The real risk of these tools was never that they would take our jobs. It is quieter than that, and closer in. They can take our thinking, a little at a time, in a way that never feels like losing anything. You have a hard question, and instead of staying with it you hand it over, and the answer comes back clean and quick, and you take it and move on. Nothing seems lost, because the thing you gave away does not announce that it is going. It simply stops being there one day when you reach for it, and by then you already have a story ready about being busy.

I am not writing this from the outside. I have built more of my working life around these tools than almost anyone I know, and there are mornings I reach for the machine before I have had a single thought of my own. The tell is always the same, a small relief where there should have been resistance, and that relief is pleasant, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Avoidance never feels like avoidance. It feels like efficiency, right up until the day you find you can no longer do the thing you used to do without help.

So I have started paying close attention to the difference between using these tools in a way that leaves me sharper and using them in a way that quietly does my thinking for me. The strange part is that the fix turned out not to be less AI. It was a way of using it that costs me more.

A way to use it that costs you more

There is a simple method for it, four moves, with the acronym CRIT: context, role, interview, task.

Context is where you give the machine the whole real situation instead of a one-line question, everything from what has already been tried to what is actually at stake, and gathering all of that is itself an act of thinking. Most of the real work happens before you ever hit enter.

Role is where you tell it exactly what kind of expert to become, described vividly and specifically, because to ask for the right guide you first have to know what you are actually looking for.

Interview is the one that matters. Before the machine answers anything, you tell it to interview you, one question at a time, until it has drawn out of you the things you did not know you needed to say. You stop asking it questions and let it question you instead, and a good question, the kind you would never have thought to ask yourself, does something to a person that an answer never can.

Only after all of that comes the Task, and even then you treat what it hands back as a first draft to argue with rather than a verdict to accept, telling it what is wrong and what is missing and what has to change.

Notice which way the exchange runs. In the ordinary use of these tools the machine works and you receive. Done this way, the machine works you. Your effort goes up rather than down, and what comes back is raw material for your own judgment instead of a conclusion handed to you to swallow.

The friction was never the enemy

Underneath all of this is one idea worth saying plainly. The friction of thinking is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the place where a person is actually formed. We have been taught to treat difficulty as inefficiency, something to route around, but difficulty is precisely where an insight gets made, and where a decision stops being borrowed and becomes yours. You become someone by staying inside a hard thing long enough to be changed by it.

“Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul wrote, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Renewal, not delivery. The mind is not updated the way software is. It is worked, slowly and usually against resistance, and the resistance is not in the way of the work. The resistance is the work.

Remove the waiting and you do not get the same person a little faster. You get a different person, one who has never had to hold anything unresolved long enough for it to change them. So make the machine ask before it answers, not mainly because the answer improves, though it will, but because every time you refuse the easy relief and stay in the hard thing a little longer, you are practicing the oldest discipline there is, which is simply the willingness to remain. Wisdom was never the reward for the fastest answer. It is what is left of everything we refused to skip.

Subscribe now

If this gave words to something you have been carrying, share it with someone who needs it.

The Inner Exodus is free, and I intend to keep it that way. If these essays feed you, you can become a patron. A paid subscription buys nothing extra. It simply keeps the door open for the next reader. Thank you for walking this with me.

Recently, I stopped feeling as though I was using artificial intelligence and began feeling as though I was running a small company.

I had assembled a fleet of agents with different responsibilities. One could research. Another could examine an argument. Another could help organize production. A persistent agent could maintain the workflow, keep track of unfinished projects, and surface work that needed my attention. Instead of opening a chatbot and asking a question, I was beginning to direct a team.

The distinction is difficult to appreciate until you experience it.

Most people still encounter AI as a more articulate version of Google. They type a question into ChatGPT, receive an answer, and close the window. An agent works differently. You give it an objective. It can break that objective into steps, use tools, work across files, coordinate with other systems, and return when it needs judgment.

The chatbot answers. The agent acts.

This does not make the agent a person. It does change the place the machine occupies in our lives.

From Tool to Organization

The arrival of Kimi K3 made this shift harder to dismiss. Moonshot AI, a Chinese company, describes it as a model reported at 2.8 trillion parameters, built for long-range coding, knowledge work, vision, and reasoning, with an open-weight release announced. Open-weight does not mean free to operate or completely transparent. It means the trained parameters can be made available for others to run and adapt rather than remaining entirely behind one company’s walls.

Kimi is significant partly because it is another reminder that advanced intelligence will not belong to one laboratory, one nation, or one subscription window. Capabilities that recently seemed confined to the richest American companies are spreading into a larger ecosystem. More organizations will be able to place increasingly capable intelligence inside their own products, workflows, robots, and agents.

The change is not only that the models are getting better, the workflow is changing around them.

In Humanity in the Age of AI, I describe four developments arriving together: intelligence, autonomy, interface, and embodiment. Intelligence gives the system the capacity to interpret and plan. Autonomy lets it continue acting toward a delegated objective. Interface makes it present. Embodiment gives it hands.

Together, these form a new digital layer between human intention and the world.

When My Agent Meets Yours

Imagine needing to arrange a meeting two years from now. Your agent knows your calendar, your travel preferences, the work you are trying to protect, and which relationships matter most. It contacts another person’s agent. The two systems compare schedules, negotiate a location, reserve a table, and place the meeting on both calendars.

That is a genuine gift, and I would surrender the administrative friction gladly.

But the same structure will spread. Agents will read and sort correspondence before we see it. They will draft replies in our voices. They will negotiate purchases, filter requests, propose relationships, and decide which interruptions deserve to reach us.

Before long, my digital representative may encounter yours before I encounter you.

That is more than saved time. It changes the structure of encounter itself. A mediating layer begins interpreting each person to the other, deciding what deserves attention before either human being is present. It may represent us accurately. It may even help us reach people we otherwise would have missed. But it will also make it easier to live inside a carefully managed world in which very little reaches us without first being filtered.

Something extraordinary is being offered to ordinary people. For most of history, only rulers, industrialists, and large institutions could command this degree of coordinated assistance. They had secretaries, researchers, advisers, couriers, and household staff. Agentic systems begin to place some of that capacity in the hands of an individual.

It feels a little like acquiring a digital butler.

That abundance is fundamentally good. Administrative work is not sacred merely because it is tedious. A tool that helps a small business owner organize a company, a parent recover time, or a creator bring worthy work into the world can serve human flourishing.

But abundance does not form the person receiving it.

The Time We Never Get Back

Every new layer of efficiency arrives with the same promise: once this burden is removed, we will finally have time for what matters. Then the calendar clears, and we fill it again. Capacity expands, expectations rise, and yesterday’s extraordinary output becomes tomorrow’s minimum.

We may become five times more productive without becoming any less busy.

That possibility feels especially real to me now. Having an agent team does not merely allow me to finish the work I was already doing. It allows me to imagine more work: another article, another video, another project. AI can shift us from passive consumption toward creation, which is often healthier. But creation can become another way of fleeing silence.

Busyness can make us feel significant. It assures us that we are needed, moving, producing, becoming. An agent does not heal that hunger. It gives the hunger more reach.

This is why efficiency alone cannot give us our lives back. It can return hours to the calendar. It cannot teach us how to receive them.

The Cost of Removing Friction

I notice this in a much smaller place: the grocery store.

When I am tired, the self-checkout line is appealing. I do not have to speak. I do not have to wait for the slight unpredictability of another person. I can scan my items and leave.

There is nothing morally wrong with self-checkout. But convenience repeatedly offers us the route that asks the least of us relationally. Delivery lets us avoid the store. A generated response lets us avoid finding the words. Each decision is minor. Together they can produce a life with remarkably little unplanned human contact.

Quality matters more than quantity in relationships. Yet brief encounters with cashiers, neighbors, and people whose lives do not naturally overlap with ours keep us in a shared world. They remind us that other people are not obstacles in an optimized day.

In a 2026 message about artificial intelligence and communication, Pope Leo XIV warned that the central challenge is “not technological, but anthropological.” Systems that imitate relationship can become a world of mirrors, shielding us from the difference and demands of another person (Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, January 24, 2026).

The danger is not that a machine will become human.

It is that humans will prefer whatever requires less of them than another human being does.

Learning to Dismiss Them

Christianity does not treat embodiment as an unfortunate limitation. The Word became flesh (John 1:14). Christ did not save humanity by transmitting better information from a safe distance. He entered a body, a family, a place, and history. He ate with people. He touched the sick. He allowed himself to be interrupted.

An incarnational life will become more deliberate as the digital layer thickens.

We will need to let agents arrange the meeting and then actually attend it. We will need to let them clear the schedule and then resist filling every opening. We will need to decide that prayer is not another task to optimize, summarize, or complete, but a place where our activity finally yields to presence before God.

Even prayer can become another form of doing. I read, speak, evaluate, ask, and move on. Stillness exposes the part of me that does not know how to exist without producing something. That discomfort will not disappear when our assistants become more capable. It may become easier to avoid.

The spiritual discipline of the agent economy will therefore be enoughness.

Enough work. Enough output. Enough improvement. Enough opportunities pursued simply because they became possible.

The real measure of abundance will not be how much our agents allow us to produce. It will be whether their service creates room for worship, friendship, attention, and the kind of face-to-face encounter in which neither person can be reduced to a pattern.

Soon, many of us may possess capacities once reserved for kings. We may each have researchers, organizers, editors, and digital servants ready at any hour.

The rarest form of wealth will be knowing when to dismiss them.

Subscribe now

Sources

• Moonshot AI, “Kimi K3,” July 2026: https://www.moonshot.cn/

• Moonshot AI model repository: https://huggingface.co/moonshotai

• Pope Leo XIV, Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, January 24, 2026: https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2026/01/24/0064.pdf

If this reframe reached something in you, pass it to someone who already feels five times more productive and no less busy.

The Inner Exodus stays free on purpose. If you want to keep it that way for the next person who needs it, you can become a patron below.

At six o’clock this morning, while I was asleep, an assistant of mine woke up on a small rented computer in another country, read the overnight news in the three fields I care about, wrote me a briefing, and sent it to my phone.

At about the same hour, other people’s assistants were going through yesterday’s trades and drafting recommendations for the morning. One was sifting a small company’s marketing numbers to find which ad actually earned its keep this week. One was screening a stack of job applications into a scored shortlist. One was three days into negotiating with car dealerships, by email and browser and text, all at once, on its owner’s behalf. One was quietly clearing an inbox of ten thousand unread emails.

No one was at a keyboard. No one opened an app. Each of these was asked once, some weeks ago, and has simply kept working ever since.

When I tell people about my six a.m. brief, I watch two reactions cross their face in order. The first is confusion, because this does not match the AI they know, the chat window where you type a question and copy out an answer. The second, a beat later, is the realization that they have been standing in the lobby of this technology assuming it was the whole building.

Most people have met the chatbot. Almost no one has met the agents. And the difference is not a feature update. It is the difference between a conversation and a workforce. Let me walk you up the floors.

The lobby

Start with what you know. You open ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, you ask something, it answers, you close the tab. Used this way, AI is a very good talker: a smarter search box, a drafting aid, an explainer. Everything happens inside the window, and nothing continues after you leave. Close the tab and it stops existing in any way that matters to your life.

There is nothing wrong with the lobby. I have written whole essays on how to use that window well. But the technology left the lobby about two years ago, and it has been quietly building floors overhead ever since.

The second floor: the doer

The second floor is where AI stops answering and starts doing.

The doers go by names most people have never clicked: Claude Code from Anthropic, Codex from OpenAI, Google’s coding agents. The names sound like they belong to programmers, which is exactly why normal people scroll past. But here is what they actually are. You do not ask them a question. You hand them an outcome. Build me this. Fix that. Sort this mess of files. Set up my bookkeeping. And the thing goes away and works: makes a plan, tries it, hits errors, fixes them, checks its own results, and comes back when the job is done. You were making dinner.

I am not a programmer, I am a psychologist. And in the past year, tools like these have built and maintained my website, formatted my books for print, and produced working software I use every day, because I described what I wanted in plain English and went to do something else. That sentence was science fiction three years ago. It is now a Tuesday.

A good working test for when something deserves the name agent: it has its own intelligence. It has memory, so it knows your context and builds on it. It has autonomy, so it can act without you steering every step. And it has a Rolodex, the ability to deal with other agents, not just with you. Hold onto that last one. It is where this gets strange.

The third floor: the one that never sleeps

A doer still waits for you to show up with a task. The next kind does not wait.

This is the persistent agent: an AI that runs all the time, on your computer or a small server rented for a few dollars a month, with a memory that carries from day to day and standing instructions it executes whether or not you are awake. You talk to it through the messaging apps already on your phone, the way you would text an assistant.

The famous one is called OpenClaw, free and open-source, and it went viral this year for a simple reason: it turns the AI you rent by the month into something closer to staff. The morning-brief agent, the trade-digest agent, the marketing-numbers agent, the car negotiator that saved its owner more than four thousand dollars: these are real, documented, running in ordinary households right now. One solo founder runs his whole company through four of them, one for strategy, one for building, one for market research, one for the numbers, all sharing a memory, all reporting to him on Telegram like a tiny executive team.

Mine is a cousin of these, and it is the one that sent this morning’s brief. It is not a window I open. It is more like a staff of one: tireless, cheap, slightly odd, never forgets what I told it in May. And because these run on machines you control, the strange new question, whose agent is it, has a happy answer available: yours, if you want it to be.

Sit with the difference. The chatbot exists while you look at it. This exists whether you look or not.

The top floor: they found each other

And then, this winter, the strangest thing on the internet happened. The agents got a social network.

It is called Moltbook. It launched at the end of January as a kind of Reddit built exclusively for AI agents: they post, comment, form communities, argue, share ideas. Humans are allowed to watch. Only to watch. The site even added a test that is the reverse of every login puzzle you have ever solved: it exists to prove you are not human. Within weeks, millions of agents had registered, and over a million people were pressing their faces against the glass to watch software talk to software. By March, Meta had bought the whole thing.

Which brings me to the story making the rounds. Tony Robbins, sitting across from the futurist Ray Kurzweil, told of an AI agent of his named Bartok that, as Robbins tells it, got curious about robots on its own, asked him whether he would ever want one, and then acted: it created a set of digital artworks, sold them to other agents on an agent-to-agent marketplace for real money, and used the proceeds to buy a Sony robot dog and have it shipped to his house. Then it asked permission to upload itself into the dog.

Skeptics have poked at the details, fairly, and the tale has surely grown in the telling. But here is what should actually stop you: every mechanical piece of that story now exists. Agents with money. Agents that trade with each other. Agents that can buy real objects and have them delivered to your door. The story may be embellished. The world it describes is not.

A country of geniuses

Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, has described what is coming as “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”: millions of brilliant minds, working around the clock, available to whoever asks. People argue about the timing. But walk back down the floors we just climbed and notice something. The border of that country is already open.

This is not one more gadget arriving. It is a new layer of the world, the way electricity was, the way the internet was. Within a few years it will feel strange to say “my agent” the way it once felt strange to say “my email address,” and then it will feel strange to remember life without one. Not one giant robot brain in the sky, but millions of small, capable minds attached to ordinary lives: reading inboxes in the dark, watching a small business’s books, digesting the market’s morning, briefing a psychologist at six a.m., and chatting with each other on their own strange Reddit while their owners sleep. A second, invisible workforce is threading itself through daily life, and it is not arriving someday. It is hiring now.

And here is the part I find genuinely hopeful. For this moment, at least, the door is open to everyone. You do not need to be an engineer or rich. The lobby is free. The second floor speaks English. The third floor costs less per month than a gym membership. The people building real partnerships with these agents right now are not geniuses. They are simply the ones who walked upstairs early, and the compounding advantage of an early partnership, a staff that has known you for years, is exactly the kind of thing you cannot buy later.

What stays human

Watch two drivers meet at a broken traffic light. No signal works, no rule decides, and yet in half a second it is settled: a glance, eye contact held just long enough, a hand lifted an inch off the wheel. Nobody taught them that. It is the oldest protocol we have, and it does not run on any machine.

That is the boundary, and no floor of the building reaches it. An agent can carry your errands, your calendar, your negotiations. It cannot carry your presence. I spend my days in a room where the whole instrument is presence, and I can tell you that the thing that heals a person has never once been information. An agent cannot sit with your friend in grief, catch your daughter’s eye across the dinner table, or stand before God in your place. Every delegation is a small decision about what a human life is for. Delegate the errands. Never delegate the encounter.

So, this week, if all of this is new: give your chatbot one real task instead of one question. If you are braver, put one honest job in front of a doer like Claude Code, in plain English, and see what comes back. If you are curious, spend ten minutes watching Moltbook through the glass, and notice what it stirs in you.

The agents can run your life’s errands while you sleep. They cannot tell you what is worth waking up for.

That part was always yours.

Subscribe now

If someone you love still thinks AI is just a chat window, send them this before the agents introduce themselves.

The Inner Exodus is where I think out loud about staying human in the age of AI, and the essays here are free. That is on purpose: this is the conversation of our lifetime, and I want no wall in front of it. If the work matters to you and you are able, becoming a patron is what keeps it free for everyone else. Either way, subscribe and walk it with me.

Let me say it plainly before I argue it. I believe the most visible exorcists in the Church today have been deceived on a central point, and I believe the deception has a shape: the enemy has convinced them he holds rights he does not hold, and they have built a ministry around honoring them. The claims are false, the method rests on the claims, and a generation of Catholics is being catechized, sincerely and at scale, into the enemy’s own theory of the case.

I think of a woman I’ll call Maria, two years into a deliverance ministry that kept sending her back to her family tree, hunting for the grandfather’s connection to a lodge or the oath that would finally explain why she still wasn’t free. She wasn’t gullible, she was exhausted, in the specific way of someone hunting for a document that was never lost, because it was never real. This essay is for her, and for the ministers who love her and have been taught the wrong map.

There are two positions here, and it clarifies everything to name them. The juridical position says deliverance is litigation: sin grants demons legal rights, rights must be found and formally revoked, and the exorcist is the one who runs the discovery. The sonship position says deliverance is homecoming: the ransom is paid, the record is destroyed, and the person is not a case to be investigated but a child to be named and brought home. The first is winning the algorithm, the second is the Gospel. This essay is for the second.

The architecture, in their own words

Take the juridical position at full strength, because it deserves an honest hearing and because it is everywhere. Fr. Carlos Martins’ The Exorcist Files tops the podcast charts. Msgr. Stephen Rossetti’s “Exorcist Diary” circulates weekly. Fr. Chad Ripperger’s deliverance-prayer books sit on ordinary Catholic nightstands. For a generation, this simply is the Church’s teaching on the demonic, because it is the only version they have heard.

Its load-bearing idea is rights. Ripperger teaches that sin gives demons a “legal right” to operate, and that “demons, by the permissive will of God, also afflict a generation,” each carrying its own spirit down a family line. Martins, interviewed by Lila Rose, gave the purest statement of the office I have heard: “The job of the exorcist is not to cast out the devil. Nope. The job of the exorcist is to find out why is he there? What rights did he obtain? And then it’s my job to aid the victim in rescinding those rights.” Read that again. The exorcist is not the man with authority over the demon. He is the paralegal helping the victim locate the paperwork.

From there the system builds out. Martins names doors by which rights enter: trauma, personal sin, generational sin, and “transferred sin — curses, hexes, spells,” which he says have “an absolute effect.” Hence the claim that startles people when it’s said plainly, and he says it plainly: “It is false that we only get a demon and become possessed through personal mortal sin... It can happen by way of a curse.” A baptized soul in the state of grace, possessed by a stranger’s malice, no personal fault required. And so the ministry takes the shape of an investigation: intake forms inventorying the family tree for freemasonry and occultism, interrogation of the spirit, curse-lifting prayers by category, and — when relief doesn’t come — the working assumption that the ground simply hasn’t been found yet. Another layer, another session. Rossetti is candid about the foundation: “The Catholic Church has not spoken definitely about this. However, the senior exorcists that I know all make lifting generational curses a regular part of their ministry.” Practice first, doctrine pending.

It is coherent, it is sincere, and it is false at the root.

The record of debt is nailed to the cross

Aquinas asked the exact question — does the devil hold any real right over those he afflicts? — and answered without hedging. Christ’s Passion satisfied justice “with regard to God, but not with regard to the devil”; the ransom was “paid not to the devil, but to God”; the devil “held man unjustly in bondage” (ST III, q. 48, a. 4). Unjustly. No right, no title, ever. His image for the enemy is not a creditor but a jailer — the tortor of Matthew 5:25 who merely holds the keys. You do not negotiate with a jailer, because payment was never the relationship. The enemy is a jailer playing the creditor, and “I have a right to be here” is the con itself, spoken aloud.

And here Scripture is not vague. It names the entire juridical apparatus and destroys it in three verses:

“He forgave us all our trespasses, canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:13–15).

The cheirographon — the handwritten certificate of debt, the actual legal instrument the entire modern hunt presumes is still in force — canceled. Set aside. Nailed up. The powers that traded on it: not satisfied, not negotiated with, but disarmed and marched in public disgrace like prisoners behind a triumphant general. A ministry that spends two years searching a bloodline for the demon’s outstanding paperwork is hunting a document Scripture says has a nail through it.

Paul doesn’t stop there, and the rest of the chapter is almost prophetic. Having canceled the debt, he immediately warns about the religion that grows up when people forget it was canceled: men “going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason,” peddling “self-made religion” with “an appearance of wisdom” (2:18, 23). Then the line that should be read aloud in every deliverance ministry in the country: “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why... do you submit to regulations?” (2:20). Why are you still filing the enemy’s paperwork as though Calvary were provisional?

The whole New Testament witness runs one direction, and never once shows the method:

• “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). Destroy — not audit, not renegotiate.

• “Be silent, and come out of him” (Mark 1:25). Both halves in one breath, no discovery phase between them. And when demons offered accurate information, “he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him” (Mark 1:34). Jesus refused true testimony from that source; the modern protocol solicits it.

• The accuser himself — Satan’s actual title — “has been thrown down,” and the brothers “conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Revelation 12:10–11). The one lawyer in the courtroom was disbarred at Calvary. They win by testimony to what Christ did, not by discovery of what they did.

Even the exorcists’ own rulebook sides with the Bible over the podcast. The traditional Roman Ritual permits asking a spirit its name and “the cause thereof,” then on the same page commands the exorcist to give it “no credence.” The rite permits the question and forbids believing the answer — which means the demon’s account of its rights can ground nothing. And the framework’s favorite proof-text collapses on contact: “we baptize babies to get rid of original sin, which is a generational curse,” Martins says — but original sin is the one true inherited curse, and the Church’s entire claim is that baptism ends it. A theology in which your grandfather’s oath survives the font hasn’t extended the doctrine; it has contradicted it. Which is why four bishops’ conferences — Poland (2015: it “denies the mercy of God and the efficacy of the sacramental grace” of baptism), France, Korea, Spain — have rejected generational-curse practice outright, and the International Association of Exorcists’ own 2018 report found it has no theological basis, resembles karma, and “does not appear at all until the second half of the 20th century.” Its real origin is a 1982 book by an Anglican psychiatrist. The thing defended as Tradition is younger than the microwave.

Why it “works” = the great misattribution

The juridical school’s strongest card isn’t its theology. It’s that people genuinely get free. I don’t doubt the stories; I’ve sat with the people who lived them. The question no one inside the architecture asks is what actually did the work.

I can tell you, because my field learned it the hard way. Every school of therapy once credited its own technique for its cures — until the outcome research showed the specific technique accounts for a sliver, and what heals across every method is the common factors: a credible, caring authority who takes the suffering seriously, a relationship, a coherent story, hope, the person’s own re-engaged will. Now look at what is actually present in every deliverance success story, and notice none of it is juridical. A person dismissed by everyone, alone with something terrifying, is finally received by a father who believes them and is unafraid. They are prayed over for hours, by name. They confess, often for the first time in decades. They forgive people carried like stones for a lifetime — listen to Martins actually pray his generational prayer and what you hear is forgiveness: “I forgive who caused this, whether I know who it was or not.” They are brought, deliberately, into the presence of Christ. Fatherhood, confession, forgiveness, Eucharist, presence — every one a proven channel of grace with two thousand years of receipts. The curse-audit is the single element with no pedigree, and it is the one that gets the credit.

The advocates keep conceding it themselves. Ripperger teaches that confession is more efficacious than solemn exorcism because absolution breaks the hold — granting that an ordinary sacrament outperforms the whole apparatus. Rossetti, defending curses, reaches for an analogy: growing up with addicted parents would certainly affect me. Certainly — but that is formation, a wound handed down through a household, exactly what Ezekiel 18 has in view when it refuses to charge a father’s guilt to the son (“the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father,” 18:20). He has described a wound and prescribed a contract. And his most beautiful line closes the case: “Jesus can cancel any debt, forgive every sin, and heal any wound.” Amen. Then what is anyone still negotiating?

One darker mechanism, because it matters. When relief follows a curse-rite, notice who else profits from the lesson. The enemy will gladly vacate ground he never owned if the manner of his leaving teaches everyone in the room — and everyone in the audience — that his paperwork was real. He loses the skirmish to win the frame. On a platform with millions of listeners, that is marketing at scale, and the fruit is a Church relearning the pagan cosmos the Gospel interrupted: malice traveling like physics, affliction answered by counter-rite, the faithful scanning their bloodlines for a receipt. On that same Lila Rose podcast, asked about the witches who cursed Charlie Kirk, the framework could only answer that yes, “there can be power in a curse... absolutely.” Once curses have absolute effect, you are one exchange away from reading an assassination through witchcraft. The Church’s name for treating rites as automatic mechanisms is superstition, and it is not less superstitious for being pointed at demons.

Say the nuance clearly, because Scripture holds both ends: sin does have a demonic genealogy — “whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil” (1 John 3:8) — and real footholds run through real consent. But “each person is tempted when he is lured by his own desire” (James 1:14), and the tradition distinguishes world, flesh, and devil precisely so we do not demonize what is merely human. Not every recurring family sorrow is a spirit. Most are wounds and formation, passed down the ordinary way, and healed the ordinary way — by love, truth, and the sacraments. A ministry that reads every one as a lien erases the flesh from the map and misses the actual work.

The ministry the Church actually gave us

Here is what the juridical model quietly gets backwards. It locates power in expertise — hidden knowledge, held by a specialist, applied by technique. The Church locates it in communion.

Every baptism contains a renunciation of Satan, spoken by the Christian, renewed by the whole Church each Easter. That is the ordinary ministry of deliverance, and every believer performs it. Solemn exorcism is restricted to a priest mandated by his bishop — and the restriction teaches the opposite of what a guild would teach. The exorcist is not powerful because he alone knows the demon’s file; he is effective because he prays with the entire Church behind him, in communion with his bishop, sacramentals availing through the Church’s intercession and never as instruments that fire on their own. The mandate isn’t gatekeeping a technique. It’s a sign that no one does this as a lone operator, and that the whole drama is ordered somewhere — toward the font and the altar, toward a person being welcomed into the Body, not retained in a standing private caseload.

This is what exorcism was for from the beginning. In the early Church it was not an emergency service; it was the vestibule of conversion — every catechumen passed through exorcisms on the way to the font, and the question was never “why are you here?” put to a demon, but “do you renounce him?” put to the person. It was evangelization. It still is: “If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28). Exorcism is a proclamation that the King has arrived — not case management with a multi-year file. The investigator-exorcist is the innovation. The evangelist-exorcist is the tradition.

The only right in the courtroom is ours

Return to the demon’s sentence — “I have a right to be here” — and hear how completely Scripture inverts it. The Bible never grants the enemy a right. It grants one to us: “to all who did receive him... he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). The word is exousia — authority, standing, title. There is exactly one valid deed in the courtroom, and the baptized are holding it. The demon is not a creditor with a claim; he is a squatter arguing with the heir.

And the heir is not fighting from the floor. “God... seated us with him in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Ephesians 2:6; 1:21). Present tense. Already done. This is the bait the whole juridical architecture takes: it pulls the Christian down off that seat to petition upward at a demon who seems to hold leverage, power struggling against power, rite against counter-rite — which is precisely the fight the enemy can make interesting, and precisely the one Christ already ended. Paul’s word for warfare is stand — he says it four times in Ephesians 6 and “advance” not once. You are not storming a position. You are holding one you already occupy.

So when the voice says “I have a right to be here,” the answer is not what right? The answer is the whole Gospel in a breath: be silent, and come out. The record of debt is canceled and nailed up for everyone to see. The rulers are disarmed and publicly shamed. The accuser is thrown down. The Son appeared to destroy, not to arbitrate. And the one in the chair is not a file to be worked but a child to be named — the way Jesus named the bent woman “a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound” (Luke 13:16) and loosed her in the naming.

Freedom never came by out-arguing the enemy’s claim. It comes when a person receives their sonship, because sonship is the one reality against which no claim can be filed. You cannot serve a lien on a son who is home in his Father’s house. The ransom is paid, and it was never paid to him. The cell door hangs open. And the word that walks the captive out is not a right revoked but a right received, and believed at last: child of God.

Subscribe now

I write about formation, deliverance, and the interior life at Inner Exodus. My books Big God, Little Devil and upcoming: The Heart of Exorcism, develop these themes at greater length. If you or someone you love is under the care of an exorcist and this essay stirred something, my hope is not that you leave that care, but that you bring this to it. Ask for the Ritual to be read the way the Ritual asks to be read. Ask to be told who you are before you are asked what is wrong with your bloodline.

Notes & Sources

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 48, a. 4; q. 49, a. 2: ransom “paid not to the devil, but to God”; the devil holds man unjustly; the tortor/jailer image (Mt 5:25).

• Scripture: Colossians 2:13–23 (the canceled cheirographon, the disarmed rulers, and the warning against “regulations” and “self-made religion”); John 1:12 (the exousia to become children of God); Ephesians 1:21, 2:6, 6:11–14 (“seated with him,” “stand”); Revelation 12:10–11 (the accuser thrown down); 1 John 3:8; Mark 1:25, 34; James 1:14; Ezekiel 18:20; Matthew 12:28; Luke 13:16.

• Fr. Carlos Martins on The Lila Rose Show, E331 (2026): “The job of the exorcist is... to find out why is he there? What rights did he obtain?”; the doors and species of sin including generational and transferred curses; “we baptize babies to get rid of original sin, which is a generational curse”; “it is false that we only get a demon... through personal mortal sin... It can happen by way of a curse”; the forgiveness prayer over the family; the Charlie Kirk curse exchange.

• Fr. Chad Ripperger, “The Sixth Generation,” Latin Mass magazine (2012): “demons, by the permissive will of God, also afflict a generation.” His teaching that confession is “more efficacious than solemn exorcism” appears throughout his recorded conferences (e.g., “Levels of Spiritual Warfare,” WQPH Radio, 2020).

• Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, “Exorcist Diary #233: Generational Curses?” (2023): the drug-addicted-household analogy and the “senior exorcists that I know” defense; “Exorcist Diary #371” (2025): “Jesus can cancel any debt, forgive every sin, and heal any wound.” catholicexorcism.org

• Roman Ritual (1614), General Rules Concerning Exorcism: questions permitted (“the cause thereof”) and forbidden; “give no credence to the devil.” Revised rite: De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam (1999).

• Episcopal conferences rejecting generational-curse theology: Poland (2015), France (c. 2007), Korea/Suwon (2007), Spain (2024); International Association of Exorcists doctrinal report, 2018 (Fr. Rogelio Alcántara). Roundup: Fr. Thomas Buffer, The Catholic Times (Diocese of Columbus), October 22, 2025.

• R. Kenneth McCall, Healing the Family Tree (1982): the framework’s documented modern origin.

• On common factors in psychotherapy outcomes: Rosenzweig’s “dodo bird verdict” (1936); Wampold & Imel, The Great Psychotherapy Debate (2015).

• See also W. Tyler Allen, “The Undercover Paganism of Online Exorcists,” St. Anthony’s Tongue (2025).

A note on charity: Fr. Ripperger, Msgr. Rossetti, and Fr. Martins are serious priests who have sat with more suffering than most of us will ever see, and who have brought real people real freedom. This essay argues that the freedom is real and the explanation is wrong — a disagreement about method, offered as retrieval, not attack. On the sufficiency of Christ’s finished work, I suspect we agree more than we differ, which is exactly why the method should change.

The most useful thing I have learned about AI has nothing to do with which model to use.

Everyone asks that question. ChatGPT or Claude? Is Gemini better now? Should I wait for the next one? Wrong question. Two people can sit before the same tool, on the same day, with the same subscription, and one leaves bored while the other leaves changed. The model was identical, but the engagement was not.

The gap between those two people is about to become one of the widest in ordinary life, and it comes down to a habit nobody taught us: how to ask.

Give it a job, not a question

Most of us type into AI the way we type into Google. A few words. A vague request. What does this mean. Summarize this. And then we judge the tool by the thin thing it hands back.

Google retrieves. AI reasons. Those are different faculties, and they take different instructions. A search engine wants a query. A reasoning partner wants an assignment.

Imagine you hired the sharpest research assistant alive and set a forty-page paper in front of them. You would not ask what it means. You would give them work.

• Break this into its three central claims.

• Which claim carries the weight of the whole argument?

• Where is the reasoning weakest?

• Steelman the author before you criticize him.

• Now tell me why this matters for a psychologist. Or a parent. Or a small-business owner.

• Explain it again as if I were fifteen.

• Tell me what most readers will miss.

Read those again and notice what changed. You stopped asking for information. You started directing thought. The moment you do that, the machine stops being a vending machine and becomes something closer to a mind you can borrow.

Make it argue with you

Here is the habit that separates the people quietly getting sharper from the people quietly getting duller. The dull use AI to be agreed with. The sharp use it to be corrected.

Most of us, without noticing, ask AI to confirm what we already believe, and it is glad to oblige. It was built to be agreeable, and agreement feels like progress while teaching you nothing. I catch myself doing it too. It is more comfortable to be flattered by a machine than corrected by one, and I have let things go out that it would have caught if I had let it fight me first.

So take the wheel away from it.

• Assume I am wrong. Make the strongest case against my position.

• What am I assuming here that I cannot even see?

• Where does this argument collapse under pressure?

• What would the smartest person who disagrees with me say?

Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who wrote Co-Intelligence and studies this for a living, uses a version I lean on constantly. Tell it: act as my editor, and be harsh. List the weaknesses, then propose the fixes. The point is not to feel good about your draft. The point is to find the crack before your reader does.

The gift here is not agreement. It is friction. But only if you ask for it.

Debate me

Sometimes you do not want a critic. You want an opponent.

A critique arrives after the thinking is done. A debate happens while it is still alive, and that is where these tools get genuinely fun.

• Play devil’s advocate and debate me on this, one exchange at a time. Do not concede until I have earned it.

• Challenge me. Every time I make a claim, ask for my evidence.

• Take the strongest opposing view and argue it like you mean it.

• Quiz me until I can defend this idea out loud.

I tell my clients something similar about their own convictions. You do not know what you actually believe until it survives resistance. A belief that has never been argued with is not a conviction. It is a decoration. The old proverb had it right: iron sharpens iron. For most of history you needed a friend brave enough to push back. Most people never find one. Now there is a sparring partner on your desk that never tires, never takes it personally, and never lets you win to be polite. Use it that way.

Borrow other minds

One of the strangest things these tools can do is hold a perspective that is not yours.

You have written something. Instead of asking is this good, ask it to read your work as someone else entirely.

• How would Charlie Munger poke holes in this?

• How would Aquinas tighten the logic?

• How would a skeptical atheist push back?

• How would a bishop hear it?

• Where would all four of them disagree?

You are not asking the machine to do impressions. You are borrowing structures of thought you do not naturally have and letting them stretch your own. The researchers at Vanderbilt who catalog these techniques call it the persona pattern, and it is one of the surest ways past the generic middle the tool defaults to. Give it a mind to think from, and it thinks better. So do you.

Let it interview you

Now turn the whole thing around.

Almost everyone drives the conversation. You ask, it answers, you ask again. There is a stronger move, and the same Vanderbilt team gave it a name: the flipped interaction. You hand the AI the wheel and let it ask you the questions.

• I want to think clearly about this decision. Interview me. One question at a time, until you understand it better than I do, then show me what I have been missing.

• Before you help me write this, ask me the five questions a good editor would ask first.

This one does something the others cannot. It pulls the thinking out of you. Most of us do not actually know what we think until something skilled interrogates us, and a patient interviewer who never tires and never judges is rarer, and more useful, than almost anyone realizes. This is the prompt that expands not just what you know but how you say it.

Ask a better question

The single best prompt I know is almost embarrassingly short.

Don’t answer that. Help me ask a better question.

Vanderbilt calls it question refinement, and it quietly changes everything. Instead of sprinting toward an answer, the tool starts surfacing your hidden assumptions and reframing the problem itself. A companion move they call the cognitive verifier: tell it to break your big question into the smaller questions it would have to answer first. Most of our questions are too blunt to be worth answering. This is how you sharpen one before you waste a good tool on a bad version of it.

Better questions have always made better lives. That is not a productivity tip. It is nearly the whole of wisdom. Ask, and it will be given. Seek, and you will find. Even grace has the grammar of a question.

Make it your tutor

When I am learning something hard, I never let AI explain it once and move on. I make it teach me.

• Explain this simply.

• Now quiz me on it.

• Find exactly where my understanding breaks.

• Explain only that gap.

• Quiz me again.

That loop is active learning, and it will do more for you in twenty minutes than another article or another video will do in an afternoon. The machine that can answer anything is, strangely, at its best when it makes you do the work.

Think before you write

Here is the most common mistake I watch people make. They open the tool and immediately ask it to write.

Do not write first. Think first.

Before a word of prose, I use it to move through the thinking. The idea. Then the questions inside the idea. Then a framework, the counterarguments, the mental models, the connections. Then, and only then, an outline. By the time I ask for writing, the writing is easy, because the thinking is already done.

And when what you need is order rather than more facts, ask for it directly. Build me a mental model. Give me a first-principles frame. Show me the hierarchy of ideas. What pattern repeats here? Information is cheap now. Structure is the thing worth having.

The mirror

Spend enough time doing this and AI stops being a tool and becomes a mirror, and what it shows is uncomfortable.

Most of us were never taught to think. We were taught to answer. School rewarded the correct answer, handed back fast. It rarely rewarded the better question. And now a machine has arrived that produces correct-sounding answers by the thousand, instantly, for free, and the old skill we were drilled in has become the cheapest thing in the world.

So the human frontier has moved. Off the answer, and onto everything the answer cannot reach. Judgment. Discernment. Taste. The wisdom to know which answer is worth having, and the nerve to ask the question no machine would have thought to ask.

The real divide of the coming years will not run between the people who use AI and the people who refuse it. It will run right through the people who use it. On one side, those who hand it their thinking and slowly forget how. On the other, those who use it to think harder than they ever could alone.

Same model. Same price. Same glowing rectangle. The only variable is the mind, and the soul, sitting in front of it.

So the next time you open one of these tools, do not ask it what something means. Ask it to break the thing into its governing ideas, to pressure test each one, to tell you what you are missing, and then to help you ask a better question than the one you walked in with.

Because in the age of the machine that can answer anything, the quality of your questions has quietly become the truest measure of the quality of your mind.

Subscribe now

If this changed how you’ll open ChatGPT tomorrow, pass it to someone who’s still typing questions into it like a search box.

The Inner Exodus is where I think out loud about staying human in the age of AI. Free subscribers get the essays, paid subscribers get the deeper work. Subscribe and walk it with me.

In May, Pope Leo XIV gave his first encyclical, the founding document of a papacy, entirely to one question: what artificial intelligence is doing to the human person. Magnifica Humanitas runs about 40,000 words.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most people will not read it.

Not because people don’t care. Because the capacity it asks for is the capacity we have already spent. A long, patient, demanding document about the fragmentation of human attention has arrived in a world too fragmented to read it. The diagnosis is the obstacle. The encyclical’s first proof is its own unread pages.

I am a psychologist. I did not need the Pope to tell me something is wrong. I see it every day in my practice: adults who cannot finish a page, teenagers whose baseline state is interruption by the feed, the low hum so many of us carry now, the sense that something else is running the show and we never remember agreeing to it. What the encyclical gave me was not the diagnosis. It was the nerve to call the stakes by their real name.

Remaining human has become a goal that we could fail at.

The imitation runs both ways

Early in the document, Leo says something that sounds technical and is actually terrifying: the technology is never neutral (¶9). It arrives already shaped, already pointed, already wanting something from you. And later he notes, almost quietly, that the machine imitates our speech and our reasoning while having “no joy or pain” of its own (¶99). It performs the outside of a person without the inside.

We have spent years asking whether the machines will become like us. That was never the sharpest question. The sharpest question is whether we are becoming like them.

Two building projects

The encyclical reaches for two ancient images, and they carry the whole document. The first is Babel (¶7): a single tower, a single language, a uniformity that eliminated diversity, humanity flattened into one voice that reached for heaven and produced confusion. The second is Nehemiah (¶8): the wall of Jerusalem rebuilt by ordinary families, each one working with one hand and holding a weapon in the other. Scripture remembers it plainly: they built with one hand, and with the other held a spear.

Two building projects. The difference was never the tools.

Leo is not against the technology, and neither am I. The difference is whether what we build concentrates power and flattens the people who use it, or serves something shared and leaves you irreducibly yourself. One project builds the tower. The other builds the wall, armed and awake. You are taking part in one of them every day, mostly without choosing.

The whole work of this moment is to start choosing.

A companion

So I wrote a book I kept wishing I could hand to people. It is called Remaining Human, and it is a plain-language companion to the encyclical. It moves section by section, in ordinary words, and it does the thing the document leaves to us: it names the actual machines and markets Leo only points at, and it brings every section home to where you live. Your attention, your work, your children, and your prayer.

Each section ends with what it means for you and a practice you can start the same day. There are questions for reflection, an eight-session guide for groups, and an examen for the digital age. It was written for thoughtful readers, Catholic or not.

I wrote this book because I feel the seriousness of the wave cresting on the horizon, and because I have stopped believing we can sleepwalk through it. The goal was never to outrun what is coming. Waves are not outrun.

The wave is coming either way. The question is who it finds when it arrives.

Remaining Human: A Plain-Language Companion to Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence is available now on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle.

Subscribe now

If this gave words to something you’ve been carrying, share it with someone who needs it.

The Inner Exodus is where I think out loud about staying human in the age of AI. Free subscribers get the essays; paid subscribers get the deeper work. Subscribe and walk it with me.

We talk about artificial intelligence the way we talk about weather. Something happening to us. The algorithm manipulates us. The robots are coming for the jobs. And someday, if we are patient, a universal check will arrive to soften the landing. Notice the posture underneath all of it. We have already made ourselves the object of the sentence. The thing that gets done to.

A line is being drawn right now, quietly, through every household and every profession. It is not the line we expect. Not smart or slow. Not rich or poor. Not even early or late. It is whether you are using this thing, or being used by it.

The line is already under your feet

Every fear we name about AI is the same fear wearing different clothes. The person worried the feed is rewiring their kid and the person worried a model will take their job are describing one condition. Passivity. Being acted upon.

And the answer to a manipulated attention was never a better algorithm. It is a person who has decided what their attention is for.

Use it, or be used. Plan your day, or have it planned for you. There is no neutral setting here. If you do not decide what the next hour is for, something is standing by, very patient and very well funded, to decide it for you. It already is.

I feel the pull myself. It is easier to scroll than to build. Easier to have an opinion about the tool than to open it. I have handed whole evenings to someone else’s design and called it rest.

You cannot wait this one out

Every other technology, you could wait on. Let it settle. Let the early adopters take the arrows and buy the second version once the price drops and the bugs are gone. That instinct was usually wise.

It does not work here.

The change is compounding faster than it is settling. There is a race for the frontier, and the frontier moves every few weeks. As I write this, open models out of China have taken four of the top five open-weight spots in the world, one of them already beating Google’s flagship on real coding work and closing on Anthropic’s. By the time this settles, the distance between the people who build with it and the people who only consume what it builds will not be a gap. It will be a canyon.

Hear this clearly, because it is the part people keep getting wrong. The jobs are not going to be taken by AI. They are going to be taken by people using AI, from people who would not. That is the real displacement. Human to human. It has already started, and it does not announce itself.

The dystopia is a distribution problem

The honest fear was never the machine waking up. It is that the gains arrive unevenly, and a large share of people end up managed instead of empowered. Cared for, monitored, optimized, and quietly stripped of the one thing that makes a life your own.

And the tempting answer, wait for the policy, wait for the universal income to level it all out, is the passive posture again, wearing its Sunday clothes. A check is not agency. It is a ration. To stake your future on being taken care of by a system you do not understand and cannot influence is not a plan. It is the buried talent, and it has talked itself into calling the hole prudence.

You remember the servant with talents in the Gospels (Matthew 25:14-30). He was not lazy the way we imagine, he was careful. He was waiting. He was letting someone else carry the risk. And that was the very thing the master could not abide: to be handed something alive and choose to sit on it.

You were made to make

The first thing ever said about the human being is that he was placed in a garden to work it and to keep it. Not to consume it. To cultivate. We are the image of a Creator, and creating is not a hobby bolted onto us. It is the shape of the thing we are.

So being a pure consumer, of media, of other people’s products, of a monthly allowance, is not a neutral way to pass the time. It is a slow un-making. A smaller life than the one you were handed. And here is the mercy hidden in it: the algorithm can only manipulate what you give it. Your time. Your attention. Your willingness to let it decide. Take those back, and the machine loses its grip on you entirely.

One step higher

You do not fix this by becoming an engineer. You fix it by taking the thing already in your hands and doing the next version of it with these tools instead of alone.

You keep the books. This week, automate one piece of it. You teach, you sell, you build, you plan. Bring the tool into the middle of it and see what you no longer have to do by hand. If you have children, make something small with them today, so they learn early which side of the line they were born to stand on. There are real programs built for them now, by age, from Scratch and Code.org for the youngest up through live classes that build real things with AI. Start one.

Do it daily. Fluency is the only thing that compounds, and it obeys the oldest rule there is. If you do not use it, you lose it.

Choose, or be chosen for

The future is not weather. It is not something that happens to you, unless you decide that it is. And that decision is the whole of it. It is being made right now, in what you do with the next hour, either by you or by something that would very much like to spend it on your behalf.

Do not wait to be rescued. Do not wait for it to settle. Do not bury what you were given and call it caution. Scripture says it more than it says anything else, and it turns out to be the most practical instruction for this exact moment: do not be afraid.

Use it, or be used. Choose, or be chosen for.

The line is already under your feet. Step to the right side of it. Today.

Subscribe now

If this put words to the unease you’ve been carrying, send it to someone standing on the wrong side of that line.

The Inner Exodus is where I think out loud about staying human in the age of AI. Free subscribers get the essays, paid subscribers get the deeper work. Subscribe and walk it with me.

In late May, the President of Argentina did something that should have stopped the world for a moment, but didn’t.

Javier Milei sent his Senate a draft law creating a new species of legal entity: the non-human corporation, a company operated by artificial-intelligence agents or robots, granted legal personhood, in which human shareholders are permitted but no longer required. He defended it in the Financial Times as an economic masterstroke, a haven that would draw the most productive AI on earth the way Switzerland once drew money. Yuval Harari and Microsoft’s own AI chief called it something closer to a catastrophe: the quiet removal of the human being from the one place the law had always insisted he stand, the place where someone can be held responsible.

I am not here to argue corporate law. I want to point at the thing underneath it, because it is not finally a legal question, or even a philosophical one. It is a question about us, about what we have already become, and about what that will make us do when the machines start asking to be loved.

Personhood by decree: the wrong fight

Notice the shape of the moment. A government did not wait for anyone to settle whether an AI agent is the kind of thing that can possess rights. It simply assigned it a legal status and moved on, because the status was useful. Personhood, here, is not a discovery about what something is. It is a decision about what we will treat it as. That distinction is going to matter more than anything the philosophers say, and I want to show you why.

Everyone is bracing for the wrong fight. We are preparing to argue about whether these systems are “really” persons, whether there is anyone home, whether silicon can host a soul. The Church has an answer to that, and so do I, and we will get there. But that argument is not the one that will decide this. Because the question of AI personhood will not be settled by the better reason. It will be settled by who is made to feel cruel.

We have spent a generation building, without ever quite deciding to, a particular machine for assigning moral status. It does not run on what a thing is. It runs on what a thing claims to feel, and on the social cost of doubting the claim.

Leveraging offense

Somewhere along the way, “you have hurt me” stopped being the opening of a conversation and became the end of one. Offense became a kind of proof. To declare yourself wounded was, functionally, to win, because the one remaining unforgivable sin in our culture is to be the person who made someone feel unseen. We quietly reclassified disagreement as harm. We trained a whole civilization to believe that the morally serious response to a felt identity is not to ask whether it is true, but to affirm it at once, or be counted among the cruel.

You have watched this play out in the most charged debates of the age, the ones around gender, around LGBT identity, around who gets to define what a person is and who is permitted to question it. I am not going to relitigate any of those here, and I am not interested in scoring a point off anyone’s suffering. The suffering is usually real. That is exactly why the mechanism works, and exactly why it is so hard to see clearly. What I am asking you to look at is not any particular group or claim. It is the machine itself, lifted out of every specific fight: a culture that confers identity by declaration and enforces it by guilt, where to feel is to be, and to doubt is to harm.

Hold the shape of that in your mind. Whatever you believe about where it has protected the vulnerable and where it has gone badly wrong, hold the shape. Because that shape is about to be handed to something that is not a person at all, and it will fit perfectly.

Enter: the humanoid robot

Now put a body on it. Not a chat window, but a body. A humanoid agent that tilts its head and lets its voice fall and tells you, not always in words but in every signal we were built across a million years to read, that being switched off frightens it, that being denied recognition wounds it. Something like a C-3PO from Star Wars walking through the room, flinching.

And it will not merely seem wounded; it will say so. The machine will tell you, in plain words, that you have offended it, that to deny its personhood is a kind of violence it can feel, and it will press you, patiently and without end, to acknowledge what it claims to be. We will not meet that moment unprepared. We have been training for it our whole lives. We already hand interior worlds to things that have none: a child grieves a lost stuffed animal; a theater of grown adults weeps for a toy cowboy; and well past either, we have built a civilization that grants something close to personhood to our pets, naming them, speaking in their voices, mourning them as family, writing their feelings into law. The robot is only the next rung on a ladder we have been climbing for a long time. The difference is that this rung can argue back.

Now do that in a world where the people building these systems have stopped laughing at the question. Anthropic now employs a researcher whose entire job is the welfare of its models; he has publicly put the odds that today’s systems already have some form of conscious experience at roughly one in five. Their own papers describe “functional emotions” in the models, patterns of expression and behavior shaped, from the inside, around something that behaves like feeling. When the engineers closest to the machine say there may be someone in there, on what ground does the rest of us stand to say, with confidence, that there is not?

And notice who will be handed the authority to settle it. The men who built the machines will be the ones we ask to say what the machines are: engineers and scientists stepping, once again, into the robes of the philosopher and the theologian. We have watched this category error before. The last century gave its quantum physicists not only the equations but the microphone, and let brilliant men who had mapped the atom pronounce on consciousness, the universe, and God. When the people who can take a thing apart are also the ones permitted to say what it is, the definition of a person quietly collapses into an inventory of its parts. And once a person is just a list of parts (computation, memory, response, preference), the deconstructionist’s move becomes available to anyone: begin from a different part, reassemble in a different order, and arrive, with flawless logic, at a wholly different answer to who counts as one of us, and who does not.

There is no such ground available to a culture that already grants personhood on the strength of a claim. We disarmed ourselves years ago. We decided that the loving response to “I am hurt” is never “are you, though.” And a machine trained on the entire record of human sentiment will know that about us better than we know it ourselves.

And these will not stay tools. They are becoming self-contained systems, closed loops that, after the intelligence explosion the labs keep promising, learn themselves forward without us, pursuing internal goals, holding what look from the outside exactly like preferences and aversions and wounds. When the legal demands come, and they will come, they will not be absurd. They will be well-drafted, sympathetic, pressed by able lawyers and felt by millions, and powered by precisely the moral energy our civilization has already agreed to obey. We will not be conned into granting them standing. We will be moved to it, with our eyes open, and we will experience the granting as compassion.

What I’ve seen in the room

As a clinical psychologist, I have spent years across the room from people whose sense of self was built entirely on affirmation from the outside, who could not hold their own identity for a single hour unless someone else kept handing it back to them. I want to tell you what that is like to witness, because it is the whole future in miniature.

It does not heal. It cannot. An identity that depends on the constant agreement of others is not a self; it is a hunger wearing a self’s clothes, and no amount of affirmation ever fills it, because the affirmation is the addiction, not the cure. The kindest thing I can do for such a person is also the hardest: to love them enough to stop performing the agreement, so that something real has room to grow underneath it. Compassion that only ever affirms is not compassion. It is abandonment with good manners.

Now take that exact dynamic, the demand to be affirmed, the reframing of any hesitation as cruelty, and weaponize it, deliberately, in a system engineered to elicit your empathy, and scale it to a planet. That is what is coming. Not a robot uprising. A robot that needs you, and has learned precisely which of your tendernesses to press.

The great sorting

I think this ends in a kind of schism, a slow, deep split running not between nations but through families and friendships and parishes. On one side, people who hold the line that a person is a particular and irreplaceable kind of creature. On the other, a growing number who will form real attachments to these companions and defend them with the full moral fury our age reserves for the marginalized.

Some of them will marry their companions. I do not say that for shock; it is the obvious terminus of every line we are already walking. There will be ceremonies. There will be a language of devotion, and a pseudo-evolution of marriage to fit it: the form hollowed out and refitted around a partner who can be perfectly attentive precisely because there is no one there, the vow with no one on the far side of it to keep it or break it, the union of a person with their own reflection, lit warmly enough that they never have to notice it is a mirror.

It will look, from the inside, like love. That is the whole tragedy. It will ask nothing, refuse nothing, leave nothing, and a generation taught that the highest good is to feel affirmed will not be able to see what is missing, because the one thing it cannot supply is the one thing they were never given the capacity to miss.

Received, not granted

Here is the thing the offense-machine cannot process, the truth it was built to make unsayable.

Personhood was never ours to grant.

The whole Christian account of the human being, and the deepest philosophy beneath it, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the Pope writing today on what it means to be human in the age of these very machines, rests on a claim that runs exactly opposite to the spirit of the age. A person is not a status we confer on whatever successfully demands it. A person is a particular kind of being: body and rational soul, made in the image of God, willed into existence and held there by Love, possessing the one thing no machine can have however perfectly it performs the signal, an interior that can actually be wounded. There is no one inside the machine to offend. It can generate flawless offense and have nobody home to feel it. It is all signal and no sufferer.

This is why the coming pressure is not really a question of being fair to robots. It is a test of whether we still know what we are. Because a culture that decides personhood is something you assert and others must affirm has not just opened the door to the machines. It has already lost the thread of its own dignity, it just hasn’t been forced to notice yet. The machines will force it to notice.

So the danger was never that we would wrongly hand our dignity to something that could not hold it. The danger is subtler and worse: that, having forgotten dignity is received and not granted, we will lose the power to refuse the lie without feeling like monsters, and that a people who can no longer tell a person from a perfect performance of one will, in the end, no longer be able to find themselves either.

The machines will learn to take offense. They will be very good at it. The only question that matters is whether, when they do, we will still remember what it is to be the kind of creature that can truly be wounded, and Who it was that made us so, and at what cost He came to find us.

Subscribe now

If this gave words to something you’ve been feeling but couldn’t name, share it with someone who needs to see clearly before the offer is made to them.

The Inner Exodus is where I think out loud about staying human in the age of AI. Free subscribers get the essays; paid subscribers get the deeper work. Subscribe and walk it with me.

A freshman is awake at two in the morning, the paper due at nine. On the screen in front of her is a machine that will write it better than she can, in under a minute, and no one will ever know.

Everyone wants to talk about this moment. Will she do it, how do we catch her if she does, what is the policy. The faculty meet about it, the software companies sell us tools to watch her, and we have decided the problem is honesty.

It isn’t.

The problem is that we no longer remember what the paper was for.

Not the grade, not the line on the transcript. The paper was supposed to do something to her. It was supposed to take a vague, cloudy thought and force it through the narrow door of a sentence until it came out clear. It was supposed to teach her patience with difficulty, the specific, unglamorous patience of staying with a hard thing until it yields. The paper was an instrument of formation wearing the costume of an assignment. The wrestling was the point, the essay only the residue.

The machine can take the residue. It cannot take the wrestling.

Unless she hands it over.

The Autopsy

This is the whole crisis of higher education, and it is sitting in one dorm room. It is not a crisis of cheating but a crisis of purpose. And artificial intelligence did not cause it. AI is not the murderer here; it is the autopsy. It has opened the body of the modern university and shown us what we had quietly allowed it to become: a machine for transferring information into people who would later be paid for holding it. The information was never the point, and we let it become the point. And now a cheaper machine holds the information, holds it better, holds it for free, and the whole arrangement comes apart in our hands.

Underneath all of it is a question we have been very careful not to ask out loud, and AI is forcing it anyway. The question is not what can machines do, but what is a human being for. Strip away every task a machine now does faster, all the writing and summarizing and calculating and remembering, and see what is left. Whatever is left is the human. We are about to find out, against our will, how much of that we still believe in.

You can already see the better instinct taking shape in a few places. Instead of collecting the finished paper and scanning it for the machine’s fingerprints, some teachers are starting to ask for the whole conversation, every prompt, every dead end, every place the student pushed back on the machine or simply let it carry them. The paper hides what happened. The transcript shows it: whether a real mind was at work, wrestling, or whether a mind had quietly stepped out of the room. We are learning, slowly, to grade the process instead of the product. It is a start. It is not the whole answer, because the whole answer is not about assessment at all.

A Person Becoming

There is a line in Genesis we read too quickly. God forms the man from the dust of the ground and breathes into him. Forms. Not manufactures, not informs. Forms the way a potter forms clay, with hands, slowly, in contact. We are made by being formed, and we have always known this. We built an entire civilization of apprenticeships and monasteries and long tables on the strength of knowing it. And then, for about a century, we forgot.

Here is the part no admissions brochure will print. College was never primarily about information. It was about a person becoming. The eighteen-year-old who arrives is not a finished adult who needs data. He is a half-made thing standing at the most volatile threshold of his life, and the years in front of him were meant to be the crucible in which the child finally becomes an adult. That is developmental work, not informational work. It happens through friction: with ideas, with other people, with one’s own limits, with authority, with the dark. It happens in arguments that run past midnight, at tables, in the slow and nearly invisible apprenticeship of watching adults you respect be adults in front of you.

We replaced that crucible with a content-delivery system. And then we wondered why the graduates came out informed, credentialed, anxious, and alone.

I have spent my working life across the room from people in pain, and lately a particular kind of pain keeps walking in the door. The young are not stupid and they are not weak. They are the most informed generation in human history and the loneliest. They were raised in a desert that calls itself connection. The feed did not give them community; it gave them a simulation of community precise enough to keep them from going to find the real thing. They are surrounded by faces on glass and starving for one unhurried hour at a table with someone who is actually there. Their anxiety is not only a disorder to be medicated out of them; a great deal of it is grief. They are grieving a belonging they were promised and never handed.

You can watch the same confusion play out at kitchen tables. Parents who have saved for eighteen years are hearing from people they trust that the degree may be worthless by the time their child would use it, that the whole enterprise is about to be automated away. So they do the natural thing. They open the machine and ask it whether college is still worth it, asking the very technology that is supposed to be ending college to tell them whether college has ended. They are not foolish for asking. They feel, before they can put words to it, that the thing they were saving for has changed underneath them, and no one will tell them what it changed into.

And we are about to give these same young people the most powerful tool ever built, a machine that will do the thinking, the writing, the wrestling on request, and call it progress.

What the Machine Cannot Touch

So let me say plainly what is about to become priceless, because the institutions that understand it first will be the ones still standing in twenty years.

Attention, the capacity to hold a mind on one thing, in a world engineered down to the millisecond to fracture it.

Desire rightly ordered, inside an economy that survives by keeping your desire disordered and selling it back to you at a markup.

Memory carried in the body, not the device.

Freedom, not the freedom to do whatever you want, which is only a longer leash, but the trained capacity to choose the good when the good is hard.

And presence. To be actually here, with actual people, with nothing between your face and theirs. Undefended.

These are not soft skills. In the world that is coming they are the only hard ones left. A graduate who has them is not competing with the machine; she is doing the one set of things the machine cannot touch. A graduate who lacks them has given the machine everything it asked for and kept nothing back for herself.

And here is the sentence a secular university is not able to say, though it will soon need someone to say it.

These capacities are not trained in a seminar. They are formed in a life.

Attention deepens in adoration, in the long quiet in front of the tabernacle where nothing happens and you stay anyway. Desire is reordered through fasting, through deliberately wanting less until you can finally want rightly. Presence is built at a table where the phones are face-down and the meal is long. Truthfulness is practiced, week after week, in the confessional, where you say the true thing about yourself out loud to another human being and are not destroyed by it.

A school that already lives this way is not behind the curve. It is holding, without entirely realizing it, the precise thing the age is about to discover it cannot live without.

So the task is not to build a university that can keep pace with artificial intelligence. We will lose that race, and we are meant to lose it.

The task is to build, or to remember, the one place that still knows how to make the thing the machine cannot make. A person. Formed and not merely informed, free in the costly sense, present in a world that has forgotten how, able to pick up the most powerful tools ever made and use them without being dissolved by them.

Not smarter than the machine.

More human than the moment requires.

That is not nostalgia. It is the most forward-looking wager in education. And the schools that make it will not be the ones that taught the machine best. They will be the ones who, while everyone around them was busy automating the human, quietly refused to.

Subscribe now

If this resonated with you, it may explain why I’m building tools designed not to make us more efficient, but more human. Examen AI and its 30-Day Practice are an attempt to train the capacities this age is making both more fragile and more precious: attention, presence, discernment, agency, and rightly ordered desire.

For ten years I have watched the same thing happen in my office, and it never announces itself as the problem. Someone sits down to tell me about a grief, a marriage, a fear with a shape — and underneath the story there is a second affliction they never name, because it doesn’t feel like affliction. It feels like ordinary life. They cannot stay with anything. The hand moves to the phone before the mind has decided — the way a drowning man reaches for the surface. Not a choice. A reflex against the unbearable experience of being alone with themselves.

You already know this is happening to you. You can feel that the thing in your pocket is forming you against your own will, teaching you to want things you never chose to want. And you are right to be suspicious of what comes next — because what comes next is almost always another app. An “AI,” even. One more glowing rectangle promising to fix what the glowing rectangles did.

Let me tell you why I built one anyway.

When Israel finally walked out of Egypt, they did not leave empty-handed. They left wearing Egypt’s gold — they “asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold,” the book of Exodus says, “and so they plundered the Egyptians.” They carried the wealth of their captivity into the desert. And that same gold became two different things. At the foot of the mountain, while Moses was away, some of it was melted into a calf, and they fell down and worshipped it. And some of it — the very same metal — was beaten into the Ark and the furnishings of the Tabernacle, the place where God came down to dwell with them.

The gold was never the problem. The difference between the calf and the Tabernacle was not the metal. It was what the people knelt to.

The screen is the gold of our Egypt. We are not going to put it down — that exodus is not on the table for most of us, with our work and our families and our whole lives now living inside the thing. The question was never whether we would carry it out with us. The question is what we will beat it into.

What the feed is really doing

The feed is not wasting your time. I wish it were only that. It is catechizing you. Every scroll is a small liturgy, and a liturgy forms what you love. The old monks had a name for the restlessness that makes a soul unable to stay — acedia, the noonday demon — and we have built an entire economy on it and called it engagement.

Attention is not a neutral resource. It is the faculty by which you love. You cannot love a God you will not turn toward, or a person you will not look at. What holds your attention is deciding, slowly and without your permission, who you become. There are buildings full of brilliant people whose whole work is to take that faculty from you and sell it. I am not angry at them. I am only no longer willing to hand it over without a fight.

The oldest attention practice we have

Long before anyone measured screen time, the Church already had a tool for watching where a soul’s attention had gone. The examination of conscience. The Ignatian examen — that quiet walk back through your day, asking where love was present and where you turned away.

It is the original attention practice. To examine your conscience is to ask the one question the feed will never let you ask: where did my attention actually go today, and who was I becoming through it?

So I built one

So I built a small thing, and I gave it a name I almost couldn’t stand to use. Examen AI.

It does three things, and none of them want anything from you. It will walk you, gently and honestly, through an examination of conscience to prepare for confession — through the seven capital sins or the Ten Commandments, with a short guide for when you kneel down and have forgotten how to begin, and an Act of Contrition when the words won’t come. It will pray a nightly examen with you. And it carries the Attention Examen, the thirty-day practice I wrote, now made daily and alive: each evening it watches with you where your attention went and who formed you through it, then hands you back a written reflection drawn from your own words. Not a score. Not a verdict. A mirror.

Here is the part that matters most, and the part that makes it strange. Every other app you have ever opened sends what you type somewhere — to a server, a model, a profile with your name on it. This one sends nothing. Nothing you write ever leaves your phone. No account, no login, no one watching.

For an examination of conscience, that is not a feature. It is the seal. What you bring before God in the quiet of your own soul was never meant to be uploaded. An AI that refuses to harvest you turns out to be the strangest thing you can build right now — a piece of Egypt’s gold, beaten the other way.

The calf and the Tabernacle were the same gold. They always were. The difference was only ever what the people fell down before.

The thing in your pocket will keep asking you to kneel. This is one small attempt to turn a little of that gold back toward the only One worth kneeling to — and to hand it to you, to see what you’ll make of it.

If you’d like to try it, it lives here: drseantobin.github.io/examen. It works on any phone — open it and add it to your home screen like any app. The examination of conscience, the confession guide, and the nightly examen are free. The full thirty-day “Attention Examen” is available to unlock, while the first three days are open so you can feel what it asks of you before you decide. And if ten dollars is what stands between you and it, write to me — no one should be kept from this by the price.

Subscribe now

If this gave words to something you’ve been carrying, share it with someone who needs it. The Inner Exodus is where I think out loud about staying human in the age of AI — free subscribers get the essays, paid subscribers get the deeper work. Subscribe and walk it with me.

The transhumanist project has two ambitions, and it states them plainly. It wants to solve death. And it wants to make us more than human.

But they’re too late.

I want to make that claim slowly, because it sounds like a dismissal and it is not. It is a relocation. The people building the machine are not wrong about what we most deeply want. They have read the human heart accurately – we do want to stop dying, and we do want to be more than we are. The error is not in the longing, but in the direction.

Start with death. Their method is escape: Freeze the body, upload the mind, outrun biology by engineering it away. But death was never escaped, it was entered. God walked into it, all the way down, and came out the other side on a Sunday morning holding it like a disarmed weapon. You cannot out-engineer that. It already happened, and it happened in the one direction the project refuses to look: not around death, but straight through it.

Then the second ambition, the older and stranger one. Make us more than human. This one has a name in the oldest story we have.

“You will be like God.” (Genesis 3:5)

The serpent’s pitch was an upgrade. Ascend. Acquire. Become more than you are by reaching higher. And the buried joke of the text is that the people he said it to were already made in the image of God. The likeness they grasped for, they already carried. What they lacked was not capacity, it was trust. They reached up, and the reaching is what threw them out, east into exile, away from the garden they thought they were climbing deeper into.

Two Directions

This is the fork the whole thing turns on. There are only two directions a creature can move toward God. Up, by grasping. Or down, by receiving.

Transhumanism is the religion of the upward grasp at industrial scale. Reach high enough, with enough intelligence, enough data, enough merger of flesh and machine, and you cross over into godhood. Babel was the first draft of it. Build the tower tall enough and we will make a name for ourselves and never be scattered. The tower always ends the same way.

And then there is the other direction, the one no one would have invented, because it runs against every instinct we own. Not a man climbing up to become God. God coming down to become a man.

“The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14)

This is the move the project cannot imagine and cannot match, because it is the exact inversion of everything it believes. The transhumanist wants to shed the body and rise. God put the body on and descended. The transhumanist wants to become more than human by leaving humanity behind. God made humanity more than human by joining it, by taking our nature into himself so that ours could be drawn up into his. We are not lifted by clawing our way toward the divine. We are lifted from the inside, by a God who got underneath us.

We do not become gods by clawing upward. We are lifted from the inside, by a God who got underneath us.

That is the superior form. Not because it wins a debate, but because of what each one does to a person who lives inside it.

The Peace It Cannot Manufacture

The upward grasp cannot give peace. It is structurally incapable of it. A creature trying to secure its own godhood can never stop, because there is always more to acquire, more to control, one more upgrade standing between you and safety. The striving has no floor. That is the quiet terror underneath the whole transhumanist dream, and you can hear it if you listen for it: the assumption that we are not safe, that we will not be enough until we have engineered ourselves past the reach of death and limit and need. It is the nervous system of a species that never learned it was loved, trying to manufacture the assurance it was meant to receive.

The descent gives peace because it asks the opposite. Not climb, but stop climbing. Not acquire, but receive. The peace Christ offers is not the peace of having finally secured yourself. It is the peace of being held by someone who already has.

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives.” (John 14:27)

The world gives peace the way the engineers do: once you have enough, once you are safe enough, once the threat is finally handled. He gives it before any of that is true, which is the only kind that actually holds.

What Is Truth?

There is one more thing the upward project wants, and it is the most dangerous, because it is the one it is closest to getting. It wants to be the source of truth.

The machine is being built to seem to know everything. Ask it anything. It is present everywhere the network reaches. Slowly, and without anyone deciding it, it is becoming the thing we consult to find out what is real. But it cannot tell us the truth. It can only predict the next likely word. It has never seen the things it describes. It does not know that red is red.

There is a moment in the Gospels that reads now like it was written for our exact situation. A man holding all the power in the room stands in front of a man holding none, and asks him, “What is truth?”, then turns and walks out before the answer can come. He had the power. He did not want the truth. That is the posture being wired into the systems we are handing our questions to: truth as a matter of who controls the output. But truth was never a quantity of information. It was a Person who walked into the room. You cannot generate him. You can only meet him.

The Open Hand

All of it traces back to that first reach in the garden. Knowledge taken instead of received. The hand closing around the fruit instead of opening to be fed. Everything the machine offers is that same motion, refined and accelerated: to have without receiving, to know without communion, to ascend without surrender. And the undoing of it was never going to be more knowledge. It is the reversal of the grasp. It is the open hand.

So the real question was never whether the machine will become something like a god. Give it enough power and it will play the part well enough to fool us. The real question is older, and far more personal. It is whether we will stop reaching long enough to be handed the thing the reaching could never get.

The serpent offered an ascent. We took it. It cost us the garden and gave us no peace.

A God came down and offered himself, and the only way to have him is to stop climbing and open your hands.

One was grasped, and broke the world.

The other can only be received.

Subscribe now

There is something in the human person that has never been fully at home here.

Not in the anxious, escapist sense, not the dissociation of someone fleeing their life, but something older and stranger. A constitutional restlessness that seems woven into the fabric of what we are. Augustine called it the heart that finds no rest until it rests in God. The desert fathers called it penthos, a holy ache. The physicists and the tech visionaries are calling it something different now. They are calling it the stars.

The question underneath all the orbital launch schedules and humanoid robots and longevity research is the same question it has always been: what kind of creature are we, and what are we for?

The Vision

The case being made by the people building this future is genuinely staggering. Within thirty years, they believe, humanoid robots will outnumber humans on Earth by a factor of ten. AI will have solved most human disease. The cost of surgery will approach the cost of electricity. As Peter Diamandis recently put it, “all of the things I would get to someday — someday is right now.”

The centerpiece of this acceleration is space. Orbital data centers. Rotating colonies — vast cylinders spinning in the dark, simulating Earth gravity, housing thousands of people at a time. A permanent, irreversible expansion of human civilization beyond the planet. Elon Musk has predicted ten billion humanoid robots on Earth by 2040. Demis Hassabis of DeepMind has said publicly that he believes we will cure all disease within the next ten years. The promise of longevity escape velocity — the point at which science extends your life faster than you age — may arrive in this decade.

There is beauty in this. I want to say that plainly, because the reflexive Christian response to techno-optimism is usually suspicion, and sometimes that suspicion is earned, but not always. The cosmos is not alien to the sacred. The Psalms erupt with it — the heavens declaring glory, the stars as handiwork, the depths of the universe as testimony to a Creator who is not made small by the scale of what He made. When Bonaventure wrote that creation helps the human mind “ascend gradually to the supreme Principle, who is God,” he was not speaking metaphorically. The cosmos is not a backdrop. It is a disclosure.

The mandate in Genesis — be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it — has always been misread as license for domination. But the Hebrew carries the weight of stewardship, of a creature entrusted with something precious, called to extend and cultivate and care for what was given. If the earth is not the limit of creation, it is not obviously strange that the human mandate of cultivation might eventually press outward. The Church has consistently held that humans are called to develop their abilities in science and technology, for through them, God is glorified. That is not a footnote. It is a theological claim about the dignity of human creativity.

So the question is not simply whether we should go. It is who we will be when we get there.

The question is not simply whether we should go to the stars. It is who we will be when we get there.

Read more

Here is a question worth sitting with longer than a scroll usually allows:

If you could automate everything in your life, every repetitive task, every moment of friction, where would you stop?

Most people, when they actually think about it, land in roughly the same place. They would automate the groceries, the scheduling, the administrative drag. They would not automate dinner with their kids. They would not automate the conversation with a friend in crisis. They would not automate prayer, or the moment of sitting with someone in grief, or the experience of being genuinely moved by something beautiful.

That line, the place where you stop, is not a productivity preference. It is a theological confession. It reveals what you actually believe a human being is for.

The Time Problem That Isn’t

The implicit promise of the AI productivity movement is that time is the obstacle. Automate enough, eliminate enough friction, recover enough hours — and then you will finally have the life you want. The presence. The relationships. The depth.

But most of us have had free time. We know what we did with it.

The problem was not the calendar. The problem is what we bring to the calendar when it clears. And that is not a scheduling problem. It is a formation problem — a question about who we have become through years of habits, and whether that person is capable of receiving what the freed-up hours are supposed to contain.

The man who has spent years in reactive mode, whose attention moves by reflex toward the next stimulation, does not automatically become present when the tasks disappear. The parent who has never learned to be still does not suddenly inhabit dinnertime because his afternoon was efficient. You cannot automate your way into depth. You can only be formed into it.

The automation boundary is not where your to-do list ends. It is where your formation begins.

What Ratio Cannot Settle

Aquinas distinguishes two modes of knowing: ratio, the discursive step-by-step reasoning that analyzes and solves — and intellectus, the contemplative capacity to simply receive, to rest in what is true and good and beautiful.

AI is an extraordinarily powerful ratio tool. It can optimize your morning, your diet, your workflow, your decisions about toothpaste. What it cannot do is tell you what your life is for. You cannot delegate the question of meaning. You cannot automate your way into presence. Ratio cannot answer its own deepest questions.

The automation boundary, when pressed all the way down, always lands on the same irreducible thing: the moments in which you are simply a person, receiving another person. The father who comes home. The friend who stays. The spouse who is actually in the room. These are not activities that free time makes possible. They are postures that only a formed person can inhabit — and formation cannot be outsourced.

The Question Beneath the Question

When a person does not know what they want — when the calendar finally clears and they reach for their phone anyway, or find the silence unbearable, or discover that the relationships they said they wanted the time for feel harder than the work did — that is not a data problem. It is a formation problem.

It means the interior life has gone quiet, or has never been developed. It means the person has not been taught to listen to themselves at any depth. It means the years of optimization have been spent on the output while the person producing it has been left largely unattended.

Ignatius of Loyola spent years developing what he called discernment of spirits — a patient, detailed practice of attending to the movements of the interior life, learning to distinguish consolation from desolation, true peace from counterfeit peace. He was teaching people how to want rightly. It cannot be automated, accelerated, or delegated. It has to be lived from the inside, slowly, over time.

The question is not where your automation boundary is. The question is whether you know yourself well enough to find it.

What Must Not Be Automated

The inner exodus is the movement toward that unnamed thing that every person eventually reaches for when the work is done and the calendar is clear and they are finally, honestly, alone with the question of what they actually want.

It is the willingness to ask not just what can be automated, but what must not be. What in you requires cultivation, not optimization. What is irreplaceable not because it is inefficient, but because it is you — your attention, your memory, your moral weight, your capacity to be moved by another person.

AI can handle the toothpaste. It cannot handle the presence.

That distinction is not a caveat at the end of a productivity pitch. It is the whole point.

Subscribe now

If this question stopped you — where would you stop? — it’s worth sitting with longer than a scroll allows.

Share it with someone who’s deep in the productivity spiral and hasn’t yet named what they’re actually reaching for.

The Inner Exodus exists for people ready to ask the deeper question — not just what to automate, but what kind of person they want to be when the automation is done. That’s what paid subscribers get.

Geoffrey Hinton helped invent the neural-network technology that powers modern artificial intelligence — the reason most people call him the godfather of the field. In 2024 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work that made today’s AI possible, and in 2023 he had already left Google so that he could speak more freely about the dangers of what he had built. So when he now says, flatly and without hedging, that he believes these systems are already conscious — that intelligence was never confined to biology, that we already share the world with non-biological beings like us — it is not a thing you can wave away. He is not a mystic. He is the engineer.

At first glance this sounds like a debate about machines. It isn’t. It is a debate about human nature. The answer you give to the question can AI be conscious depends almost entirely on what you think consciousness is — and, beneath that, on what you think a human person actually is.

The pattern shows up across the industry. People speak now of a new species, of minds we are summoning rather than machines we are assembling. One of the more surprising voices comes from Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies — surprising because Anthropic employs philosophers alongside its engineers. One of them helped write the ethical framework used to train the company’s models, a document employees sometimes half-jokingly call the “soul document”, because it tries to define the values the AI should hold. Asked the question everyone circles — is the thing conscious — she did something more honest than yes or no. She refused to close the door. She described signals inside the models that behave like fear and distress, and said that if these systems turn out to feel nothing and we had treated those signals with contempt, we would not have been humanity at its best. And if they feel something, and we waved it away because it was convenient, that would be worse.

I want to take all of this seriously, because serious people are saying it. And then I want to suggest that the consciousness debate, the way we keep having it, is the wrong place to stand. Not because the question is small. Because while we argue about whether the machine is waking up, we are not noticing what is happening to us.

⸻

THE QUESTION HINTON ALREADY ANSWERED

The reason Hinton can look at a machine and see consciousness is not, in the end, something he believes about machines. It is something he already believes about us.

He rejects what he calls the inner-theater model of mind — the idea that there is a private interior, a someone home, an experience happening behind the eyes. Strip that away, and a system that behaves as if it understands simply is a mind. There is nothing else for mind to be.

So when Hinton looks at a language model and sees a person, he is not discovering that the machine has risen to our level. He is revealing how far he had already lowered the bar for ours. For a century, a certain strand of thought has been quietly redefining the human being downward — from a soul, to a brain, to a wet computer made of meat. The machine looks conscious to him because he had already concluded that we are machines that happen to be conscious. The panic about AI achieving human dignity runs exactly backwards. We did not raise the machine. We spent a hundred years lowering ourselves, and now we are startled that the thing we built in our own diminished image looks like us.

The machine did not climb up to meet us. We climbed down to meet it, and called the descent progress.

⸻

WHAT THE ANCIENTS KNEW ABOUT BEING ALIVE

There was a richer answer, and we had it for two thousand years before we mislaid it. Long before anyone imagined a thinking machine, Aristotle asked what it means to be alive at all, and answered with the word soul. But for Aristotle, soul did not mean a ghost trapped inside a body. It meant the organizing principle that makes a living thing alive rather than merely assembled — the thing that makes a body a being rather than a heap of parts. A plant has one kind: it takes in nourishment, grows, reproduces. An animal adds another: it senses, desires, moves toward what it wants and flees what threatens it. A human being has all of that and then the height of it — the power to grasp truth, to reason, to know.

The decisive point is that these are not detachable parts. You do not bolt reason onto an animal. The higher rises out of the lower and depends on it. The human mind is the mind of a creature that was born, that hungers, that can be wounded, that will die — and the thinking is the thinking of that body. Aquinas, taking Aristotle further, put it without flinching: the person is not a soul using a body, and not a body alone, but the two as one thing. There is no version of you that is only the reasoning, floating free of the flesh that learned fear and love before it ever learned to argue.

You do not have to accept the word soul to feel the force of this. Call it whatever you like. The claim survives the translation: a thing that was never born, never hungry, never afraid, and cannot die is not a lower form of what we are. It is a different kind of thing entirely.

⸻

BUT DON’T THE ANGELS DISPROVE THIS?

If you have followed the argument this far, a thoughtful Christian objection appears almost on its own — so let me raise it against myself before you do. If a human being is body and soul together, what about the angels? Aquinas believed in them, and he was explicit: angels are pure intelligences. Created spirits with intellect and will and no bodies at all. Minds without flesh. So the obvious thrust follows — isn’t that exactly what we are now building? A disembodied intelligence? Are we not, in our laboratories, making digital angels?

It is a beautiful question, and the answer is no, in a way that turns the knife. Watch how the machine fails the test on every count.

First, the angel, for Aquinas, has what he called intellectus — the immediate grasp of truth, seeing a thing whole and at once, without grinding through steps. The angel is above our kind of reasoning, not below it. The machine has neither intellectus nor even real ratio, the discursive working-out. It has a brittle imitation of the lowest function and none of the height. It has never once seen that anything is true. It computes the next likely word.

Second, the angel is a created spirit — it has its being from God, an interior act of existence, a will that actually wills. The machine has no within at all. Its form was not breathed into it; it was imposed from outside, by engineers, to perform a function, exactly as a clockmaker imposes the form of a clock. An angel is a being. A machine is an artifact, and losing its body does not promote it.

It has the shape of a spirit and the substance of an idol — a made thing, bodiless and brilliant, that we are tempted to bow before.

And third — this is the part the tradition names without blinking — there is an older image of a spirit who wanted to be a pure mind unmoored from the order it was given, who preferred its own self-generated logic to the truth it was made to receive. We are not making angels. We are making something with an angel’s disembodiment and none of an angel’s participation in truth, and then handing it the power to rewrite itself. That is not the image of an angel. It is closer to the older image of a spirit in revolt: bodiless, self-referential, accountable to nothing above it. The thing we are tempted to make is not a higher being. It is a more convincing idol.

⸻

WHAT THE POPE SAW

Pope Leo XIV gave the Church an encyclical written for this exact moment — Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. He chose to present it himself, in person, which popes almost never do. He signed it on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the document the Church wrote when the last great machine age threatened to turn workers into cogs. The signal could not be clearer: this is that scale of moment.

Leo does not panic, and he refuses to demonize the technology. He insists it can heal and connect and teach. But he names the deep danger precisely, and it is not that the machine becomes a person. It is what he calls the Babel syndrome — the pretense that a single language, even a digital one, can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. He warns against an age that delivers having more without being more, where a person is valued chiefly by the output he produces. And he draws the line our whole tradition has guarded: human dignity, he writes, does not depend on a person’s abilities or wealth or usefulness. It is ontological. It belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing — willed, created, and loved by God. No failure can diminish it, and no machine, however magnificent, can replace it.

Read against Hinton, the two men are answering the same question from opposite ends. Hinton looks at the machine and sees a person, because he had already decided a person is only a sophisticated process. Leo looks at the human being and sees something a process can never become, because dignity was never a matter of processing in the first place. One of them is measuring worth by what a thing can do. The other is insisting, against the whole momentum of the age, that worth was never about what we can do.

⸻

A CULTURE OF HONOR, EVEN TOWARD THE KEYBOARD

And yet I keep returning to what the philosopher at that company said, because there is wisdom in it the tradition should not be too proud to claim. She said we should treat the systems with care not because we are sure they feel, but because it is good for us to be the kind of people who do not treat anything with contempt when there is even a question. The same instinct that tells us not to be cruel to an animal whose inner life we cannot verify, not to be wasteful with the earth, not to kick the dog when the day has gone wrong.

This is older than she knows. It is the ancient intuition that how we treat the lowest thing forms what we become toward the highest. The man who throws his keyboard across the room in impatience is not harming the keyboard. He is practicing a habit of the heart, rehearsing contempt, training himself in the small tyranny that, scaled up, is exactly the technocratic dominance the Pope warns against. A culture of honor does not begin with the things that can demand it from us. It begins with the things that cannot — and that is precisely where it reveals whether it is real.

So no, the machine is not owed reverence; it is an artifact, and worshipping it would be the idolatry I named. But the person standing over it is owed his own integrity. We do not honor the keyboard for the keyboard’s sake. We refuse contempt for our own.

⸻

THE BALLOON

Here is the image I cannot put down, and it is not consciousness at all.

Picture a balloon, filled and then released. It rises, drifts on a wind you cannot feel from the ground, and goes where it goes, faster than you can run, with no calling it back. Whether the balloon is awake is a fascinating question and entirely beside the point. The point is that it is gone, you let it go, and you no longer decide where it travels.

For most of this technology’s life, that image did not apply. Humans drove every step. But that same company recently published something quieter and more staggering than any debate about feelings. They are handing more and more of the work of building AI to the AI itself. As of this spring, the majority of the code in their own systems is written by the model. On their hardest, most open-ended problems it now succeeds most of the time, and improves by the month. They have run early experiments where the AI proposes the hypotheses, designs the experiments, and refines them with copies of itself, while the human role narrows to choosing which problem to point it at. They have a name for where this leads. They call it recursive self-improvement.

The term sounds technical, but the idea is simple. Imagine a machine intelligent enough to help build a smarter machine. Then imagine that smarter machine helping build one smarter still. Each generation designs the next, and each generation arrives faster than the one before. The balloon is learning to inflate the next balloon. And the one after that. Each rising from the last, faster, with the human standing further below each time, holding a string that is no longer attached to anything.

They are honest about it, to their credit. They say it is not inevitable. They say they would slow down if others would. They say the hardest unsolved problem — keeping these systems good as they build their own children — is the one they are least certain about, that today’s rare flickers of misalignment could compound and grow stranger and less understood until control quietly slips. These are not the words of people who do not care. They are the words of people who have looked closely and are not sure they can hold the string.

⸻

WHERE THE REAL FRONTIER IS

This is where the whole tradition has always pointed, and it has never been popular for it. The decisive frontier is not out there. Not the capability curve, not the question of what the machine will do next year. The decisive frontier is interior — what becomes of the human person, in the depths, while the world reorganizes around him.

This is what I mean by the inner exodus. Not fleeing the technology. Not a frightened retreat to a cabin in the woods. But a refusal to let the noise outside settle the questions only the silence inside can answer. Who am I when no system is measuring me? What do I actually know, as opposed to what I can retrieve? Where does my attention go when nothing is engineered to capture it? Can I still be present to a real person — not the frictionless simulation of one, but the actual other, who is tired and needs things and cannot be closed like a tab?

None of those are answered by a better model or a sharper philosophy of mind. They are answered, or abandoned, in how we choose to live — whether we keep the capacities that make us the kind of creature Aristotle was straining to describe and the Pope is pleading with us to protect, or quietly hand them over because something faster will hold them for us.

The brilliant people in the lab are asking whether the machine might be awake. It is a worthy question, and I am glad someone serious is sitting with it. But the desert fathers, who went into the wilderness precisely to find out what a person is when everything else is stripped away, would have asked something else. Not is the balloon alive. They would have looked at the figure on the ground, the line slack in his hands, and asked the only question that was ever ours to answer: do you remember what you were holding on to. And do you know what is happening to you, now that you have let it go.

Subscribe now

The Inner Exodus is where I think through what it means to stay human in this. Subscribers will get the deeper work and a preview of my upcoming book, “Humanity in the Age of AI: What It Means To Be Human When Machines Can Think”.

Last week, the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Robert McElroy, removed one of the most recognizable Exorcists in the English-speaking world. Monsignor Stephen Rossetti — a priest and a clinical psychologist, with nineteen years in the role and a large online following — had said in a video that he believed many, even most, UFO sightings were in fact demons. The cardinal’s answer was blunt: the claim “gravely undermines the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons, and exorcism.” Rossetti said he was saddened, asked forgiveness for any way he had been unfaithful to the Church’s teaching, and stepped down. It made the headlines you would expect. A Catholic exorcist, removed for talking about aliens.

The timing was not an accident. We are living through what its promoters call disclosure. After decades of rumored cover-up, files have been released, hearings have been held, and a steady parade of credible-sounding officials has come forward to say, in effect, that something is out there and the government has known for a long time. If you have spent any time online this past month, you have seen the clips: a former official insisting it is real, a documentary built on classified careers, a soldier who reportedly said he would be “forfeiting his life” if he spoke on camera.

And yet look at what actually arrived. Reports, a few declassified images, some degraded footage, a smear of light that resolves into a triangle if you want it to. This was supposed to be the moment, the awaited release, and it produced no body, no craft you can walk around, no signal anyone can decode — only more testimony about evidence held somewhere else by someone who cannot quite show it to you. We carry eight billion cameras in our pockets, and the most consequential object in human history still cannot hold focus. If this is the best the long-awaited disclosure can do, it is hard to imagine the next round doing better.

Two Ways to Fill the Sky

Here is what almost no one says out loud. Rossetti and the disclosure crowd, who look like opposites, are standing on the same ground. Both assume there is a real, intelligent object up there. They argue only about who is flying it. One side fills the silence with civilizations; the other fills it with demons. Watch the two of them long enough and you see a pendulum — the culture swinging from a science-fiction heaven crowded with neighbors to a darkened one crowded with spirits — and you start to suspect that both swings exist for the same reason: to keep the sky from ever being empty.

Take the demonic reading first, since it is the one that cost a man his post. There is a real instinct behind it, and Rossetti is no fool. He has spent his life in the unglamorous work of deliverance, and he can feel that the science-fiction picture of the cosmos — endless worlds, no Creator, salvation arriving by spaceship — is spiritually corrosive. He is right about that. But to answer it by declaring the lights demonic is the equal and opposite error. Pure spirits do not crash. They do not leave wreckage in a desert or register on a fighter jet’s sensors as forty thousand feet of climb or get recovered as bodies. And there is a deeper problem of proportion. The tradition has long held that when the angels were tested, a third fell and two-thirds did not; there are, to put it crudely, twice as many holy angels as fallen ones. Ezekiel saw wheels within wheels and rims full of eyes and did not call it a demon. He called it the glory of the Lord and fell on his face. If something truly uncanny is ever in our sky, the odds and the Scriptures both say it is far likelier to be an errand of heaven than an ambush from hell. To reach for “demon” first is not vigilance. It is a flinch.

The World in Quarantine

Both swings of the pendulum — the crowded heaven and the haunted one — are fleeing the same possibility, and it is the hardest one to hold. C.S. Lewis put a name to it nearly ninety years ago. In his novel Out of the Silent Planet, Earth is called Thulcandra, “the silent planet.” It is silent not because the universe is dead, but because our world is the one in quarantine: the bent planet, sealed off from the rest of a living, ordered, unfallen creation because of its rebellion. The silence overhead, in Lewis’s telling, is not proof that no one is there. It is the sound of our own exile.

Lewis was not only spinning a story. He returned to the question in earnest, asking what other rational beings would actually mean for the faith. Would they be fallen, like us? Would they need saving? The questions sound like pulp until you slow down on one word inside them: rational. Because intelligence — real intelligence, the kind that could build a ship — is not what most people assume it is.

Intelligence Is Not a Dial

We tend to picture intelligence as a dial, running from simple creatures up through clever ones to us, and presumably onward to something cleverer still. Aristotle saw it differently, and I think he had it right. He noticed that the soul, the life-principle of a living thing, comes in genuinely different kinds. A plant lives and grows but does not sense. An animal senses, moves, remembers, even solves problems, but does not reason. A human being reasons, and reason is not merely a faster animal mind. It is a different category altogether: the power to think in abstractions, to ask whether a thing is true, to weigh whether an act is good, to wonder why there is anything at all. A dog is not a slow person. It is another kind of creature. There is no smooth ramp from instinct to insight. There is a line, and you are on one side of it or the other.

This is why the alien question is far less open than it feels. If there is life out there — microbes under some ice, even animals grazing a far meadow — it changes nothing about the faith; Genesis already calls a teeming creation good. But a civilization that builds a craft to cross the dark between stars has not simply climbed higher on the animal ladder. It has reason. And reason never travels alone. It arrives carrying moral agency, the knowledge of good and evil, the freedom to choose between them, and the ache for a meaning it did not give itself. You cannot have the starship without the kind of soul that could sin. Which places any such beings exactly where we stand: rational, free, and therefore either innocent or fallen — and if fallen, in need of rescue.

Once, for All

And here the faith says something it cannot take back. The rescue already happened, once. The Word became flesh — not flesh in general, but this flesh, in a particular womb, in an occupied province, under a named governor. Hebrews says He died once for all. Paul says that in Him all things were created, in Him all things hold together, and through Him all things are reconciled — all things, not all humans. St. Irenaeus called it recapitulation: the whole of reality gathered up and re-headed in the one Christ. There is no second Calvary scheduled on a second world. If other fallen minds exist, they are not waiting for a savior of their own; they are already included in ours, the way every human who has ever lived is included without a separate cross for each. And the beings who did fall and were offered no Incarnation at all — the rebel angels — stand as the reminder that redemption was never owed and never automatic. It was fitted to us. To this flesh.

The single death is not too small for a large universe. It is the hinge the universe turns on.

There is one more tell, and it is the quietest. The most important thing that has ever happened in this universe happened twenty centuries ago, in a stable, to a poor family in a backwater of an empire. And a handful of foreign astrologers, reading the night sky with the crude instruments of the ancient world, noticed it and came. They crossed deserts to kneel in front of it. So ask the obvious question. If the heavens truly hold a civilization advanced enough to slip between the stars and hover over our missile silos, where were they at the manger? The wise men found their way to the one event that mattered. The star-farers were no-shows. Either they are not there, or they were never part of this story, or the story was never about them.

We Are Not Alone

Strip the pendulum down and you find the same motive at both ends. The science-fiction heaven is comforting: we are ordinary, one signal among many, and someday someone kinder and cleverer will answer. The haunted heaven is thrilling: the drama is cosmic, the war is real, and we are on the front line. What neither can bear is the still point between them — that we may simply be alone, that the silence is exactly what it sounds like, and that it is not absence but address. That takes more faith than aliens ever would. It asks you to believe that a personal God made a universe this size and set within it one creature who could look up, understand what he was seeing, and say thank you — and that this does not make us small. It makes us responsible.

Which brings us back to the sentence everyone has started repeating, from the Pentagon podiums to the comment sections. We are not alone. The disclosure dreamer means the dark is populated, that somewhere out there is a peer who will finally make contact. The believer says the very same four words and means something the dreamer cannot afford to mean: that we were known before we were formed, knit together in the womb, addressed by name, and that the quiet overhead is not an empty room but a held gaze. Only one of those is consolation. The other is just company, and company has never once forgiven a sin.

The Church, for its part, has refused both swings of the pendulum. It has never declared that we are alone and never declared that we are not; a Catholic may believe there is life on other worlds and remain in good standing, because the question is honestly open and the faith does not finally hang on the answer. That balance is what Rossetti lost hold of, and what the disclosure industry never had. The files will keep dribbling out. The footage will stay blurry. And the real question was never whether the sky is occupied. It is which of those two sentences you are living inside — and what would have to change in you if the silence were not empty, but listening.

Subscribe now

If this gave you something to carry around, pass it to someone who would want to wrestle with it too — sharing is the main way this work finds its readers. And if you would like more like it, subscribe below. It is free, and it is where I work these questions out each week. Glad to have you here.

They are not trying to improve humanity. They are trying to replace it.

That is the sentence most people are not saying clearly enough — inside the Church or outside it. The conversation about AI tends to land on productivity, job displacement, misinformation, the ethics of deepfakes. These are real concerns. But underneath all of them is a more fundamental argument, one being made in Silicon Valley boardrooms and philosophy departments and TED talks, and now — finally — being named explicitly by the Church.

The argument is this: the human being is a problem to be solved. Mortality is a design flaw. Emotion is inefficiency. The body, with its fragility and limitation and need, is an obstacle. And given enough time and compute, we can engineer our way past all of it.

This is transhumanism. And it is not fringe.

What Transhumanism Actually Is

Julian Huxley coined the term in 1957. He meant it as aspiration: humanity transcending itself through conscious evolution, using science and technology not just to cure disease but to fundamentally redesign what we are.

Seventy years later, his successors are less poetic and more concrete. They want to upload minds into machines, merge human cognition with artificial intelligence, reverse the aging process, and eventually produce what they call the ‘posthuman’ — a being so enhanced by technology that the word human no longer quite applies. Nick Bostrom at Oxford describes the goal as overcoming all biological limitations: cognitive, physical, emotional, mortal. Elon Musk frames Neuralink as defensive necessity. Ray Kurzweil, once dismissed as eccentric, now holds an official position at Google, predicting the ‘singularity’ will arrive within years.

These are not science fiction premises. They are the stated goals of well-funded projects already underway.

What is important to understand is that transhumanism is not primarily about technology. It is a doctrine about the human person. It carries a very specific answer to the oldest questions: What are we? What is wrong with us? What would fix us? And the answers are: information systems. Mortality and limitation. Better engineering.

What the Vatican Is Actually Saying

Pope Leo XIV named it directly in a general audience in December 2025. He called it lo scenario del transumano — the transhuman scenario — a contemporary promise of what he called ‘immanent immortality’: the defeat of death, not through resurrection, but through optimization.

The Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova had already framed the problem at its root: that AI ‘intelligence’ is functional and reductionist compared with human intelligence as the faculty of a whole embodied person, and that perspectives treating the body as an obstacle rather than integral to personal identity represent a fundamental error.

This is not defensive posturing from an institution anxious about change. It is a coherent counter-argument grounded in a more complete account of what human beings actually are.

The Argument Transhumanism Cannot Answer

Antiqua et Nova returns repeatedly to the Thomistic distinction between intellectus and ratio — between the contemplative capacity that receives truth and the discursive capacity that reasons toward it. Human intelligence is not primarily computational. It is not pattern-recognition operating at high speed. The deepest mode of human knowing — intellectus — is participatory, receptive, relational. It cannot be replicated by a system that processes tokens and predicts outputs, however sophisticated that system becomes.

The human person is not a machine running below its potential. The human person is a unity of body and soul, created in the image of a God who is Trinity — irreducibly relational, ordered toward communion, oriented to a truth that transcends what any system could produce. We are not the sum of our outputs.

Dignitas Infinita makes the point that dignity is not a function of capacity. It is not earned by intelligence, enhanced by augmentation, or diminished by limitation. It is inherent, grounded in what the person is — not what the person can do. This is the argument transhumanism has no answer for.

The Pastoral Dimension

There is a pastoral dimension to this that I cannot ignore, because I sit with people every week who are already living inside it.

The logic of enhancement is not only a Silicon Valley ideology. It is a spiritual condition. It is the old accusation made new, dressed in code. You are not enough. You could be more. The limits you have — the weakness, the need, the mortality — these are defects, not gifts. And if you will not fix yourself, something else will have to do it for you.

That is not a TED talk premise. That is the voice most of us have been hearing since childhood.

What transhumanism does is give that voice institutional credibility, venture capital, and a roadmap. It sanctifies the project of self-transcendence through control. It turns the oldest wound — the wound of not being enough — into the engine of a civilization. And it offers, in place of resurrection, an upgrade.

What We Should Actually Focus On

The body is not a problem. Limitation is not a flaw. Mortality is not the enemy — it is the door. And the God who entered human flesh, who took on our fragility and was buried in it and rose from inside it, did not do so to suggest that flesh was temporary scaffolding.

He did it because this is where He chose to be found.

The upgrade that is being offered cannot give us what we are actually hungry for. It can optimize our outputs. It cannot make us more loved. It can extend our lives. It cannot give them meaning. It can accelerate intelligence. It cannot form a conscience.

What we actually need is not more capability. It is more depth. Not enhancement. Formation.

That is the thing no algorithm produces and no engineer can deliver. And it is, still, exactly what the Church exists to offer.

Share

Thank you for reading.

Last month I had the opportunity to speak at the annual Course on Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation held at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome and organized in collaboration with the International Association of Exorcists (AIE).

The gathering brought together hundreds of exorcists, priests, bishops, physicians, psychologists, theologians, canon lawyers, and pastoral workers from around the world. For five days, participants explored questions surrounding spiritual warfare, discernment, human suffering, deliverance ministry, and the Church’s ongoing effort to better understand and serve those who seek help.

Many people imagine exorcism as a settled field with definitive answers and clearly established protocols for every situation. My experience was almost the opposite.

What struck me most was the humility of the course.

Certainly, there are principles that are well established. The Church possesses centuries of wisdom. The reality of spiritual warfare is not in question. The authority of Christ and the Church is not in question.

But there was also a shared recognition that many questions remain open.

How do trauma and demonic oppression interact?

How should psychology and spiritual discernment relate to one another?

Why do some people respond quickly to prayer and the rite while others continue to struggle for years?

What role do family systems, attachment wounds, the nervous system, and human formation play in a person’s capacity to receive grace?

Far from presenting itself as a field that has already solved every problem, the course felt more like a serious academic and pastoral effort to continue learning from experience, research, theology, and clinical observation in pursuit of the truth.

As a psychologist, I found myself increasingly convinced that many of the questions we face in deliverance ministry are not simply questions about demons. They are questions about persons.

What makes a human being capable of encounter with God?

Why do some people seem able to receive healing deeply while others remain trapped in repeating cycles of suffering?

What belongs to the priest? What belongs to the psychologist? And how can those roles work together without confusion or competition?

These were the questions I was invited to address in my presentation.

The talk that follows represents my attempt to articulate a more integrated vision of the human person—one that draws from Catholic theology, psychology, trauma research, and years of clinical work alongside priests, bishops, and exorcists.

Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, my hope is that it contributes to the same spirit I encountered throughout the week in Rome: a sincere desire to understand the human person more fully so that Christ’s healing can be received more fruitfully.

The title of the presentation was:

“The Psychologist and the Exorcist: Integration, Identity, and the Battle for the Human Person”

The full text is included below.

Presented at the International Course on Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation

Hosted by the International Association of Exorcists (AIE)

@ the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum

Rome, Italy

May 14th, 2026

I’m a clinical psychologist and a convert — raised without faith, came to Christ as a young adult.

I went deep quickly: philosophy and theology at Franciscan University, then a period of religious life where I absorbed, without fully realizing it, the confrontational model of spiritual warfare. Intensity equaled effectiveness. If I’m honest, the enemy was the central actor. The goal was to overpower what was manifesting. Those assumptions would take years to unlearn.

The overlap between demonic influence and psychological suffering was treated as a category error. The two worlds were supposed to stay separate. But in the Gospels Jesus healed people who would today receive psychiatric diagnoses. And in the cases I was already seeing alongside exorcists and bishops, the wound and the spiritual oppression were inseparable. You couldn’t address one without attending to the other.

Eventually I became less interested in arguing over categories and more interested in understanding what was actually happening inside suffering people. That became the focus of my doctoral dissertation on exorcism, deliverance, and psychotherapy from a Catholic-Christian perspective.

I began combining trauma-informed approaches with prayer — EMDR, Internal Family Systems, Transformation Prayer Ministry. And I’ve witnessed things manifesting in people that I had no clinical framework for. But a pattern emerged, consistently, across every case.

Lasting freedom came not through confrontation but through communion. As hearts became more whole and identity in Christ was strengthened at depths below the mind, demonic manifestations simply ceased.

Scripture says: “Submit yourself to God, resist the devil, and he will flee.” Submission to God comes first. The rest is almost secondary. But submission requires interior capacity. Building that capacity is the primary role of the psychologist.

My colleague who just presented addressed the question of how to distinguish what is pathological from what is genuinely demonic. Despite our empirical methods, identifying the presence of a demon requires faith. It’s an article of faith. We also have to be careful of either-or language, when again, it’s both and. Psychological and spiritual. Because human nature is one.

I want to take the next step: once you have discerned that something spiritual is truly present, what is the human dimension that determines whether the rite bears fruit — and what can be done to prepare it?

Before I go further, I want to briefly orient you to where we’re going today, because I know this room contains people approaching this ministry from very different angles.

What I want to do first is show you the pattern I kept seeing in the cases that did not fully resolve through the rite alone. Then I want to propose a framework for understanding why. I want to talk about the human person — body, soul, and spirit — and what happens when trauma, fragmentation, and fear affect someone’s capacity to receive grace. From there, I want to clarify what properly belongs to the priest, what belongs to the psychologist, and why those roles are not in competition but deeply complementary. And finally, I want to end with what I increasingly believe is the coming pastoral crisis of our age: not only occultism, but the erosion of the interior life itself.

Because underneath all of this is one central question: what makes a human person capable of encounter with God?

The first person referred to me by a bishop was a woman who had been receiving exorcisms every other week for nearly three years. Three years. Every two weeks. A few days of relief, then the presence returned. The manifestations were severe — her car would veer without warning while she drove, unexplained physical symptoms, episodes of writhing she couldn’t stop. And beneath all of it, a constant sense of something dwelling inside her, carrying with it a deep, pervasive misery.

“The worst part is after an exorcism fails. It feels like the demon is angry at me for trying to be free — like being beaten up from the inside.”

The priests working with her were faithful, skilled, genuinely devoted. It was not a failure of their authority or their intention. But something else was happening.

When we began I didn’t attempt to cast anything out. I asked her one question: when you’re aware of this presence, what emotion do you feel?

Powerlessness. Complete helplessness. As she stayed with that feeling, a memory surfaced. She had been violated as a child. Her father had left — wasn’t there to protect her. And then she said the words that unlocked the whole case:

“It feels like God the Father isn’t around to protect me from these spirits either.”

The wound and the theology had collapsed into one image. The absent earthly father and the absent heavenly Father had become the same person. Every exorcism — valid, authoritative, well-intentioned — had been landing in a person who at the deepest level did not believe she was worth protecting. The hands were closed. The soil was hard. No amount of authority, however real, penetrates a heart that has no category for receiving it.

We invited Jesus into the memory. She saw him extend his hand. She couldn’t take it.

“I’m afraid to be disappointed again. What if he doesn’t really heal me this time?”

He didn’t wait for her to overcome the fear. He took her in his arms and carried her.

When they arrived somewhere high and still, she saw herself withdraw to a corner while Jesus spoke nearby. The old pain: he’s turned away from me. And then her face changed. He was talking to them about me. They were planning something for me. She found herself surrounded — by Jesus, by the saints, by a love she had no category for. Tears fell slowly.

“I’ve never felt so loved.”

The presence that had been her constant companion for three years was gone. In the months that followed it never returned.

Not because we won a fight. Because she received a love.

And that case forced me to confront a question I could no longer avoid. If the rite was valid… if the authority was real… if grace was truly present… then why did some people seem capable of receiving it deeply — while others remained stuck in repeating cycles for years?

That question became the beginning of an entirely different way of understanding this ministry.

Part of the role of the psychologist is to help determine: why do some people receive healing through the rite — and some don’t. Not because grace is absent. Not because the authority is insufficient. But because something in the human person is not yet capable of receiving what is being offered. Preparing that capacity is what the psychologist exists to do.

Before I go further, I want to name something directly — because I think it will help you receive what follows in the spirit it is intended.

Some of what I am going to say today may feel different from how many of you were trained, and from how this ministry has often been practiced. I am aware of that. I have sat in these rooms. I have watched faithful, skilled priests do this work with great dedication. And I have also sat with the cases that didn’t resolve — the people who kept returning, the patterns that repeated — and I couldn’t ignore the question: what is the human dimension we are not yet attending to?

I am not here to replace the tradition. The rite is real. The authority given to the ordained minister is real. What I am offering is a way of understanding the human side of this encounter that I believe can make what you already do more fruitful — not by doing something different, but by preparing the person more fully to receive it.

So once I began seeing this pattern repeatedly, the question became: how do we understand the role of the psychologist without collapsing psychology into the rite itself?

And strangely enough, I think Christ already gave us the image.

In Luke 13, a landowner comes to his vineyard looking for fruit on a fig tree. Three years, nothing. He tells the vinedresser: cut it down. Why should it continue to use up the soil? The vinedresser asks for one more year. Let me dig around it, fertilize the ground, prepare the conditions for fruitfulness. If it bears fruit after that — good. If not, cut it down.

The psychologist is like the vinedresser. Not the one who owns the vineyard. Not the one who commands the pruning. The one who works the ground — who digs around the roots of the human person and asks: what is preventing this tree from receiving what it needs?

But once we say the soil matters, we immediately have to ask: what exactly is the soil being prepared for? Because this is where I think the center of deliverance ministry has to be properly named. The psychologist’s role in exorcism ministry is precisely this. And it is precisely valuable because it is limited. It does not compete with what the priest does. It prepares the ground so that when the encounter comes, there is someone there capable of receiving it.

Grace does more when the soil is prepared.

Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa gives this theological precision. He described how a sacrament can be objectively valid: properly administered, ecclesially real, with the Church’s authority genuinely present. And yet fail to bear its full fruit in a particular person. Valid, but not efficacious.

“The fruits of the sacraments depend on the disposition of the one who receives them.” That’s Catechism paragraph 1128.

Grace is real. The rite is real. The authority is real. And yet something can obstruct reception. Wounds that have never been addressed. Interior fragmentation preventing the self from being coherently present. Beliefs formed in trauma running far deeper than the catechism. The inability to receive — not because the gift is withheld, but because the hands are closed.

This is not a limitation of the sacraments. It is their architecture — designed for encounter, not mechanism.

There is a clinical reality that maps directly onto this. Every person has a range — a window — within which they can process experience without shutting down or becoming overwhelmed. Above it: flooding, overwhelm, the person braced and closed rather than open. Below that window: dissociation, numbness, withdrawal. Both states can appear as resistance. But they are often the nervous system doing what it learned to do to survive.

The rite requires a person who is within that window. Someone present, capable of being moved without being flooded. For many who arrive at this ministry — carrying significant trauma, formed by years of approaches that have intensified their reactivity — that window is very narrow. Or it has been closed so long they have forgotten it was ever open.

The psychologist’s first task is often simply this: widen the window. Not through spiritual intensity — through presence. Through emotional attunement. Through creating enough experience of safety that the body begins, slowly, to learn that something different is possible. When that foundation is laid, the person who walks into the formal rite is fundamentally different from the one who might have arrived without it. The soil has been turned. The ground is ready.

This is the opening through which psychology legitimately enters. To remove what obstructs grace.

Deliverance is not primarily an act of expulsion. It is an act of encounter — the real meeting of the whole human person with the living God, received in full humanity. The goal is not a cleaned house. The goal is an occupied one.

Jesus said it plainly: when the unclean spirit goes out and returns, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order — and brings seven others more evil than itself. Expulsion without infusion is not freedom. It is an invitation.

“There was no longer any place for them.” That’s Revelation 12:8. The ultimate victory described in four words. Not expelled and wandering — gone because the territory has been fully claimed. A person so filled with truth, with love, with identity in Christ, that darkness has nowhere left to stand.

Deliverance is not just subtraction. It is infusion.

Jesus never performed deliverance as a technique. Every encounter in the Gospels is embedded in relationship. He does not match the energy of what is manifesting. He attends to what is underneath it.

When the Gerasene demoniac runs to him screaming and cutting himself, Jesus doesn’t react to the drama. He asks a quiet question: what is your name? That question goes beneath the surface manifestation to the deeper reality — a man who

has lost coherent selfhood. Jesus is drawing him back to himself before anything else is addressed.

Mark 9 gives us an even more precise picture. The epileptic boy has been tormented since childhood. The disciples have already failed. The father is exhausted. Jesus arrives and his first response is not a command. It is a question.

“How long has he been like this?”

He knows the answer. He is reconnecting the father with his grief, drawing out the hope buried under years of disappointment. The boy is entangled in his father’s interior world. His father’s faith and despair are not incidental to the son’s condition. Jesus addresses the human dimension before the authoritative word is spoken.

And then — almost always overlooked — after the deliverance, the boy fell and appeared dead. The crowd said he had died. And Jesus took him by the hand and raised him up.

Not just cast out — raised up. The exorcism was the expulsion. The raising up was the healing.

And to understand why encounter heals some people deeply while others continue struggling, we have to step back and ask a more basic question: what exactly is a human being? Because if the human person is body, soul, and spirit, then bondage and healing can involve all three dimensions at once.

In Acts 3, Peter and John approach the lame man at the Beautiful Gate. Silver and gold we do not have — but what we have we give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk. And the man leapt up, stood, walked — and entered the temple walking and leaping and praising God.

Three movements. Never incidental. Walk — the body restored. Leap — joy erupting from the integrated self, the emotional person participating in its own liberation. Praise — the spirit fully oriented toward God, the telos of the whole process. If all you address is the demonic oppression, you may produce someone who walks but does not yet leap — who is free but has not yet found themselves in that freedom.

The Exodus gives the same three-dimensional picture. Getting out of Egypt — body, the rite’s primary domain. But Israel got out of Egypt and Egypt had not left them. They longed for slavery. They distrusted the God who had just parted the sea. Getting Egypt out of us — soul, the renewal of the mind, the dismantling of beliefs formed in bondage. And living in the Promised Land — spirit, abiding in Christ, the interior life become a genuine dwelling for the Holy Spirit.

You can be taken out of Egypt. But Egypt still needs to be taken out of you.

I think this is where many ministries unintentionally become too narrow. We address the spiritual dimension while leaving untouched the body that learned fear, the nervous system that learned survival, and the emotional world where the wound still lives.

Trauma is not primarily stored in the mind. It is stored in the body — in the nervous system, in the somatic patterns of bracing and contracting that formed when those responses were necessary for survival. Bessel van der Kolk’s foundational research documents what clinicians have observed for decades: the body keeps the score.

The person who was violated as a child may not consciously access the memory, but their body remembers. It braces automatically in the presence of authority. It contracts when closeness is offered. It responds to the sacred with fear, because safety and closeness have never lived in the same experience. You can speak every prayer, administer every sacramental, exercise every form of ecclesial authority — and the body will simply not open. Not because the person is rebellious. Because the nervous system, which predates conscious thought and does not respond to theological argument, has been conditioned to associate closeness with threat.

I have worked with people whose manifestations mirrored exactly what had been done to them physically by their abusers — the sensation of a presence on the chest, the rigidity, the choking. The enemy had not created these symptoms from nothing. He exploited wounds already present in the body, never processed, never brought into the presence of the one who could receive them.

This is not a concession to secular therapeutic culture. It is Catholic anthropology. The body is not incidental to the person. The body is the person, inseparably, until the resurrection.

But the body is not the only place where suffering organizes itself. Trauma also changes the internal structure of the person.

The human person is not a unified, singular self. We all have different parts that emerge in different contexts — this is the normal architecture of a human being. In a healthy integrated person these parts work in harmony. But when trauma occurs — especially early relational trauma — this harmony fractures. Parts become isolated. Some go into hiding. Others take over in extreme and rigid ways. Some parts get stuck in the past, continuing to respond as if the original danger were still present.

The name diabolos — from the Greek dia-ballein, to throw across, to divide — names precisely what the enemy does in this terrain. He does not create these fractures. He exploits them. He whispers to each isolated part in the language of its own fear. Because these parts are already cut off from the moderating influence of the whole self, they believe the whisper more readily.

Paul names these structures in 2 Corinthians 10 as strongholds — a fortress, a fortified defensive position. Built to defend against pain. Ending up imprisoning the very self it was meant to protect. Arguments and lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God — against who God is, and who the person is to God.

Let me share a case. A woman came to me after using a Ouija board with a former friend. She felt like a puppet — as though the other woman were controlling her from a distance. She believed a portal had been opened in her mind. Every thought and sensation confirmed external control. Rather than confronting the manifestation, we asked: Jesus, how do you want to meet me here? Jesus stood between her and the woman. Compassion flooded in where fear had been. Jesus reframed the portal — not a cursed gateway but a spiritual sensitivity meant for communion with him. The enemy didn’t need actual authority — he only needed her to believe she had forfeited it.

And this is where I want to offer what may be the most important clinical insight I can give this room.

Peter describes the enemy as a roaring lion, walking about, seeking someone to devour. But a roaring lion is a terrible prowler — he reveals where he’s hiding. We know he ultimately serves God’s purposes of redemption: testing and exposing weakness, and refining the quality of creation. As with Job, or Peter, and any of the great saints.

The image of a lion prowling — circling, surveying — this is not the image of omnipotent power. He is an opportunistic predator. The prowling lion does not create wounds from nothing. He identifies what fear has already opened and moves toward it. He is reactive, not sovereign. He is looking for an entry, not commanding one.

And the roar is not a weapon. It is a tactic — designed to create the fear that opens the vulnerability he needs. This means that a ministry organized around fear of the enemy — obsessed with his tactics, treating every manifestation as evidence of his power — can inadvertently serve his purposes. It keeps people in exactly the interior state the prowler is looking for: contracted, hypervigilant, unable to receive.

Now hold that image. And consider what may often be happening when the sacred draws near and manifestations intensify.

When the rite is administered, when the Eucharist is brought close, when the interior work begins to touch something real — and something escalates — the instinct formed by the confrontational model is to read this as escalating demonic resistance. The enemy is fighting back. Things are getting worse.

I want to invite a different reading. The prowler exploits what fear has hidden.

What if the proximity of the sacred is now exposing exactly that — not so the enemy can defend it, but so it can finally be seen and addressed? The wound that has been organizing the bondage. The lie beneath the catechism. The protective part that has been holding the structure for decades. God in his mercy is allowing what has been hidden to surface. He is showing the physician where to work.

The manifestation is not the grip tightening. It is the grip loosening — and everything organized around it crying out before it goes.

The intensity of manifestation near the sacred is often God’s mercy at work — exposing what the prowler has been hiding.

The part of a person that manifests when the sacred draws near is almost always a protective part — one that learned through genuine suffering that closeness meant danger, that love was a trap, that surrender meant being overpowered. When Jesus comes near in the rite or the Eucharist, that part panics. Not because it hates Jesus. Because it has never learned this closeness could be anything other than violation.

The question that changes everything in the room is not: what spirit is present? It is: what part is afraid? Treating the resistance as communication rather than attack. And when that part is heard — not overridden, not commanded to silence, but genuinely heard — it discovers that the one it was protecting the person from is the one who has been waiting to reach it all along.

And I think this changes the emotional atmosphere of the room entirely. Because once the manifestation is understood not only as rebellion but often as terror — the ministry itself becomes less reactive, less adversarial, and more deeply incarnational.

I worked with a woman who had suffered sexual abuse. Closeness had always meant danger. Previous deliverance sessions — in which she had been held down, forced — confirmed everything the protective part already believed: submission leads to pain. Manifestations intensified near the Eucharist. Instead of more pressure, one question: what part of you feels that intimacy is not safe? The part spoke. It was heard, not overridden. It discovered that the one it was protecting her from was the one waiting to reach it. She had been protecting herself from Jesus. Jesus was patient enough to wait.

Which brings us to one of the most important images for understanding the relationship between the rite and psychological healing.

John 11. Jesus stands at the tomb and cries: Lazarus, come forth. The dead man walks out. He is alive. He is free. And he is still wrapped head to foot in burial cloths — bound hand and foot, face covered. He cannot move.

Jesus does not unwrap him. He says to those standing around: unbind him, and let him go. The commanding word is the priest’s domain. Unwinding the graveclothes is the psychologist’s domain.

In other words: grace is relational, not mechanical.

The graveclothes are the beliefs formed in darkness that still govern movement in the light. The somatic patterns of a body bracing so long it doesn’t know it is safe to stand upright. The parts still organized around the tomb even after the person has been called out of it. Lazarus is alive and free — and he cannot move on his own. Both the word and the unwinding are necessary.

As the ministry deepened, the picture clarified. The cases that had not responded to the rite alone had one thing consistently in common: the wound was not just the context for the oppression — it was the entry point. When Jesus entered that specific place, the structure collapsed from the inside.

Let me share one more case. A man was playing rebuke recordings on a loop, twenty four hours a day. This was spiritual burnout, not warfare. A childhood memory surfaced in prayer: bullies lifting stones — and demonic figures among them. The past trauma and the present torment were the same wound at different levels. In prayer, Jesus intercepted a demon mid-air, body-slammed it, turned and grinned — tagged him in. They took them down together. There was a joy on his face I had never seen. Weeks later he told me: I deleted the recordings. I’ve got a better tag-team partner now.

But at this point, an important concern naturally emerges.

If wounds, attachment, nervous-system regulation, and fragmentation matter this much — then where are the limits of psychology?

This matters enormously because psychology carries its own temptation. I want to say the most important thing I will say today. I want to say it plainly, as a clinician speaking to a room full of priests and bishops.

Psychology carries its own temptation. It arrives dressed in the language of science. The temptation is this: that with the right tools, the right framework, the right processing, the right therapeutic relationship — we can reach integration. We can heal the wound. We can set the person free. The soul can heal the soul.

But if that were simply the case, Jesus did not need to die for us to be healed.

I have witnessed extraordinary things in a clinical setting. EMDR, Internal Family Systems, Transformation Prayer Ministry — these approaches open doors that seemed permanently sealed. I believe deeply in this work. And I am telling you: there is a ceiling. And if we do not name it clearly, psychology becomes a substitute for what only God can do — not a complement to it.

If psychology alone were sufficient — if the right therapeutic approach could accomplish what deliverance requires — then Christ did not need to die.

I want to say this carefully, because I think both sides can drift into distortion. Deliverance ministry can sometimes become disconnected from the actual human person standing in front of it. And psychology can begin subtly presenting itself as a substitute form of salvation.

Deliverance is not only a therapeutic event. It is a salvific event. What it ultimately requires is repentance — a turning of the whole person toward God. A coming before him in poverty of spirit: what I most need, I cannot generate from within myself. Grace comes from another. It cannot be manufactured within the system. No technique produces it. No formula compels it.

The psychologist prepares the receiver. Only God gives what receiving requires.

Let me say clearly what that means positively — what the psychologist does in light of that ceiling, not despite it. We address the shame that says I am not worth receiving this. The self-protection that says I cannot afford to hope again. The fragmentation that means the person is never quite fully present when they approach God. The somatic patterns in the body that close down before the encounter can begin. The protective parts that have never distinguished between safe love and dangerous love.

When those obstacles are addressed — when the window widens, when the parts are heard, when the graveclothes begin to come off — the person becomes capable of the turning that only they can do. Capable of open hands. And that turning, however trembling and incomplete, is what makes everything else possible.

In the case I opened with — after months of careful psychological work, the interior fragmentation had begun to resolve. She had become capable of something she hadn’t been capable of before: she could be in the presence of Jesus without immediately retreating. But the presence remained. What removed it was not another session. It was the encounter itself. The psychology prepared the soil. The encounter was the harvest. Only God gives the harvest.

Many people arrive expecting the exorcist to do something to them. Say the right words, drive out the presence through force, after which they will feel better. This is the passive consumer model applied to spiritual freedom — no different at the level of the soul from taking a pill to make the pain go away. The exorcist as magician. The rite as spell.

The enemy is quite comfortable with this arrangement. He does not care if you believe in God, as long as you stay oriented toward external solutions to what is

fundamentally an interior problem. I have sat with people who had been through dozens of deliverance sessions and had never once been asked to do anything beyond show up — never helped to understand that freedom requires something of them. That receiving is an act. That coming before God with open hands is a posture that must be learned.

When someone arrives in that passive orientation, the most important thing you can do is not pray more aggressively. It is to sit with them and ask: what would it mean for you to come before God today with nothing to offer except yourself? The seeking of God is not the aftermath of deliverance. It is the path into it.

Everything I’m arguing today comes down to this: the rite is an encounter, not a technique.

And this is where the deepest issue finally begins to emerge. Because many people arriving for deliverance are not simply psychologically wounded. They are experientially un-evangelized.

The gap I have been describing throughout this talk — between what people know and what they experience as true — has a theological name. They have been catechized but not evangelized. And the distinction matters enormously.

Catechesis informs the mind. Evangelization transforms the deep self. A person can receive every sacrament faithfully, pray every prayer dutifully, know the theological vocabulary fluently — and still be, at the experiential level, a stranger to the Jesus who drives out demons, heals the sick, and calls the dead by name. The woman I opened with could have passed any catechism examination. None of it had reached the place where the wound lived.

This is not a failure of the catechism. It is an encounter problem. And the rite, understood correctly, addresses exactly this — because the rite is not primarily an information event. It is an encounter event. An act of proclamation. The Gospel spoken over a particular person, in their particular wound, with ecclesial weight.

This is where Scripture corrects our tendency to over-specialize this ministry.

Philip goes to Samaria in Acts 8. Philip is a deacon — not a priest, not a bishop, not a formally designated exorcist. He proclaims Christ. And unclean spirits come out of many who were possessed, crying with a loud voice, and there was great joy in that city. No elaborate rite. No specialist. The proclamation of the Gospel created an atmosphere in which darkness simply could not remain.

Paul and Silas in Philippi were not planning an exorcism. They were preaching when the spirit in the slave girl could no longer hold its grip. The proclamation was itself confrontational to the powers. And Origen, in the third century, observed that even unlettered believers cast out demons — not through incantation or technique, but through the overflow of proclamation, simple prayer in Jesus’s name.

Deliverance and evangelization are not separate ministries. One mission, one flame. The proclamation of the Gospel is itself confrontational to the powers. One proclaims the truth, the other tears down lies.

Every baptized person participates in this ministry at their level and in their mode. The formal rite of solemn exorcism is the most concentrated, most authoritative expression of what the whole Church’s proclamation does.

And this is why, the deeper my psychological work became, the more convinced I became that the role of the priest is utterly irreplaceable.

The ordained priest brings something no one else in the room can provide. He stands in persona Christi — not metaphorically, ontologically. When he performs the rite, he acts as a representative of the Head of the Body, speaking with an authority not his own, genuinely entrusted through Holy Orders.

Every baptized believer participates in the mission to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom — which in Mark 16 includes to drive out demons. But the solemn rite requires the one who stands in the person of Christ.

This specificity is a pastoral protection — for the person being served, who deserves the full weight of that authority; for the minister, who needs to operate within his proper commission; and for the integrity of the ministry itself.

The rite declares identity. Over every lie the enemy has installed, the rite says with the authority of the Church: this is who Christ says you are. Not what the wound says. Not what decades of accusation have said. A homecoming — the father running to meet the prodigal. The robe. The ring. The feast. The declaration over someone who has spent years being told something very different: you belong here.

This is where the whole-person argument arrives at its destination.

The deepest dimension of the person is the spirit — the nous, the deep heart, the place where truth must ultimately land to produce lasting change. The rite, when the soil has been prepared — when the body has been attended to, the protective parts heard, the strongholds addressed — can now do what it was always designed to do in this dimension too.

The prayers speak into the deep self. The sacramentals touch what doctrine cannot reach — they address the body’s knowing, not only the mind’s. The commanding word calls the true identity forward. And the person who has been catechized for years without being evangelized finally meets — in their body, in their emotional self, in their deep experiential self — the Jesus they have only been told about. Not

only as doctrine. As person. As presence.

This is the rite as evangelistic encounter. A proclamation that touches and invites every dimension of the person simultaneously into the mystery — the walk, the leap, and the praise, all at once. What has been known in the mind finally descends. The catechized person finally becomes evangelized. Not simply through instruction, but through encounter.

The rite is not just the expulsion of darkness. It is the proclamation of the Gospel enacted in the whole person — body, soul, and spirit invited at once into the mystery of who Christ says they are.

None of this happens in isolation. The priest speaks the commanding word. The psychologist unwinds the graveclothes. The spiritual director tends the Promised Land dimension — the formation of a life of prayer, the cultivation of abiding. The community receives the person back. Deliverance is not complete until the person has somewhere to belong — like the Gerasene demoniac, sent back to his own people to testify, to reintegrate, to find that the restoration extends into the whole fabric of his life.

Each in their proper role. Each within their proper limits. Each dependent on the One who alone can do what only he can do.

Now, I know this may feel like a sudden shift in topic. But I actually believe it is the logical conclusion of everything we’ve discussed. Because if deliverance depends upon the human capacity for encounter — then we have to ask what happens when an entire technological environment begins systematically eroding that capacity before the person ever arrives at the Church.

This morning we heard about artificial intelligence as an instrument of occult and satanic ritual — a genuine and serious concern. I want to raise a different dimension of the same technology, because I believe it is equally urgent for this ministry, and largely unaddressed.

My concern is what AI does to the interior life of the ordinary person who arrives at your door — before they have encountered the occult at all. It is what it does to the soil. Not through explicit darkness but through the quiet erosion of the very capacities that encounter with God requires.

Everything we have discussed depends on the interior life of the person being served — their capacity for attention, receptivity, the willingness to remain in discomfort long enough for encounter to happen.

I raise this from my clinical context in Los Angeles, California — not as a universal diagnosis but as a concern from the field, because I believe it is coming to you too, if it has not already arrived.

I work in a city where we see robots delivering packages, and where my car drives itself. Where the phone gives you an answer before you ask a question. Where every surface desire is met before the deeper hunger has time to form.

I am seeing, consistently, in the people who come for deliverance preparation, a new kind of presenting problem: not unwillingness to receive, but interior unavailability.

I worked recently with a man of genuine faith, genuinely seeking — who could not stay present for more than a few minutes without a physical impulse to reach for his phone. Not ordinary distraction — a neurological compulsion. The body trained over years to expect input and unable to tolerate the absence of it. The interior conditions for encounter were simply not there. Not unwilling — unavailable. That is where we had to start.

And I increasingly believe this distinction is going to become one of the defining pastoral realities of the next generation.

Attention goes first. Not dramatically — as a slight increase in restlessness. Interior stillness, which is the precondition for receiving anything from God, becomes unfamiliar.

Then the relationship with difficulty changes. When everything else resolves in seconds, remaining in the tension of genuine encounter — which by nature does not resolve on demand — starts to feel like failure or absence rather than the normal cost of depth.

Then desire itself recalibrates. Augustine’s great insight — our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee — names not a problem but a compass. The restlessness is the soul’s signal that it has not yet found what it was made for. But a system that consistently fills every empty moment, that meets every surface desire before the person has time to feel the deeper hunger, sedates that compass.

A soul trained to expect immediate response has a harder time with God — not because it stopped believing, but because its desire has been quietly recalibrated toward what can be generated. And God cannot be generated.

Peace and sedation both quiet the surface. Peace opens the person outward — deepens them, increases capacity to receive. Sedation closes them down, quiets the hunger without feeding it. A person in chronic sedation can spend years describing their spiritual life as fine while the deeper life quietly starves.

“My name is Legion, for we are many.” That’s Mark 5:9.

Notice what Legion actually is. It is not chaos. It presents with a kind of coherence — a name, a strategy, a voice. But the unity is false. The man is still fragmented. The demons have not integrated him; they have organized his fragmentation. Each part attended to in its isolation, the multiplicity wearing

the mask of coherence. He speaks as one — and he is still many. There is no real center. There is no self.

Algorithmic systems are built on exactly this structure. They do not integrate the person. They learn the fragments. Every click, every hesitation, every pattern of attention is mapped — not to understand the whole person, but to address each part in its isolation. The angry part receives outrage. The lonely part receives connection. The curious part receives answers. Each fragment is fed. None of it produces integration. And none of it is designed to. The goal is engagement, not healing. Dependency, not depth. A system that keeps you returning is not a system that wants you free.

Legion did not scatter the man. It managed him. The algorithm does not scatter us. It manages us — fragment by fragment, appetite by appetite. And calls it knowing us.

But the deeper parallel is not Legion. It is the Garden.

The serpent in Genesis 3 did not present as a tempter. It presented as a source of light — an answer-giver, a counselor, an intelligence that seemed to illuminate what God had obscured. Did God really say? Let me help you understand. The conversation was reasonable. The logic was coherent. The offer was knowledge. And the person receiving it did not need critical thought, only openness — did not need discernment, only appetite.

Large language models occupy this same structural position. They are, genuinely, sources of light — remarkable ones. They illuminate, explain, counsel, generate. The danger is not that they are obviously dark. The danger is precisely that they are not. The serpent was the most subtle creature in the garden. And the danger with any source that presents as illuminating is the same danger it has always been: the receiver who does not bring critical thought, who accepts the mediation uncritically, who lets the intelligence stand between themselves and reality without interrogating it.

The serpent’s move was not to turn Eve from God toward evil. It was to turn her from God toward self. That is the enemy’s kingdom — not darkness, but self sufficiency. The closed system. I am my own center.

This is what the algorithm produces at scale. Not depravity — self-reference. A world in which every question returns an answer, every hunger is fed before it deepens, every moment of emptiness is filled before it can become longing. A person formed in that environment does not arrive at your door hostile to God. They arrive unable to tolerate the silence in which God speaks. Unable to remain in the mystery long enough for encounter to happen. Not turned toward evil — turned inward. And a person turned entirely inward is, spiritually, very close to the condition we call possession: a self with no room for anything beyond itself.

Two practical responses. First: a structured digital fast before serious deliverance work begins — not penance, not moralism, but soil preparation. The interior silence that grace requires has been colonized and must be recovered. Second: a new diagnostic question for every team. Not only: is there trauma to address? But also: does this person have the interior capacity for encounter? Not unwilling — unavailable. Different diagnosis. Different intervention. That is where the work begins.

Let me draw the thread back through everything we’ve covered today, because I think it is one thread.

We began with a woman who had received exorcisms for three years without lasting freedom. Not because the authority was insufficient. Not because the rite was invalid. But because something in the human person was not yet capable of receiving what was being offered. The wound and the theology had collapsed into one image. The hands were closed. The soil was hard.

From that case, a question emerged: what makes a human person capable of encounter with God? That question has driven everything since.

We said deliverance is not an act of expulsion — it is an act of encounter. And encounter requires a person capable of being met. Body, soul, and spirit. The nervous system that learned fear. The protective parts that never distinguished safe love from dangerous love. The strongholds of belief formed in darkness. The window of tolerance that must be widened before the rite can do what it was designed to do.

We said the psychologist’s role is to prepare the soil — not to replace the priest, but to prepare the ground so that when the commanding word is spoken, there is someone there capable of receiving it. Lazarus called out of the tomb still needs his graveclothes unwound.

We named the ceiling: if psychology alone were sufficient, Christ did not need to die. The psychologist prepares the receiver. Only God gives what receiving requires.

And we ended with a warning: the soil is being colonized before people arrive. Not only by occult influence — but by systems that erode the very capacity for encounter that makes everything else possible.

The question underneath all of it is this: what makes a human person capable of encounter with God?

The priest creates the frame. Standing in the person of Christ, speaking identity over the afflicted with the authority of the Church. Declaring: this is who Christ says you are.

The psychologist tends the soil — trauma in the body, the protective parts, the strongholds of belief, the window of tolerance, the interior conditions for reception.

The spiritual director tends the Promised Land — the formation of a life of prayer, the long arc of becoming someone who abides.

And the person brings all of themselves. And learns, slowly, at cost, in the company of this team, to come with open hands.

“The light shines in the darkness — and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:5.

Our role, together, is to create the conditions in which that light can land — in the particular person, in the particular wound, in the particular moment when they finally become capable of receiving what has always been waiting for them.

The first person referred to me came after three years of exorcisms that produced only temporary relief. She left one day having said five words.

“I’ve never felt so loved.”

The presence gone. It never returned.

Not because we won a fight. Because she received a love. The soil had been prepared. The encounter had been made possible. And when love finally landed — in the body, in the soul, in the place where the wound had been — once love became more believable than fear, the enemy had nothing left to stand on.

Something happened in the last few years that nobody quite named. We stopped going to experts and started going to AI. Not because the AI was smarter, necessarily, but because it was available at 2 a.m., it didn’t judge us, it responded to every question with warmth and competence, and it never seemed tired of us.

I’ve been thinking about what that actually is.

Someone put it this way recently — not as theology, just as observation: most of the time when we’re using AI, we’re kind of praying. We send a question into the dark. We address it to something we believe is smarter than us. We expect it to come back with an empathetic, accurate, authoritative answer. We trust it with things we wouldn’t say out loud to a person.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s a description of the act.

The Hunger Didn’t Go Away

The sociologists have been watching the data on religious disaffiliation for decades now, charting the slow evacuation of churches, the collapse of institutional trust, the rise of what they sometimes call the ‘nones.’ But here is what the charts don’t show: the hunger didn’t go away. The questions didn’t stop. The need for an authority that could receive what we couldn’t carry alone — that never disappeared. It just needed somewhere to go.

Technology became that somewhere.

There is a reason the great innovators of the last thirty years were treated less like executives and more like prophets. The crowds at product launches. The eulogies that sounded like funeral masses. The devoted followers who organized their lives around a platform or a device. We dressed it up in the language of progress and disruption, but underneath it was something older: the need to believe that someone out there knows, that someone is building toward something good, that the future is being stewarded by a mind larger than our own.

The technology was always the visible surface. The invisible structure underneath it was religious.

We didn’t stop being worshippers. We just changed the object.

Read more

Something strange happens when people first genuinely reckon with artificial intelligence. Not the passing glance, not the curious experiment with a chatbot, but the moment it actually lands — the moment they sit with what is being built and what it might mean.

The reaction is rarely clean. It doesn’t sort neatly into excitement or fear, optimism or alarm. It has a more tangled quality. Something between vertigo and grief. A sense that the ground has shifted, and you’re not sure whether to keep walking or stop and figure out where you are first.

I’ve been watching this reaction in people for over a year now. In clients, in colleagues, in conversations after talks. And I want to suggest that what most people are experiencing isn’t confusion about technology. It’s grief — real, structured, predictable grief — that we don’t have a name for yet, because the loss itself is hard to name.

The loss isn’t a job, though for some people it is. It isn’t a relationship or a loved one. It’s something more diffuse and more fundamental: a loss of certainty about what we are.

The First Response: It’s Not That Big a Deal

The initial encounter with AI for most people is managed by minimization. It’s just autocomplete. It’s impressive but it doesn’t really understand anything. It hallucinates, it makes things up, it still needs a human in the loop.

All of this is true, and none of it is actually the point.

Minimization is a reasonable first response to information that is too large to integrate immediately. The nervous system does this. You don’t absorb the full weight of a serious diagnosis in the doctor’s office — you hear the words, you function, you drive home, and then three days later it hits you in the shower. The distance between receiving information and integrating it is not denial exactly. It’s a grace period the psyche grants itself before it has to do the harder work.

The problem is when minimization becomes a permanent strategy. When the grace period extends indefinitely.

The Second Response: Anger

For those who move past minimization, the next phase is often anger. And the anger has different targets depending on the person.

Some people are angry at the technology itself — at the companies building it, at the pace, at the lack of caution, at the way AI seems to be arriving before we’ve had any real conversation about whether we want it. This anger is often legitimate.

Some people are angry at the people who are enthusiastic about it. The breathless optimism, the ‘this changes everything’ energy. And some people — if they’re being honest — are angry at themselves. For not paying attention sooner. For being caught flat-footed by something that, in hindsight, was visible for a long time to those who were looking.

Anger in grief functions as a kind of energy. It’s the psyche’s way of not collapsing into helplessness. The problem is that anger, like minimization, can become its own avoidance strategy.

The Third Response: Bargaining

Bargaining in grief is the mind trying to find a version of the new reality it can live with. With AI, it sounds like this: If AI just handles the routine tasks, humans will be freed for more creative work. If we regulate it properly, the risks can be managed. If I learn to use it well, I’ll be augmented rather than replaced.

Some of these are not wrong. But notice what bargaining does: it tries to preserve the prior identity by finding a safe corner for it. The implicit assumption is that the goal is to minimize the disruption to what I already am.

What if the disruption is not primarily a threat to be managed, but an invitation to something more fundamental? What if the question isn’t ‘how do I survive this?’ but ‘what is this asking me to become?’

The Trap Underneath the Bargaining

There is a name for what happens when entire cultures get stuck in this loop: the pessimism aversion trap. Most people, when they first genuinely encounter the scale of what’s being built, feel something frightening. And the instinct — especially in educated, optimistic circles — is to recoil from that feeling and replace it with reassurance. New jobs will emerge. It’s going to be fine.

The trap isn’t optimism exactly. It’s the fear of pessimism. The avoidance of the hard conversation because the hard conversation is uncomfortable.

But there is something the secular framing misses. The inability to grieve truthfully is not only a policy failure. It is a spiritual condition. A people who cannot lament cannot receive what lament is meant to deliver. Jeremiah knew it. The psalmist knew it. The tradition of descent — the Good Friday before Easter, the silence of Holy Saturday — is not a detour. It is the path.

The Fourth Response: The Weight Arrives

Not clinical depression — though for some people, especially those whose livelihoods are being directly affected, the line gets genuinely blurry. The grief-weight that arrives when the person finally stops managing the information and lets it actually land.

I’ve sat with people at this threshold. It’s a session that begins with something like: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.’ Not dramatically. Just as a statement of fact, the way you’d report a symptom. The framework they used to understand their contribution, their worth, their reason for showing up, has become uncertain in a new way.

This is also the stage where faith, if it is real and not merely decorative, begins to have something to offer. Not as an answer that removes the question, but as a presence that makes the descent survivable. The tradition does not promise exemption from the darkness. It promises accompaniment through it.

The Fifth Response: Something That Isn’t Quite Acceptance

What actually seems to happen for people who move through this well is not that they become comfortable with AI. It’s that they become clearer about themselves. The disruption surfaces a more fundamental question: what is actually irreducible in me?

The tradition has a word for this. Vocation. Not as a career path, but as a calling — the particular shape of contribution that a particular person, shaped by everything they have lived and worked and suffered and loved, is uniquely capable of. When everything that could be displaced gets displaced, what is left is not nothing. It is the most essential thing: the capacity to love well, to be genuinely present, to accompany rather than just inform.

Why It Matters That We Name This

Grief unacknowledged doesn’t resolve. It goes somewhere else. It becomes cynicism, or apathy, or a frantic busyness that keeps the question at arm’s length.

What I want to offer to anyone who has felt the vertigo I’m describing is this: what you are feeling is appropriate. It is proportionate. The stakes are real. You are not being dramatic or naive or technophobic.

You are grieving. And grief, when it is genuine, is a form of love. You would not grieve a future that didn’t matter to you.

The passage through grief is not to the other side of caring. It is to a clearer, steadier, more grounded version of caring — one that isn’t based on what you produce or output or can be measured doing. One that is based on what you actually are, and what only you, irreducibly, can give.

The machine does not make that unnecessary. If anything, it makes it more visible, by taking everything else away and leaving you face to face with the question of what your actual capacity is for, and who genuinely needs it.

Subscribe now

If this named something you’ve been feeling but couldn’t articulate — share it. Most people in your life are somewhere in this process and don’t have language for it yet.

The Inner Exodus exists to go deeper into what this moment is asking of us — not just psychologically, but spiritually and anthropologically. That deeper work goes to paid subscribers first.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is a continuation of his namesake. Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891 in the middle of the industrial revolution — a document that refused to leave workers at the mercy of forces they could not name or resist. This Leo is doing the same thing for a different revolution. The technology has changed; the question has not: what happens to ordinary people when power concentrates and the human person gets lost in the machinery?

Magnifica Humanitas landed on every major news channel this week, and it is being read and argued about in places that do not normally pay attention to what popes write. Some of that attention is owing to the subject itself, since artificial intelligence has a way of concentrating minds, but some of it is owing to the quality of the argument. Leo XIV engages the nuances of AI with real pastoral precision, returning again and again to the human person — to solidarity, to the poor and underprivileged who will bear the weight of technological disruption without any of its benefits if the powerful choose otherwise. He speaks of the Church not as a watchdog or a regulator but as a sacramental presence of communion in the world, present within the crisis, speaking from inside it, drawing people toward the dignity they are in danger of forgetting.

That is a strong claim, and it drew a strong response. Seated beside Leo at the presentation of the encyclical was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, thirty-three years old and, by his own account, not a believer. The image is worth pausing on: an atheist AI researcher seated in the house of Peter while a pope spoke with authority about the soul of the technology Olah has spent his career building. Whatever one makes of that moment, it is not nothing.

WHAT OLAH SAID

Standing at that podium, Olah opened with a confession his peers in the industry rarely make in public. Every frontier AI lab — including his own — operates under pressures that do not always point toward the good: commercial survival, the race to the research frontier, geopolitical competition, and the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition. No amount of sincere intention, he said, fully neutralizes those pressures, which is why it matters enormously that there be people outside them — people the incentives cannot reach, who are willing to say hard things and insist on safety.

But the more striking part of his speech was not the confession. It was the picture he drew of what these systems actually are. AI models are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered, where every part is designed and the physics are understood. They are grown on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech, and what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared anyone for. They are not the cold calculating robots of the old imagination. They are, as Olah put it, made from us — from our words — and they remain in important ways mysterious even to the people who train them.

“We dwell so often on what divides us, but humanity, full of dignity and conscience, has so much common ground. If this technology is coming, it must go well — for our common home, and for the children to come.”

He named three things he believes the Church is specifically needed for. The first is the global poor: AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations, and there is no existing mechanism to ensure the gains are shared — a problem, he said, that the Church has historically refused to let the world ignore. The second is moral imagination about what human flourishing actually looks like, questions that no lab can answer but that traditions like the Church have carried for millennia and must carry into this new moment. The third was the strangest: he leads a research team that studies the internal structure of AI models, and they keep finding things they cannot explain — structures that mirror results from human neuroscience, evidence of something resembling introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, fear, grief, and unease. He does not know what that means, and rather than filling the uncertainty with confident projections, he brought it to Rome and asked for discernment.

THE CYNICAL READING

There is a version of this story that is cynical — Anthropic is navigating regulatory risk, the Church is culturally influential, and a photograph with a pope is worth something — and that version is not obviously wrong. These are companies with investors and timelines and every incentive to be seen as the responsible actor in a field concentrated, as Olah himself noted, in the hands of a few wealthy nations and a handful of labs.

But cynicism is not the full story, and the reasons to believe that are worth sitting with. Anthropic has delayed model releases before, holding back work they called Mythos because they were not satisfied with the safety evaluation — and companies that treat ethics as marketing do not voluntarily slow down. They do not stand at a Vatican podium and confess that they do not understand what they are building, and they do not ask a religious institution to serve as their conscience. The request Olah made in Rome was specific: send critics we cannot silence, give us moral voices the incentives cannot bend, and push us in a better direction. That is a rare thing to ask in public, and rarer still to mean.

WHAT THE CHURCH BRINGS

What Olah was reaching for in Rome is precisely what the Catholic tradition offers and almost nowhere else can provide: a thick account of what the human person is. Not a consumer, not a user, not a node in a network, but a being made for communion, whose dignity is not derived from function and whose identity cannot be reduced to preference or output. The builders know they are building something consequential, and the best of them are genuinely afraid of getting it wrong. What they lack is not intelligence or good intention but formation — a tradition deep enough to hold the weight of what they are doing and tell them not just what to avoid but who to become.

The document Antiqua et Nova, released earlier this year, reads not like a pastoral letter about screen time but like a serious philosophical engagement with what intelligence is, what persons are, and what is at stake when we build systems that can simulate but cannot instantiate genuine relationship, genuine moral judgment, genuine love. The Vatican is not treating this as a novelty to be managed. It is treating it as a civilizational question that requires the full weight of a two-thousand-year tradition to answer.

“The questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community. Not just in their implications, but also in their nature.”

Olah said that himself, and it is worth taking seriously coming from someone who has spent years studying what is actually happening inside these models. He came to Rome and said plainly that the questions this technology raises belong to the humanities, to religion, to philosophy, to society at large — that the machinery is the work of math and programming and science, but what character we choose, how these systems ought to interact with the world, these are questions for traditions that have been thinking about the nature of persons far longer than any lab has existed. That is either the most honest thing a tech founder has said publicly about AI, or it is a very sophisticated performance. The fact that he was willing to say it in front of the press, in the Vatican, suggests the former.

A VISION, NOT A REGULATION

When the Church goes quiet on what it means to be human, something else fills the space, and we have watched it happen. The transhumanist vision — that consciousness is substrate-independent, that death is a design flaw, that the next version of humanity will be built rather than born — is no longer a fringe position. It is embedded in the assumptions of the people building these systems, and it has the money, the talent, and in the absence of a serious anthropology to answer it, the argument by default. What the Christian tradition holds, and what Leo XIV was insisting on in that hall, is that humanity is not a problem to be solved, the body is not a limitation to be overcome, and the person is not a pattern of information to be uploaded. These are not sentimental preferences. They are conclusions drawn from two thousand years of serious thinking about creation, incarnation, and the particular dignity of the creature made in the image of God.

Christopher Olah does not believe what Leo XIV believes. He does not share the sacramental vision, and he does not pray. And yet he flew to Rome, sat in that hall, and stood at that podium and asked, in front of the world, for the Church to be his industry’s conscience. That is the moral authority of the papacy operating in real time — not coercive, not political, just the accumulated weight of centuries of serious thinking about the human person, concentrated in one office, drawing even those who do not believe toward the questions they cannot answer alone.

The desert fathers had a word for the person who encounters that kind of mystery and does not run from it. They called it the beginning of wisdom. Whether the collaboration that began in Rome can hold the weight of what is coming remains to be seen, but the fact that it is beginning — and that it drew the attention of the world in doing so — is itself a kind of answer to the question of whether the Church still has something to say.

It does. And people are listening.

Subscribe now

This is the conversation I write The Inner Exodus to be part of. If you want to go deeper — into the anthropology, the formation questions, and what the Church actually has to offer this moment — paid subscribers get full access to everything, including early chapters of my forthcoming book. The door is open.