News & Blog

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a moment of genuine civilizational urgency. Its concern for human dignity, its alarm at the displacement of labor, its refusal to treat artificial intelligence as a neutral instrument — all of these are worthy moral interventions. The encyclical asks the right questions. Yet a careful reading alongside of Teilhard de Chardin's ultrahumanism, and the theological tradition that runs from Teilhard through Jung and Tillich, suggests that the encyclical's answers are constrained by a metaphysical framework no longer equal to the evolutionary world it seeks to address. This essay does not dismiss Leo's concerns; it argues that Teilhard provides a more adequate — and ultimately more hopeful — theological grammar for engaging artificial...