A Body in Transition: From Center to Institute
We are living through a hinge moment in the human story. Artificial intelligence, planetary crisis, and the steady erosion of shared meaning are not three separate emergencies; they are the same emergency seen from different sides. Each is asking the same question: who, in this century, do we intend to become? It is in the gravity of that question that the Center for Christogenesis is undergoing a transition — from “Christogenesis” to the “World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture.”
Some have asked, why the change? Why does anything change? Because life is energetic, a restless flow of attraction and transcendence — what Teilhard de Chardin called withinness and withoutness. There is an intrinsic dialectic built into nature, a yearning for resolution, for wholeness. On a practical level, that yearning expresses itself in language, and the language we use either opens or closes the door to the world we hope to form.
Teilhard coined “Christogenesis” to name a cosmic process of transpersonal formation — a vision he understood as global, planetary, and stretched across deep evolutionary time. Yet to the non-Teilhardian ear, the word lands as confessional, explicitly Christian, and therefore bounded, even divisive. Teilhard spent his life trying to widen that horizon, elucidating Christogenesis for a world still in formation. The new name does not abandon his vision; it removes the door that kept others outside it.
The deeper reason for the change has less to do with Teilhardian language than with what I have come to see as a crisis of knowing. Science and technology have transformed nearly everything around us — what we make, how we communicate, what we know, even what we are — and yet we continue to educate as if a century or two has not passed. We are forming students for a world that no longer exists. Unless we change the way we think, we will not change the way we act, and we are running out of time to act differently.
Education in the classical sense was formative: a deepening of mind and heart that expanded the whole person toward truth. Higher education today, by contrast, is largely organized around careerism and information streams designed to deliver success rather than wisdom. It produces graduates who can do almost anything and have not been asked what is worth doing. That is not a small failure. It is the failure on which most of the others rest.
The World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture (WISR) is an educational platform dedicated to forming the human person on the level of the Noosphere — the sphere of shared mind and meaning that Teilhard saw emerging across the planet, now intensified beyond his imagining by global communication and the rise of machine intelligence. WISR’s aim is to form the whole person for the whole world of the twenty-first century: to bring science, religion, and culture back into conversation precisely where they have been kept apart, and to take seriously that human beings are not finished. In doing so, WISR carries Christogenesis from concept into lived practice — an evolution from the conceptual to the embodied, from formation to transformation.
This is not an abstract project. One of my undergraduate students recently wrote, “Artificial intelligence forces me to think about the future as more than a technological issue. It is also an ethical, spiritual and evolutionary question.” Our choices shape the direction technology takes; the technology, in turn, will shape what kind of creatures we become. How do we live responsibly with the new forms of intelligence we are bringing into the world? Another student answered with arresting clarity: “The real danger of AI is not that it will take over but that we will use it to avoid the work of figuring out and becoming who we truly are.”
That is the heart of the matter. The real risk of this century is not that machines will think for us; it is that we will let them, and in doing so quietly hand over the labor of becoming human. WISR is built around precisely this point. Only by beginning here — at the level of formation, of who we are willing to become — can we hope to form a global ethics for a converging world. Christogenesis is the process of that formation.
This is why we need your support. Scholarships, faculty, conferences, the infrastructure of a thinking center — these are the ordinary materials out of which extraordinary things are built. True knowledge must lead to love, or it will dissolve into the infinite streams of information that already flood our lives. In the end, only love remains, because only love unites.
A world that does not learn to converge will not, in this age, outlast its divisions. Now we have an opportunity to educate for a new world rising up in our midst and to transform our lives for a world in formation. This is the best of Christogenesis as it yields to WISR, discovering a new God for the new person and a new earth. The past is behind us, and our only true reality is the future. Let us travel together into the future.
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Deep deep bow … I want to help integrate this into Catholic high school religious studies classes.
Thank you, Ilia! Your vision of what we need it right on — formation in and for this new world that is evolving. I’m a retired teacher and also a Catholic who has appreciated the Catholic Church’s educational institutions in my formation. Therefore, it’s easy for me to realize how important formation is for a good life. I hope I can follow you and your new direction. Blessings to all of your team.
I love “ In the end, only love remains, because only love unites.”.
Thank You for everything you are and are becoming. I am greatly encouraged by the possibilities you proclaim. It’s time for the Catholic Church to reflect the truth that we are humans without borders and our cell walls should be as they are in our bodies :fluid, flexible, taking in nourishment. And it is key to allow the cells to release what no longer serves.
I get why the change,still WISR lacks the poetry and vulnerability of Christogenesis…many Thanks for this exacting article.
Thank you so much for this concise information on the reason for changing the name. I have always loved the idea of Christogenesis as a planetary goal and understand its universal nature. Unfortunately many use “Christ” as the last name for Jesus which limits this evolutionary concept. Even the move from “Center” to “Institute” is more expansive.
As a Dominican Sister I am limited in what I can give financially, but also, as a Dominican, I am continually searching for “truth”, believing that it is also evolving as the cosmos evolves. Your work is invaluable for me and my own spiritual development – as well as our common planetary future.
Dear Ilia,
“discovering a new God for the new person and a new earth” Really? What is wrong with the old God Do you not believe in your own concept or what I thought was your concept that we already have an evolutionary God who is at least as clever as you are at changing with the times, but who needs to be put into new words certainly. I found these notes that I took for my own private understanding of what I was reading in The Emergent Christ some time ago. I still find the ideas adequate for my own relationship with God to progress well. I am turning 80, I have managed to remain a practicing Catholic based on your ideas and feminist theologians’ ideas of the Trinity. Do you agree with this idea of God now? “A New God” bothered me. I agree wholeheartedly with the need to correct the language to offer the young. Maybe it is Teilhard who is running out of energy but I don’t think God is.
The Notes:
I think that the post-resurrection Pentecost event implies that God’s creative power continues to generate from the future new life out of an ever newness in love that is always more than the present moment can hold. God is love and God remains forever drawing the Church into an ever-new horizon of love. God ensured a future of newness in love. The innovative appearance of “Christ in us” is God building the Temple of God through a complexity of factors in our individual and collective contributions.
Do you mean new WORDS for the present GOD?
I have followed Teilhard for a very long time even when I didn’t fully understand but intuitively knew there was deep truth in his writing. Now at 80 years of age I am beyond grateful for your continuing to flesh out his wisdom. especially because it is vitally important for me to become the person I was created to be…and I need guidance each day.
so I thank you, Ilia for all you provide
Contrast the “AI created” future person with the “Who we truly are” future person. Help me to see………..
It is unfortunate that this need to press this change does not include the need to uncover truths long hidden from Christianity and Catholics.
While I understand that AI is, and will continue to be, a major threat to education, learning and critical thinking, much of this threat is caused by a populus that is unable, or unwilling, to recognize the flaws within a supposed perfect religion.
If language, meaning and understanding are so important, and I do believe they are as my PhD was written on their importance, then where is The Mother? Where is the recognition of Sophia? Where is the recognition of the Bride of God?
Where is the understanding that as long as the prevailing attitude is that we can rape and pillage the earth and Her people we do not understand ANYTHING about Teilhard and the sacredness of all things.
I understand the need to educate, but I for one do not believe that changing from Center to Institue will help that education. Unfortunately, the Center’s message did not easily translate into a curriculum for primary and secondary schools. These are the schools where minds are shaped.These are minds wide open, inquisitive, creative, and not far from their Mother-Father.
These are the minds to teach as they are the FIRST to touch AI, science and religion.