Weekly Roundup
Eating with Sinners and Magnifica Humanitas
Today’s Gospel begins with a table scandal and ends with Jesus calling an unnamed, suffering woman “Daughter.” Matthew, the tax collector, the hemorrhaging woman, and Jairus’s child all stand at the edge of belonging in different ways, and Jesus moves toward each of them without hesitation. It also examines a troubling way we expect to experience healing and identity in Jesus’ ministry.
"Daughter"
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
It is an easy question to mishear. Modern readers often assume the Pharisees are asking a moral question. Why would a religious teacher associate with people of questionable character? Why would a holy man spend time with the wrong crowd?
Part One of this series begins with Magnifica Humanitas and asks what kind of humanity the Church is trying to defend in the age of artificial intelligence. The essay focuses on the document’s language of ontological dignity and reads it alongside the Church’s own sacramental imagination..
Magnifica Humanitas Part I - Dignity and AI
This essay is the first in a series exploring Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and the deeper questions it raises about technology, dignity, hierarchy, grace, and the modern world. While the encyclical is framed as a reflection on artificial intelligence, I suspect the most interesting issues lie elsewhere—in the theological assumptions that have shap…
Part Two of this series turns to one of the central tensions in Magnifica Humanitas: the Church rightly critiques Babel’s dream of technological mastery, managed sameness, and human life organized from above, but often does so while passing too quickly over its own long ingestion of Rome. The essay asks what happens when Christianity absorbs Roman habits of hierarchy, universality, law, liturgy, and administrative order, then mistakes those imperial forms for the shape of divine truth itself.
Magnifica Humanitas Part II: Babel, Rome, and Empire.
Part Two of a three-part series on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. While each essay stands on its own, readers new to the series may wish to begin with Part One: “Dignity and AI.”
Monday I will publish the final essay in the Magnifica Humanitas series as well as looking at UFOs alongside Vice President JD Vance’s comment: “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons.”
Thanks for spending time in the Studio with me.
