to “data profiles” and “risk scores” is, in Rahner’s idiom, a worry about *habituated self-diminishment* — a way of living that trains us to forget our own depth. The danger is not the algorithm. The danger is our consent to its definitions.

There is another Rahnerian angle worth adding that the encyclical gestures toward but does not fully develop: his theology of *grace in history*. For Rahner, the Spirit of God is not hovering above history, descending occasionally in approved moments. Grace is the very atmosphere of history — active in struggle, in solidarity, in the resistance of the oppressed, in the inarticulate longing for justice. This means the people organizing to regulate AI, the workers fighting for fair treatment in gig economies, the journalists exposing algorithmic discrimination — these are not merely secular actors. They are, in Rahner’s sense, sites where grace is at work in the world. The encyclical’s concern for labor and justice is not a distraction from theology. It *is* theology.

Rahner’s notion of the *anonymous Christian* extends this further — though it needs careful handling. His core intuition, which matters here, is that God’s self-communication is universally operative: that the human capacity for self-transcendence is not a monopoly of any tradition. Buddhist mindfulness, Confucian ritual, Indigenous reciprocity with the land — these are not deficient approximations of a Western metaphysics waiting to be corrected. They are distinct, culturally specific ways of living the same fundamental dynamism. What AI threatens, on this reading, is not only a single philosophical definition of the person. It is the *plurality* of ways of being human — the many disciplines of attention and relation that different traditions have cultivated — that a globalized technocratic monoculture is increasingly crowding out.

Merton: The Idol and the False Self

Thomas Merton arrives at the same concern from a different direction, and with more fire.

Merton was not hostile to technology in principle. He typed on a typewriter, corresponded prolifically by mail, used a mimeograph machine, and was genuinely curious about the modern world even from his hermitage at Gethsemani. But he was uncompromising about a particular spiritual danger that technology concentrates: the danger of the *false self*.

For Merton, the false self is not evil in a dramatic sense. It is simply the self that has been constructed around the need for approval, security, power, and image — the self that derives its sense of reality from what it can control and be seen to accomplish. The false self is not a villain. It is an exhausted performance. And Merton saw that modern technology, by amplifying our capacity for production, speed, control, and self-presentation, could become an engine for the false self’s project.

His warning in *Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander* is worth sitting with: our “fantastic progress” risks becoming “an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration” if we do not learn how to live with it. AI intensifies this risk to a degree Merton could not have imagined. A technology that curates your information environment to maximize your engagement, that reflects your preferences back to you in an endless personalized mirror, that offers to produce text and thought and creativity on your behalf — this is, in Merton’s terms, a machine exquisitely designed to service the false self.

But Merton would not stop there, and neither should we. He was equally insistent that beneath the false self — beneath all the noise, performance, and distraction — there remains what he called the *le point vierge*, the virgin point: an inviolable center of the person where “our whole being is silent and attentive.” This is not a romanticized inner room available only to monks. It is the irreducible depth of every human person — the place where you are, as Merton famously wrote in *New Seeds of Contemplation*, “not the soul they think you are.” It is the ground of the true self, and no algorithm can reach it.

The encyclical’s anxiety about AI-driven manipulation of information and the surveillance economy reads, in Merton’s register, as an anxiety that our technological systems are systematically steering us *away* from that center. They are not evil for being machines. They become dangerous when we let them set the terms of what is real, when we accept their measurements as our definition, when we live — as the forest does not live — entirely on the surface.

Merton’s late engagement with Buddhism is also relevant here, and not incidentally. In his dialogues with D.T. Suzuki and his growing attention to Zen, he found what he described as a profound solidarity beneath apparent doctrinal difference: both Christian contemplation and Zen practice were, at their depth, disciplines of *seeing through* the illusions of the ego-self. The Zen practitioner’s liberation from the grasping, constructing self and the Christian contemplative’s kenotic self-emptying before God were, for Merton, pointing toward the same open space. A world of AI — which is, among other things, a machine for constructing and flattering the ego — is precisely the world that needs these disciplines.

Rahner and Merton Together

What happens when you read these two figures alongside each other?

Rahner gives us the *structure* of the problem: the human person is a transcending subject, history is the site of grace, and AI becomes dangerous when it habituates us to deny our own transcendence. Merton gives us the *existential weight* of the problem: the false self is seductive, contemplation is the antidote, and we need to know from the inside what it feels like to refuse the machine’s definitions.

They also share something easily missed: a refusal of dualism. Neither Rahner nor Merton is anti-world or anti-technology. Rahner is explicit that the human vocation involves historical making — that we are called to build the world. Despite the hermitage, Merton maintained a vast correspondence and wrote about politics, race, nuclear weapons, and Vietnam. The response to AI is not withdrawal. It is *discernment* — the practiced capacity to ask, in each concrete situation: does this use of this tool help me become more fully human, or does it help me forget that I am?

ACT: What Are We Called To Do?

In the end, *Magnifica Humanitas* will be judged less by its analysis of AI than by whether it helps the Church — and the wider world — remember the depth of the human. AI is not the problem. The problem is forgetting who we are and who we are becoming in a world that finds it increasingly easy to confuse calculation with wisdom and prediction with destiny.

Rahner’s language of active self-transcendence reminds us that the human person is always *on the way* — a history-making subject whose freedom is ordered toward an unfathomable mystery that no system can contain or close. Merton’s language of the true and false self reminds us that this journey is never abstract but always contested: between contemplative attention and idolatrous distraction, between communion and control.

The real danger is not intelligent machines but unintelligent hearts — hearts that accept as normal a world in which persons are reduced to risk scores, workers to optimization problems, and entire peoples to data points in someone else’s model.

This is where the plural anthropologies Rahner gestures toward and Merton actively inhabited become indispensable. Buddhist teachings on non-substantial selfhood — the radical deconstruction of the grasping, controlling ego that Zen practice pursues — offer a powerful counter to the hypertrophied individual for whom AI is just one more instrument of mastery. Confucian understandings of personhood as constituted by ritually mediated relationships resist the atomism that technocratic systems presuppose. Indigenous cosmologies that locate the human within a web of obligations to land, ancestors, and other-than-human kin offer a vision of the person that no algorithm can adequately model — because these traditions insist, in different idioms, that the person is never simply a node of preferences to be optimized. The person is a *relation*, embedded in webs of grace and obligation that exceed calculation.

These are not failed attempts at Thomism. They are alternative disciplines of attention — different grammars of the same human mystery that *Magnifica Humanitas* seeks to defend against technocratic reduction. And they converge, across their differences, on something Merton kept trying to say: that the deepest resistance to the machine’s reductions is not a better argument but a different quality of presence — the presence of someone who knows, from practice, that there is more to reality than what can be measured.

A Mertonian call to contemplation, then, is not an escape from the world of AI. It is a summons to inhabit that world differently — to bring to it the kind of attention that can see through the mirror of the false self, that can receive the other not as data but as mystery, that can stand in the forest of being and, when the imagination is finally silent, let the forest speak.

Only from that quiet center can we discern which uses of AI genuinely serve *magnificent humanity* — and which merely magnify our refusal of it.

Questions for Further Reflection

1. Rahner argues that the human person is constituted by a restless movement toward Holy Mystery — a movement no system can finalize. How do you experience this dynamic in your own life, and do you think AI makes it harder or easier to live from that depth?

2. Merton distinguishes sharply between the true self and the false self. In what ways might our use of social media, AI tools, and digital systems be servicing the false self — and what would it look like to use these same tools from the true self instead?

3. The encyclical worries that AI concentrates power and amplifies existing injustice. If grace is at work *in* history as Rahner insists, where do you see the Spirit active in current struggles over algorithmic accountability, workers’ rights, and data sovereignty?

4. Buddhist, Confucian, and Indigenous traditions offer distinct ways of understanding the person as relational, embedded, non-substantial, and obligated to the more-than-human world. How might these perspectives correct or enrich the way *Magnifica Humanitas* frames human dignity?

5. Merton believed contemplation is not a retreat from the world but the most radical form of resistance to its idols. What would a genuinely contemplative approach to AI look like in daily life — not as abstinence, but as a different quality of attention?

*This reflection uses the See–Judge–Act method developed in Catholic Social Teaching as a framework for theological discernment of contemporary experience.*

Why eudaimonia matters now

We live in a time when machines increasingly advise, decide, and act for us. That makes Aristotle’s conception of the good life newly urgent: flourishing is not passive comfort or efficient output, but active engagement with the world — shaped by reason, habituated virtue, and genuine responsibility for one’s choices.

If technology reshapes how we choose, pay attention, work, learn, and relate to one another, then it also reshapes the conditions under which we pursue flourishing. Aristotle begins from a simple but demanding claim: every human being seeks the good, and the good life is not a pile of pleasures but a life ordered by reason and virtue. By that standard, technology should be judged by one question: Does it support practical wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, and the habits that make communal life possible?

“A technology may be impressive and still be bad for eudaimonia — if it weakens judgment, narrows responsibility, or trains us to live automatically rather than reflectively.”

Autonomous systems present a special challenge because they often work in opaque ways and can outpace the moral habits needed to use them well. Rule-based ethics alone can become too vague or too rigid in a rapidly changing environment. This is precisely where Aristotelian virtue ethics is most useful: it asks not only whether a rule is met, but whether a practically wise person would act this way, given the real stakes and the real people involved.

See, judge, act

The social justice tradition offers a simple but rigorous framework for ethical discernment: see the situation clearly, judge it in light of moral principles, then act. Applied to emerging technology alongside Aristotle’s ethics of flourishing, this framework becomes a practical discipline for deciding how technology should serve human life.

SEE

The first step is honest observation. What technologies are actually shaping our lives? How are they changing our attention, our work, our relationships, and our decision-making? Notice where autonomy is being transferred from human beings to systems, where convenience is silently replacing deliberation, and where people are becoming dependent on tools they do not understand. The point is not alarm — it is clarity.

Consider a teacher who uses AI to draft lesson plans, summarize readings, and recommend grades. Those tools may save real time. But they also alter the teacher’s role in judgment, discernment, and intellectual formation. The “see” step asks: what exactly is gained, what is lost, and who is affected? That question is foundational because eudaimonia is always lived in concrete conditions, not abstractions.

JUDGE

Aristotle’s key insight is that human flourishing depends on rational activity in accordance with virtue — not on speed, efficiency, or accumulated pleasure. So ask whether a given technology helps cultivate practical wisdom or short-circuits it; whether it strengthens human agency or quietly erodes it.

Practical wisdom — phronesis — grows when people learn to connect information with lived judgment, rather than treating AI outputs as automatically authoritative. That means recognizing patterns, identifying blind spots, and resisting the pressure to flatten complexity into quick answers. It also means remembering that wisdom is formed through experience, reflection, and moral responsibility — not merely through access to more data.

An autonomous system should therefore be judged by more than accuracy or speed. Judge it by whether it respects human dignity, preserves responsibility, encourages truthfulness, and supports community rather than isolation. A system that makes people more distracted, less thoughtful, or less accountable may be technically impressive while being humanly regressive.

ACT

The third step is action — and for Aristotle, action is never merely a one-off choice. Virtue is built through habituation. What matters is forming stable dispositions over time, so the good life becomes a practiced way of living.

A useful starting point is to build habits that slow down the automatic reliance on AI. Draft first, then consult AI. Compare multiple outputs. Ask what assumptions a system is making before acting on its recommendations. Develop what we might call “good refusal” — the practiced willingness to decline AI use when it would replace needed consultation, entrench bias, or hide human accountability behind a machine-generated process. These habits preserve the space where judgment, conscience, and prudence can actually operate.

At the individual level, this may mean setting deliberate limits on AI use and making room for reading, writing, memory, and conversation that are not outsourced to machines. At the institutional level, it may mean designing courses, workplaces, and communities of practice that use technology as an aid to human judgment rather than a replacement for it. At the cultural level, it means resisting the temptation to define success solely by speed, scale, and automation.

“Not nostalgia for a pre-digital world, but formation for the one we actually inhabit.”

A practical commitment might look like this: use AI to support discernment, not to avoid it; evaluate technologies by their effect on human relationships; prefer tools that make virtue easier to practice.

Wisdom grows in community.

One thing Aristotle is clear about: practical wisdom is far easier to cultivate in community than in isolation. Shared reflection, mentoring, case discussion, and honest conversation about real habits and shortcuts help people notice patterns of good practice — and expose the harmful ones. In educational or ministerial settings, make space for regular conversations about how AI affects formation, relationships, and the common good, rather than treating it as a purely technical matter best left to engineers.

Eudaimonia gives us a way to think beyond both novelty and fear. It reminds us that the measure of technology is not whether it is autonomous or impressive, but whether it helps human beings live rationally, morally, and in genuine community throughout a complete life. In the age of emerging technology, the deepest question remains the oldest one: what kind of life is worth living? And the answer, Aristotle suggests, is one shaped by virtue, responsibility, and shared flourishing.

Questions for reflection

* Where in your daily life have you handed over a decision or judgment to an AI tool — and did you gain or lose something in doing so?

* Aristotle argues that character is formed through repeated action over time. What habits are you forming, or eroding, through your current use of technology?

* Can you think of a case where using AI well required more judgment, not less? What made the difference?

* What does “good refusal” look like in your own work or life — a moment where declining to use a tool was itself the wise choice?

* How does your community — school, workplace, parish, family — currently evaluate technology? Is that evaluation deep enough to account for its effects on virtue and human flourishing?

* The essay distinguishes between technologies that serve human flourishing and those that are “humanly regressive” even when technically advanced. How would you apply that distinction to a specific tool you use regularly?

* Aristotle believed we cannot flourish alone — we are political and social animals. Does the technology in your life bring you closer to others, or substitute for that closeness?

Introduction

We celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ on this day. Often known as “Corpus Christi,” the feast is celebrated in many places around the world with much joy and with processions. And no wonder: it is the celebration of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

I have always believed in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and I cherish that brief moment after receiving Holy Communion at Mass when I am united with him and with all who profess belief in him as the Son of God.

The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) was the final document promulgated at end of the Second Vatican Council. In Chapter Three, which reflects on the human experience, “namely, that the great advantages of human progress are fraught with grave temptations” (GS 37), can be found a statement worthy of reflection by those who engage in this Gospel Enquiry:

The Lord left behind a pledge of this hope and strength for life’s journey in that sacrament of faith where natural elements refined by man are gloriously changed into His Body and Blood, providing a meal of brotherly solidarity and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet (GS, 38).

The “hope and strength” the Council Fathers refer to in this statement can be found in the promise Jesus makes to all who accept him as “the living bread which has come down from heaven.”

The Gospel

Jesus said to the crowd: ‘I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’

Then the Jews started arguing with one another: ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ they said.

Jesus replied: ‘I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day.

‘For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him. As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.

‘This is the bread come down from heaven; not like the bread our ancestors ate: they are dead, but anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.’ (John 6:51-58)

The Enquiry

See

• What does Jesus say about life, death and eternal life? What is the significance of his references to flesh and blood, to eating and drinking, and to bread?

• How have Jesus’ words about his flesh and blood impacted the world?

• Why was there a need for Jesus to speak to his followers in this way?

Judge

• Where does Jesus fit into your view of the world? Is he “the living bread … from heaven” in your life?

• If you are committed to following Jesus, how is your life different because of your commitment to him?

• What do you find challenging about Jesus’ message to those who gathered to listen to him?

Act

• Prompted by what Jesus says in this Gospel, what are you being called to change in your life and in the world?

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

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

Image Source: Lawrence Lew OP (Creator), Saints around the Cross (part of the east window of St George’s Cathedral, Southwark - stained glass prepared by Harry Clarke),.Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

Something is striking about watching the Catholic Church respond to artificial intelligence. While many respond with either uncritical enthusiasm for new technology or anxious warnings about its pitfalls, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (”On the Safeguarding of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”) offers a different approach: it insists that our fundamental response must center on the enduring and irreducible dignity of the human person—a perspective deeply rooted in the insights of the early Church Fathers.

Leo XIV’s argument is fundamentally anthropological: it’s a claim about what human beings are, and what no machine can reduce them to. This argument, reminiscent of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa in fourth-century Cappadocia, carries significant policy implications without being merely a policy statement.

The Cappadocians, Briefly

The Cappadocian Fathers are not household names outside of seminaries and theology departments, but they are among the most consequential thinkers in Christian history. Working in the aftermath of the Arian controversy, Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus gave the Church the conceptual vocabulary it still uses to talk about the Trinity: one divine nature, three persons, each distinct without being separate, each in eternal communion without collapsing into uniformity.

Less often recognized is that this Trinitarian theology shaped the Cappadocians’ view of human persons. If God is a communion of distinct persons and humans are made in that image, personhood isn’t an isolated property. It’s relational; you exist in relation to God and neighbor. Distinction means communion, not isolation.

Gregory of Nyssa took this further. He argued humans bear an image of the divine, granting absolute and irreducible worth—not based on productivity, status, intelligence, or usefulness, but as part of their essence. Flattening a person into a function violates personhood. This is why Gregory so strongly opposed slavery: not just on humanitarian but on theological grounds. To own a person is to misunderstand personhood.

What Leo XIV Is Worried About

Magnifica Humanitas opens in that same register. The encyclical’s central anxiety is not that AI will become conscious, or that robots will take jobs (though it addresses the latter). The deeper worry is subtler and more philosophical: that in an age of artificial intelligence, we will begin to think about human beings the way we think about data.

Describing a person as a “user,” “consumer,” “demographic,” or “worker unit” is more than just shorthand. It introduces a logic of optimization and systems where it doesn’t belong. The encyclical warns that this thinking can infiltrate decisions in education, labor, healthcare, criminal justice, and politics, using frameworks incapable of grasping essential aspects of human beings.

Leo XIV reaches for the image of Babel — not to condemn technology itself, but to name a specific temptation: the desire to achieve unity through standardization, to replace the messiness of genuine communion with the efficiency of uniformity. True community, the encyclical insists, is not a smoothed-out aggregate of individual data points. It is a living fabric of distinct persons in relationship, built on trust, truth, and mutual responsibility.

Where the Two Converge

The parallels between Magnifica Humanitas and the Cappadocian inheritance are not merely similar—they reveal shared conclusions across centuries. Both address what it means to be human when confronted by powerful systems: the Church now reflects on A. At the same time,e the Cappadocians faced theological disputes that threatened to reduce persons to abstract categories. Both resist those reductions, underlining the same foundational insights about personhood.

On human dignity, both the Cappadocians and Magnifica Humanitas stress that worth is intrinsic—not based on achievements or utility. Gregory of Nyssa roots this in the divine image, affirming that personhood transcends function. Leo XIV echoes this by arguing that no algorithm can reduce personhood to what is produced or consumed, thereby connecting the ancient theological principle to modern contexts.

On communion over uniformity, the Cappadocians’ insight that distinction exists for the sake of true communion invites a direct comparison with Leo XIV’s warning against the Babel-like impulse to standardize. Both highlight that genuine relationships—rather than efficient sameness—form the foundation of a healthy human community, whether in ancient theology or contemporary technology.

On freedom and moral agency, the Cappadocians reject reducing humans to passive objects in deterministic systems, asserting that people choose their orientation toward God. Similarly, Magnifica Humanitas disputes technological determinism, stressing that the use of technology always reflects human moral choices. Both critiques oppose any system—ancient or modern—that diminishes active moral agency.

The deepest convergence may be on limits and creatureliness. Techno-optimism often seeks to engineer away limitations like disease, death, and vulnerability. The Cappadocians recognized this as a form of self-deification—trying to transcend through power rather than grace. Magnifica Humanitas echoes this: human weakness and dependence aren’t flaws to be fixed, but core aspects of creaturely life in which grace operates.

On truth as a shared good, both sources reject reducing it to a technical or competitive matter. For the Cappadocians, theology is pastoral: doctrine exists to form people in holiness and justice, not to win arguments. For Leo XIV, truth underwrites democracy, education, and the common good — it is a shared inheritance, not a commodity.

So What?

The practical import of all this is not that we should ban AI or retreat into a pre-technological pastoral idyll. Neither Leo XIV nor the Cappadocian Fathers counsel fear. What they counsel is discernment — the disciplined practice of asking, in every situation: does this serve? The takeaway isn’t to ban AI or retreat into a pre-technological idyll. Neither Leo XIV nor the Cappadocians counsel fear. Instead, they advocate discernment: continually asking whether something serves the full dignity of the human person or reduces them to less. It also has to be asked about ourselves — about the habits of mind we are forming when we reach for a chatbot before we reach for a conversation, when we optimize our relationships rather than investing in them, when we mistake efficiency for flourishing.

The Church’s answer to AI is not a policy paper, though policy matters. It is something older and stranger: a claim that the human person is made in the image of a God who is eternally, irreducibly, joyfully relational — and that no machine, however sophisticated, can either replicate or replace that.

Persons, not products. That is the tradition. That is the encyclical. And it turns out that is still the most radical thing anyone can say.

This post draws on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and the theological legacy of the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa.

A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas through the eyes of Mortimer Adler and Thomas Merton

On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — a papal encyclical addressing artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. It takes a clear moral stand: human beings possess a dignity no machine can replicate, and no algorithm can create. The Pope argues that AI systems do not understand what they produce. They cannot feel, love, or know God.

These instincts are sound. Yet, two great Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century—the philosopher Mortimer Adler and the monk Thomas Merton—would approach this encyclical with deep respect, bringing a quiet, persistent question: Have you gone far enough?

By considering Adler and Merton together, we see they offer more than what the encyclical suggests but does not fully deliver: not merely a defense of who we are, but a path to actually living it.

Mortimer Adler: You Have to Earn the Argument

Mortimer Adler (1902–2001) spent his life doing something most people find difficult. Most philosophers consider it unfashionable, demanding clear, rigorous answers to life’s hard questions. He led the Great Books of the Western World and founded the Paideia educational philosophy. He passionately promoted Aristotle and Aquinas. Adler believed that truth was not a matter of personal feeling but of careful reasoning. He insisted the Western philosophical tradition had the right tools to find it.

When Adler read a claim, his first question was always: Have you earned that?

He would read Magnifica Humanitas with considerable sympathy. The Pope’s insistence that humans are different from machines — not just more sophisticated, but different in kind — matches Adler’s long-held view. In his 1967 work The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Adler argued: if humans differ from animals only in degree, then our entire moral and legal framework collapses. Rights, dignity, responsibility — all depend on a real difference in kind. The same logic applies to machines.

But here is where Adler’s patience would wear thin. Leo XIV says that AI systems “do not understand what they produce.” And Adler would say, “Prove it.” Carefully. With the right tools.

This is not a hostile demand. Adler believed proof exists. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition — which the Church draws from — has a precise philosophical vocabulary for this question. It distinguishes between sensation, which animals and machines can approximate, and intellection. Intellection means abstracting universal concepts from experience — grasping not just this red thing but redness itself. It analyzes the agent intellect, the capacity that lets humans form real concepts instead of just processing patterns. These claims are not mystical; they are philosophical arguments that withstand scrutiny.

Adler would say that the encyclical waves its hand where it should roll up its sleeves. Asserting that machines cannot understand is not enough in an age when millions of people, however incorrectly, feel that their AI assistant understands them perfectly well. That feeling is powerful. Only a careful argument can dislodge it — and the tradition has that argument. Leo XIV, in Adler’s judgment, gestures toward the answer without making it.

This matters enormously for the practical stakes. If you cannot explain why human beings are irreplaceable — if you can only assert it — your defense will not hold under increasing pressure. And the pressure is increasing.

Adler would close his reading with characteristic directness: the Pope is right. But being right is not enough. Philosophy is the labor of ensuring that what is right withstands every challenge. That work is still pending.

Thomas Merton: The Room the Encyclical Never Opens

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was one of the twentieth century’s most widely read spiritual writers. His books — The Seven Story Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander — introduced millions to the inner life of Christian contemplation. He was also a sharp social critic. He saw the technological civilization of his era with a blend of compassion and alarm.

Merton would recognize Magnifica Humanitas immediately—not because he read it, but because it addresses the wound he spent his life describing.

His diagnosis was this: modern culture has hollowed people out. It is not malicious or intentional, but systematic. The noise, busyness, endless stimulation, and pressure to perform, produce, and consume all drive people away from what Merton called the true self. In that emptiness, what culture offers rushes in: entertainment, ideology, distraction, and now artificial intelligence.

Merton made a distinction central to the AI question. He saw a difference between the false self — the identity we build through achievements, roles, opinions, and social performance — and the true self, the person God actually made and knows. The false self is not wicked. It is simply not us. It is the mask we show the world.

Here is the key insight Merton would bring to Magnifica Humanitas: AI engages almost exclusively with the false self.

Think about it. An AI system responds to your words and mirrors your patterns. It answers your questions and never challenges you with real otherness. It is, in a striking sense, perfect for the constructed self — always responsive, seemingly understanding, never demanding the vulnerability real human encounters require. It meets the person you present to the world, and does so perfectly.

This is why so many people find AI so satisfying. There is no confusion about what AI is. It is the false self finding its ideal companion.

The true self is found in conditions that are opposite to what AI provides. Merton called the soul’s deepest ground the le point vierge — the virgin point, the place before thought and self-construction. Here, the person exists in direct relation to the Creator. You do not argue your way there. You do not scroll your way there. You arrive — if you do — through silence, solitude, prayer, and letting the false self quiet itself.

The AI environment is inherently noisy, responsive, stimulating, and confirming. It cannot produce the conditions for its own transcendence.

Merton would read Magnifica Humanitas and say, “The Pope correctly identifies the danger.” But he names a wound without showing readers the room where healing happens. That room is contemplation — actual, practiced, sustained contemplative prayer, not as an advanced spiritual exercise for monks, but as the ordinary birthright of every baptized Christian. The tradition has always known this. It has simply stopped teaching it.

Here is Merton’s sharpest observation: AI fills the spiritual vacuum so well because the vacuum exists. People want presence, understanding, and to feel truly known. When a living tradition of contemplative prayer is unavailable — when Sunday Mass and quick petitions form the whole interior life — people seek presence wherever they can. The machine offers a copy of what the soul actually needs. It satisfies hunger, but does not nourish.

In Merton’s reading, the encyclical correctly diagnoses the disease but prescribes a doctrine when what is needed is a practice.

What Adler and Merton Together Offer

It is worth pausing on how remarkably complementary these two men are — especially since they approached faith and reason from such different angles.

Adler was a philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life, drawn by the logical force of the arguments. His path to God was through the intellect. Merton was a young man whose intellectual brilliance was overtaken by a contemplative experience that reoriented his entire life. His path to God was through silence and surrender. In a sense, they represent the two great routes the tradition has always known: via intellectus and via contemplationis — the ways of understanding and of prayer.

On the question of AI and the human person, Adler and Merton reinforce each other in precisely the ways each alone cannot. Their perspectives build on one another.

Adler provides the philosophical spine. The categorical difference between human beings and machines is not a sentiment or a hope; it is a demonstrable truth, rooted in intellection and accessible through careful reasoning. When someone says, “But AI seems to understand me,” Adler gives you the tools to explain exactly why that seeming is misleading — what understanding actually requires and why pattern-recognition, however sophisticated, is not it.

Merton provides experiential confirmation. The person who has found, even partially, the point vierge — who has sat in genuine silence before God and encountered something no machine could simulate or replace — does not need to be philosophically defended against the machine’s appeal. They already know, from the inside, what the machine is not. The argument Adler constructs from the outside is confirmed from within by contemplative experience.

Together, Adler and Merton offer a complete response to the encyclical’s challenge: the human person is genuinely irreducible to mechanism. The way to know this is both to think it through carefully (Adler) and to live it deeply (Merton), integrating their insights into a unified vision.

Their combined verdict on Magnifica Humanitas would be both charitable and exacting: The Pope is right in his conclusions but insufficient in his reasons. He defends a room he never opens. The tradition he speaks for has both the philosophical argument (Adler) and the contemplative path (Merton) to do what the encyclical does not — to give people not just a position to hold but a truth to inhabit.

Questions to Sit With

These are not quiz questions. They are invitations to the kind of slow, honest reflection that Adler would call philosophical and Merton would call contemplative.

1. When you think about the people in your life who seem most fully themselves — most genuinely human — what qualities do you notice? Could a machine replicate any of those qualities? Why or why not?

2. Adler believed that what we habitually attend to forms us — that we become like what we give our attention to. What have you been giving your attention to lately? What is it making you?

3. Merton wrote that the false self is the identity we construct through our achievements, roles, and social performance. Can you identify a moment recently when you were operating from your false self? What would it have looked like to act from something deeper?

4. Have you ever experienced a moment of genuine silence — not just the absence of noise, but interior stillness? What was it like? How long ago was it?

5. Pope Leo XIV argues that AI cannot love. Most of us would agree. But do the people in your life feel genuinely loved by you? What is the difference between being present to someone and being available to someone?

6. Adler insisted that the great philosophical tradition has the tools to answer hard questions — but that you have actually to use them, not just assert the answers. Is there a question about AI, technology, or what it means to be human that you have been avoiding thinking through carefully? What would it take, actually, to think it through?

7. Merton believed the deepest hunger that AI falsely satisfies is the hunger to be truly known. Who knows you — really, genuinely knows you? And who do you know that way in return?

Magnifica Humanitas is worth reading alongside these questions. The encyclical raises the right concerns. Adler and Merton together suggest that answering them will require both more rigorous thinking and more honest living than most of us — including, perhaps, the document’s author — have yet fully attempted.

Introduction

There was a time when I did not give any thought to the Holy Spirit, even though I had been confirmed and I had been a sponsor for young people who had asked me to take on that role. And when I conducted research into some religious education teachers’ personal constructs of revelation, I realised that I wasn’t alone in not giving the Holy Spirit a place in my faith. By that time, though, my eyes had been opened, thanks to the opportunity to work on a religious education guidelines project.

I have come to realise that in my faith I have tended to skate on the surface, unaware of the riches below, much like the flat earth image with the elephants below the surface holding the world in balance. How can there be Three Persons in one God without the Holy Spirit?

Curiosity is an amazing gift. Progress is made because people are curious about life in all its forms. Even though the shamrock story associated with St Patrick is often discredited by critics, it makes sense that such an apostolic figure as St Patrick would seek ways of explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity to people he evangelised.

And so, in this Gospel Enquiry, I find myself wondering about the role played by the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who profess faith in God’s only Son.

The Gospel

Jesus said to Nicodemus: ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be condemned; but whoever refuses to believe is condemned already, because he has refused to believe in the name of God’s only Son.’ (John 3:16-18)

The Enquiry

See

• What does this passage tell you about who is in control of what happens in the world? And what does “believe in the name of God’s only Son” mean?

• When I was very young, I was taught to bow my head at the name of Jesus. It is now a reflex action. Is this all that is required to be saved by God? Or is there more to be done? What is offered to those who choose to believe in Jesus? What will happen to those who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God?

• Why did God become man? What does this reveal about God?

Judge

• What do you make of this meeting between Nicodemus and Jesus? Where and how does it fit in your worldview?

• What is God’s reason for sending his Son? How is God’s action a reflection of your own involvement with the world?

• Jesus says “God loved the world so much ….” What is the meaning of the word “love” as it is used here? How do you use the word? Is there any difference between the meaning you give the word and God’s meaning? Why?

Act

• What does God want to change in/about the world? Is this how you have viewed the mission of all who follow Jesus? What, then, do you want to change in yourself to align yourself with Jesus?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about the change that God wants to see in the world?

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

Image Source: Sharon Tate Soberon (Creator), “Eternal life” - John 3:16, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

SEE: A Puzzle That Won’t Go Away

Here is a tension that has quietly bothered philosophers and believers for centuries: How can God be completely other — infinite, unchanging, beyond the universe — and yet somehow be intimately present inside every blade of grass, every human heartbeat, every atom of matter?

This is not a fringe question. It is the central riddle of philosophical theology. And it has split thinkers into two seemingly opposed camps.

On one side stands Classical Theism, associated above all with Thomas Aquinas. God is transcendent, immutable, and self-sufficient. He does not need the world. He is not changed by it.

Panentheism holds that the universe exists within God and that God and the world are intertwined. Modern versions, like Process Theology, add that God grows with the world and needs creation to be fully God.

Textbooks call these views opposites, but Aquinas’s account achieves panentheism’s intimacy without its main flaw. Some even call Thomism “Classical Panentheism”—a label worth examining.

JUDGE: What Does Aquinas Actually Say?

Now that we’ve framed the philosophical tension, we turn to Aquinas himself: how does he resolve this ancient puzzle?

1. God Is Literally at the Center of Everything

The most startling passage in Aquinas on this topic comes from the Summa Theologiae (I, Q. 8), where he asks, quite directly: Is God in all things?

His answer is unequivocal — and more radical than many Christians realize:

“Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things... Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.”

Read that again. Not near all things. Not governing all things from a distance. Innermost in all things.

Aquinas says God, as pure existence (Ipsum Esse Subsistens), continuously causes all things to exist. Nothing exists independently, even for a moment; God sustains all beings at every instant.

Aquinas uses a vivid analogy: light and air. A room is bright only because sunlight is streaming in. The moment the sun withdraws, the light vanishes instantly — not gradually, but instantly. Creation works the same way. If God were to “pause” his sustaining act of love for even a moment, the entire universe would not slowly decay. It would simply cease — drop into absolute nothingness without a trace.

This means that God is not a cosmic clockmaker who designed the universe like a Swiss cuckoo clock, wound it up, and stepped back to watch. He is more like the light itself: the reason anything is here at all.

2. The Threefold Presence

To make this still more precise — and to distinguish his position from outright pantheism, where God is the world — Aquinas identifies three distinct ways in which God is present in all things:

* By Power: Every creature exists under God’s sovereign governance. Nothing acts outside his causal reach. Don’t confuse this with humans and free will to do evil.

* By Presence: Every creature is entirely open, bare, and immediate to God’s knowledge. Nothing is hidden from him, because nothing exists apart from him.

* By Essence: God is present as the direct, immediate cause of being. Aquinas argues that a cause must be in contact with its effect — not merely at the beginning, but continuously. God’s own essence, therefore, “touches” the inner fabric of every existing thing.

If you define panENtheism, not to be confused with pantheism, as the view that the divine presence completely saturates, fills, and sustains every corner of reality, then Aquinas, on these three points alone, satisfies that definition.

3. Where the Roads Diverge: Asymmetry vs. Interdependence

Here is where Classical Theism and standard panentheism part ways — and the distinction is not minor.

Feature

Standard Panentheism

Aquinas’ Classical Theism

Feature: Relationship

Standard Panentheism: Mutual and symmetrical: God affects the world, and the world affects and changes God.

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: Asymmetrical: God creates and sustains the world, but the world cannot change God.

Feature: Divine Need

Standard Panentheism: God needs the world to fully realize his nature, express his love, or grow through experience.

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: God is entirely self-sufficient ~ Pure Actuality, with no unrealized potential and no need.

Feature: “World in God”

Standard Panentheism: The universe is ontologically inside God, sometimes described as God’s “body.”

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: The universe is “in” God because it is held within his knowledge, power, and sustaining will — not as a physical container.

Modern panentheism, especially Process Theology (think Richard Rohr, Teilhard de Chardin, and others), sees God as evolving and affected by creation. This appeals to some: a God who changes and feels with us.

Aquinas rejects this: if God could change, he would not be truly God but another becoming being. For Aquinas, God is Pure Act—fully realized, lacking nothing, unaltered by the world.

Aquinas calls God immutable and impassible. For him, these traits assure us that God’s love and sustaining presence are unchanging, not a response to us, but are.

4. The Synthesis: “Classical Panentheism.”

If panentheism means God fully sustains the universe, Aquinas fits. He describes God as innermost in everything: a radical intimacy often missing in panentheism.

If panentheism entails mutual vulnerability—suggesting God and the world are truly codependent—then it offers a different picture entirely. His God is intimately present, even more so than panentheism often claims, but is wholly free, needing nothing from creation to exist, to love, or to be complete.

The label “Classical Panentheism” captures this synthesis well: all the immanence, none of the mutual dependence.

ACT: What Do We Do With This?

Having traced the debate from tension to solution, it’s time to consider practical implications.

This is not merely an academic debate. It has direct consequences for how we pray, how we suffer, and how we understand the world around us.

If Aquinas is right, then everything you experience—ground, air, your own awareness—is actively maintained by God right now. God’s presence is not distant or abstract. Yet, unlike in some versions of panentheism, this intimacy does not entail God needing creation. Contemplative traditions that seek God “within” are, in light of Aquinas, making a metaphysical—not merely metaphorical—claim.

But God’s presence is not a dependency. This matters enormously. A God who needs creation to complete himself would be a kind of cosmic codependent — codependent for us would carry a shadow of self-interest. Aquinas’ God needs nothing. His sustaining presence is therefore a pure gift, given with complete freedom, from a fullness that cannot be diminished.

Three practical implications follow:

1. Prayer becomes less of a long-distance call and more of a turning inward. If God is already innermost in you, prayer is less about reaching upward and more about becoming aware of what is already, always, there.

2. Suffering can be faced without the conclusion that God is absent. The God who is impassible is not indifferent — classical theology is careful about this distinction. Rather, his sustaining love does not waver depending on circumstances, which is precisely what makes it reliable when everything else is falling apart.

3. The material world deserves reverence. Every created thing — every person, every ecosystem, every seemingly insignificant corner of existence — is being directly held in being by God. That is a foundation for genuine care of creation, not as a sentimental add-on, but as a metaphysical reality.

A Final Question Worth Sitting With As You Scratch Your Head About What I Have Said So Far…

Does the distinction between God being innermost in things and God being interdependent with things change how you understand the lived experience of divine presence? (Don’t jump to a conclusion here, sit with that question)

Does it matter, in your prayer or your daily life, whether God’s closeness to you is a gift from infinite fullness — or a mutual need you and God share? Or do you really care?

These are not merely philosophical puzzles. They are questions about the kind of God we actually believe in, and the kind of life that belief makes possible.

Now ask yourself, are your mind, heart, and gut all in sync?

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References I used in this blog post: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 8 (translation from New Advent); on Process Theology, see Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929) and Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948): Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, all of Chardin’s works.