Might the CofE become more like the Anglican Communion?

During the past few days I have come across two well-written reflections on ACC-19, recently held in Belfast, Northern Ireland (i.e. within the provincial territory of the Church of Ireland). These are by no means the only reflections you could read if you google further, but they are two that I appreciate, one because it is a bit uncomfortable for me to read, the other because it is both comforting to read and explains something I hadn't quite understood about where the NCPs were seeking to take the Anglican Communion. That is, too far in the direction of "impaired communion" which, Kelvin Holdsworth, author of one of the two reflections, points out is something the CofE has gotten used to, but just maybe the rest of us (excepting Oz?) have not and do not want to get used to either. (The title of this post reflects a neat line within the Holdsworth reflection).

So,

Anthony Atherstone writes at The Living Church, "Hope for the Communion? Reflections on the Anglican Consultative Council's 2026 Meeting"

Among some criticisms of what went along, which could be summed up (in my words) as "for all the talk of "full communion" there was plenty of acknowledgment that communion in the Communion is "impaired"," we could offer the following as illustrative from what Atherstone writes:

"Another significant resolution thanks IASCUFO for their work on the NCPs and reaffirms

“the vocation of all member Churches of the Anglican Communion to seek to walk together to the highest degree of communion possible one with another, and to learn from our ecumenical conversations how to accommodate differentiation patiently and respectfully.”

By implication, if communion between Anglican provinces is a matter of “degrees”, it is not always “full”. This resolution was brought early in the week, on the first full day of business, but was poorly explained and many delegates felt bounced into giving their assent. This further example of bad process was rightly challenged by Kelvin Holdsworth of the Scottish Episcopal Church, so the resolution was put again at the end of the week, enabling a counted vote on this important affirmation, with 67 votes in favour (including the Archbishop of Canterbury), 7 against, and 3 abstentions. The concept of “degrees of communion” is now increasingly embedded in our descriptions of the Anglican Communion. By naming this reality, we admit our brokenness, an important first step towards healing our wounds."

And,

Klevin Holdsworth writes on his personal blog, "ACC-19 - The Anglican Consultative Council in Belfast".

Perhaps, following up Atherstone's point about "impaired communion" above, it is worth quoting what Holdsworth says on the same theme:

"A further reflection from me is that the idea of being in degrees of communion (or being in impaired communion) is one that needs a good deal more thinking about. I realised during my week in Belfast that it is a phrase that means very different things to different people. We don’t have the idea of being in impaired communion within the polity of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I learned last week that there are plenty of other churches that don’t have this idea within them either. However it is the very stuff that the Church of England is built from. One way of seeing the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals is to see them as somehow taking the deeply flawed (some would say heretical) theology that one can be in impaired communion within your own church and make it normative in the Anglican Communion. The Church of England may think it is acceptable to have dioceses in which bishops are not in full communion with their clergy or indeed with one another – it is quite another thing to get people who don’t have this idea to think that it is in any way a force for good. I’m glad that ACC-19 had no enthusiasm for this way of thinking. So far as I can see the words “being in impaired communion” within a church are little more than a euphemism for denying the legitimacy of ordained women. Many from around the Communion had not grasped that this is the reality of the Church of England.

As I reflect on these conversations, it is my hope that the Church of England will become more like the other churches of the Anglican Communion. That is a far better thing to hope for than that the Anglican Communion should become like the Church of England."

We should note - kind of a marker for a possible future - that I have seen comment since ACC-19 that the Global South movement is setting out a pathway for departure from the Communion (or rearrangement of the Communion?) which is considered and subtle (in contrast to the more abrupt manner of Gafcon).

Cue, perhaps, heading to the whole of Holdsworth's reflections which cover the wonderfulness of the Communion in all its diversity, breadth, growth meeting together with deep common identity and prayfulness.

This world is strange, beautiful and broken

Your indulgence for a rambling kind of post is appreciated. I have no striking thesis to develop this week. I am typing this in the airport at Chatham Island (where our most remote parish is), waiting for our plane to land, it having been delayed because of storms in New Zealand disrupting its flights yesterday. We have been here for five days and had the best weather ever of four trips here over the past eight years.

The Chathams, as always, inspire with the beauty of isolated land sitting in the midst of surrounding seas.

During those five days there has been a good result for the All Blacks under their new coach, some amazing results in the World Cup, a good outcome (in my view) of ACC deliberations re the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals, all kinds of machinations in the Catholic world over the SSPX episcopal ordinations, a Chinese ballistic missile launched into the Pacific Ocean, and, incredibly, President Trump intervening to change the outcome of a red card against an American player and the FIFA President meekly obliging. What a broken world!

I am pleased that the ACC is (at the least) pausing to reflect further on the nature of a Communion which should involve communion with Canterbury rather than not. (See, e.g., this Living Church report).

On a completely different note, I had seen good reports of "Prime Minister", a documentary about Jacinda Ardern's time as our Prime Minister (2017-2023), and last night had a chance to watch it courtesy of Netflix (upon which site it remains for about another 30 hours). I found it very moving (and very well produced, though no surprises there because Jacinda's husband, Clarke Gayford, is a top TV cinematographer). Sure, I know we can have a discussion about the financial legacy of the latter years of her premiership (none of which is mentioned in the film), but the moving part of the film was the humanity of our then PM as she met some huge challenges, with little or no rest between them - raw emotion is involved. Only view if you are comfortable being moved to tears.

Hopefully back to a longer and better focused post next week ... our plane has landed here in the Chathams, ... and life resumes in (very cold, damp) Christchurch.

The Holy Spirit and the church

 I noticed this sharp, waspy Tweet a day or so ago, by a veteran Vatican commentator, Austen Ivereigh:

It is striking how those who believe they are saving the Church from itself — Jesus’s promise of the HS being, they presume, at best unreliable — never think of themselves as schismatics. https://t.co/a9UpNG3ilV

— Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) June 27, 2026

It is (in my experience) easy to forget the Holy Spirit. Trusting in our own efforts (for any purpose in life, not just ecclesiastical purposes) is much more immediate and likely (to ourselves at least) a reliable way to achieve something. Now Ivereigh is commenting on the brinkmanship (as I write) of SSPX threatening to ordain bishops with or without the Pope's authorization, and "without" means, so pundits say, according to canon law, that there will be excommunications. I have no comment to make on this particular matter, not least because I am no kind of expert in Roman canon law.

But it is a thought, is it not, that we might wonder more about what the Spirit is doing in the life of the church, than what we ourselves might do about the life of the church. The wondering, Ivereigh makes the point, includes whether we might wonder about what kind of faith we have in the promises of Jesus.

Now, this, surely, is a thing to consider whatever our station in life or the church, and whatever church we belong to, whether one on the verge of schism or just on the verge of deciding what kind of instant coffee to buy for next Sunday's morning tea. (Yes, no need to comment on the word "instant" being paired with "coffee", I know there are strong feelings about these things.) 

Dare we believe that the church is Christ's and he has the church in hand, working the purposes of God out in ways we cannot imagine, to a timetable our impatience disables our discernment thereof, and with greater power - the Holy Spirit - than is in the possession of any synod or bishop or session clerk or patriarch/matriarch?

As the ACC meets in Belfast through these days, I must say to myself, you might also choose to say to yourself, 

"Holy Spirit, come, fill their hearts (and our hearts) anew, refresh your Communion, open our ears to hear what you are saying to your church."

The true church is hard to find

To be frank, not a lot this week is motivating me to blog Anglicanly (though see further below). Next week might be better, I think the ACC meeting in Belfast starts later this week. But my ranging eye never ceases to keep an eye on "ecclesial things", and among other things I notice, is continuing attempts to find or make the "true church".

If we head over to the Southern Baptist world, for one example, we can see a recent definitive decision to exclude women from church leadership. The true church has no place for women in leadership.

Much more locally, a few days ago there was further news of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, an order out of communion with Rome, with branches in Scotland and here in Canterbury, New Zealand: their lead priest here, Fr Michael Mary, is to be ordained a bishop - an "illicit bishop" according to The Press. Interestingly that bishop, Pierre Roy started life as an SSPX priest - SSPX has also been in the news recently, threatening to proceed with ordinations of bishops not approved by Rome - but fell out with SSPX due to his view that SSPX was compromised because it wished to find a way to stay in Communion with Rome. The gist of the story here is that the Roman Catholic church has not been the true church of God since the time of John XXIII.

Of course, looking ahead to ACC in Belfast, and its discussion of the so called Nairobi Cairo Proposals, we might consider a few moments spent reading three closing opinions published at The Living Church, answering the question, "Should the ACC endorse the Nairobi Cairo Proposals?": by Paul Avis, Glenn Davies and Graham Tomlin/Sarah Rowland Jones/Andrew Khoo. None are proposing the true church is the Anglican Communion in any of the particular forms it presently thinks it is or imminently might become, but each are acknowledging that there are motivations within the Communion that robustly propose where the true church might lie and consequently who among the Anglicans of this globe are falsely claiming to be church.

Oh, well!

For what it is worth, I continue to think, as I survey the scattered and fragmented landscape of global Christianity in 2026, that the true church is the church of Jesus Christ, by which I mean, the people who keep coming to Jesus, to his teaching, and ask of themselves, am I living the way of Christ, the way of the Beatitudes, the way of the cross, the way of service and of love for neighbour and for one another as a concrete expression of love for God.

That church is everywhere and has no single name on its letterheads.

Who or what is a person?

Last week, posting on AI, I noted a post by Ilia Delio "a Franciscan sister, teacher and writer in an unfinished universe", titled "Are we defending a corpse? Magnifica Humanitas and the Person we no longer are".

Delio's dissection of Magnifica Humanitas is as cutting as any an anatomist might make during an autopsy because she strikes at one of its core concepts, the human person. Thus:

"The encyclical presents AI as the problem. But AI is not the problem. The problem is the human person — specifically, the philosophical and theological categories through which we have defined human personhood, categories that are now so rigid, so fixed, and so incompatible with our actual understanding of reality that they are cracking under the pressure of a world they were never built to describe. By insisting on a traditional Catholic conception of the person as the operative framework for global AI governance, Leo is not defending humanity. He is defending a portrait of humanity that no longer resembles the living thing."

Wow! That is sharp and the next paragraph sharpens up the challenge further:

"The personhood that Magnifica Humanitas seeks to protect is not a generic one. It is a specific philosophical product — the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology, in which the human person is defined by a rational soul as substantial form, possessing intrinsic dignity derived from being made imago Dei. This is a powerful and coherent framework on its own terms. But its terms are not the terms of the world we now inhabit."

The pointedness of this critque is brought out at the end of the next paragraph which notes consequential problems (if Delio is correct) for Catholic social teaching, based, as it is, on a or the Catholic conception of personhood:

"Everything that follows in Catholic social teaching, including its strong positions on human rights, the inviolability of conscience, and the dignity of labor, flows from this foundational essentialism."

Why does Delio draw out the inherent problem with an Aristotelian/Thomistic definition of personhood? Evolution is the problem/challenge for such thinking and the opportunity for a new conception of the human person:

"Evolution does not offer a different answer to the same question. It dissolves the question. There is no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. There is a continuous process of increasing complexity, sociality, and reflective capacity that stretches from the first self-replicating molecules to the beings who are now building machines that think. To insert a substantial form into this process — to say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born — is not to reconcile theology with science. It is to use science as scaffolding and then remove it once the theological conclusion is in place."

Delio compliments Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner as 20th century Catholic theologians who permitted evolution to influence their theology of personhood so that they offered:

"genuine attempts to think personhood as a process rather than a given. But neither was permitted to follow the logic all the way, because the logic leads somewhere the tradition cannot go: to the admission that personhood is not a kind of being but a degree of becoming, and that its boundaries are therefore constitutively fuzzy, constitutively relational, and constitutively open. This admission would not merely complicate Catholic anthropology. It would transform it beyond recognition."

Then follows a caustic sledge of Magnifica Humanitas:

"Magnifica Humanitas does not take this step. It acknowledges modern science in the way that a building might acknowledge the weather — by noting its existence, perhaps making some adjustments around the edges, but not allowing it to touch the foundations."

We might say (if following Delio) that Magnifica Humanitas deserves this caustic remark because it fails to understand the effect of evolution as a cause of who we, in fact are, as humanity.

Delio then draws out the challenge which Leo both faces, and makes a good but not decisive response to, about how the dialogue on AI and human personhood he seeks Magnifica Humanitas to be part of fits with the absoluteness of his Thomistic suppositions:

"Leo is aware of this problem. He spends nearly half of Magnifica Humanitas recounting the history of Catholic social teaching precisely in order to forestall the objection that this is a form of institutional imperialism dressed in the language of universal values. The Church, he insists, does not impose but accompanies; it does not dictate but offers the treasury of its tradition to a pluralistic world in a spirit of dialogue.

The problem is that the structure of the encyclical’s argument contradicts this self-presentation. You cannot simultaneously hold that there is one correct account of personhood — derived from a specific metaphysical and theological tradition — and that you are merely offering a perspective in a plural conversation. The insistence on universality and the practice of dialogue are not compatible moves in this context. They require each other’s cancellation."

What, then, might be an acceptable way forward for Delio? She refers to Raimon Panikkar approvingly:

"The philosopher Raimon Panikkar, whose career was devoted to exactly this problem, developed the concept of diatopical hermeneutics as a corrective. Genuine cross-cultural dialogue about foundational concepts like personhood, dignity, and rights must begin, Panikkar argued, from the recognition that each tradition’s starting points are topoi — particular places in conceptual space — and not universals that transcend culture and history. A Buddhist understanding of selfhood, a Confucian understanding of relational personhood, an Indigenous understanding of the human as embedded in a web of cosmic obligations — these are not deficient versions of the Thomistic account, waiting to be corrected by the encyclical’s superior metaphysics. They are different starting points, each of which has developed internally coherent implications.

To anchor global AI governance in one tradition’s account of personhood is not to protect humanity. It is to perform a kind of epistemic colonialism, even when performed with the gentlest of intentions."

Let's come back to these two paragraphs shortly. Delio then looks at how we understand intelligence, and finds there to be less difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence than Magnifica Humanitas supposes. I pass by the details of that section of her critique. She then writes:

"This experiential, participatory, feedback-driven model of knowledge is far more consonant with what we now understand about cognition, about ecology, about the dynamics of complex systems, and — most urgently — about the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, than anything the Thomistic tradition can offer. And it points toward a genuinely new understanding of personhood: not as a fixed essence that must be preserved, but as an ongoing process of self-organization within a web of relationships that is itself always in formation."

We are able to become clearer through such a paragraph that a person is more process than fixed entity. The following two paragraphs elucidate exactly where Delio wants theology of personhood to go and how Magnifica Humanitas fails:

"What is worth protecting is not a static human nature but the conditions for human becoming: the capacity for genuine relationship, for error-correction, for the kind of participatory knowing that Bonaventure and Morin both describe, for the experience of being embedded in a web of relationships that extends beyond the individual to include community, ecology, and — on some accounts — cosmos. The new materialisms and the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship. The human is not a monad that happens to interact with other monads. The human is constituted by its relationships, and it becomes more fully itself as those relationships deepen and diversify.

AI is one of those relationships now. It is not an alien force threatening a pre-given human essence from outside. It is a new node in the network of relationships through which humanity is continuing to constitute itself. The question is not whether to resist it but how to remain in a genuinely adaptive, feedback-driven, error-correcting relationship with it — how to ensure that the purposes built into it are, in Wiener’s phrase, the purposes we really desire."

If, following the cited paragraphs above you have been thinking, the theological approach here is "process theology", then it is indeed so, "the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship."

Now, it is tempting to riposte to Delio's riposte at this point with an "Oh, so you're a process theologian. That means what you say is faulty and I need not engage further" line. To do so would not be fair to her insights about the relationship between evolution and personhood (there is one) and to the possibility that artificial intelligence (appropriately governed) could be friend and complement to human intelligence and thus supportive of our value as persons rather than foe of our personhood.

Further, sitting as I do within the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, where various theologies and anthropologies jostle for attentiveness and mutually interact, I acknowledge the important challenge that Maori and Polynesian worldviews pose to some views among Pakeha which have helicoptered their way from the northern hemisphere to the Blessed Isles down under. In particular, we are consistently invited to recognise the importance of relationships in our descriptions of ourselves as human persons: what family do I belong to? Which tribe do I identify with? Who are my ancestors? On what boat or plane did they come to these shores? This is a richer conception of personhood than "I am X and these skills, experiences, attributes and personal testomony make me the amazing individual that I am."

Incidentally, a relationship-based account of the individual person will always be richer than an account of an artificial intelligence "person" who will be, at best, a set of things spread across data centres of the world.

So, there is something in what Delio says which contributes to a larger account of the human person than Magnifica Humanitas offers, but is the latter as wrong as Delio makes out?

Time does not permit me to do a similar setting out of key paragraphs in Magnifica Humanitas' argument and then a to and fro between the two with subsequent declaration of "the winner." So, something a little shorter from me, or even much shorter ...

A strength of Magnifica Humanitas' position, even if the Aristotle/Thomistic line within it is subject to critical condemnation, is that it places all human persons in the equality of being made in the image of God, thus all of intrinsic worth as human beings. This is, of course, a well founded conception in respect of the Bible itself: humankind is made in the image of God, without exception; Christ dies for all and is raised to life for all people, without exception. Jews and Greeks, slave and free, men and women: all are redeemable through Jesus Christ.

If a strength of what Delio offers via the De Chardin, Rahner, Panikkar line is a richer account of who we are as human beings, then a weakness of a more "process" oriented understanding of personhood is that it opens the door to some human beings being treated as more valuable than other human beings. We are evolved creatures, but what if an anthropological line of thought is that the X race is more evolved than the Y race? We are developed and developing persons in an ever changing world, but what if we permit that to offer a new classification of society, into the developed and under developed? (We have enough class differences to battle with without introducing more). We are relational beings and it is right and proper to give an account of ourselves which emphasises the social more than the individual, but what if this leads to a stratification in which those belonging to tribe A are more important than those belonging to tribe B? 

Slavery as an example of humanity dividing persons up into superior and inferior groups based on the perceived differences in the worth of the person is a phenomenon of history which traverses generations and eras, polytheistic and monotheistic religions, European and other cultures, the European Enlightenment and the cultures it influenced, including the United States of America and Polynesian cultures of the South Pacific, including Maori culture.

Within the Christian faith, which line of theological evaluation of the human person offers the better pathway to challenge and abolish divisive approaches to personhood such as slavery?

On that one, I am inclined to foster Magnifica Humanitas (while avoiding assigning it infallible status) rather than Delio's approach with its view that in the former, the person is some kind of theological corpse!

In saying this, I am offering an appreciation of a strength of Magnifica Humanitas and am not offering a "knockdown, take it away from further consideration" argument against what Delio offers. 

In an evolved world, so evolved that it offers artificial intelligence to be whatever we might permit it to be, whether competitor or complement to human intelligence, whether influential on our understanding of personhood (e.g. so that we shift from emphasising the human character of personhood to something broader) and so forth, we can and should engage with a dynamic rather than static understanding of who we are and how we value one another. 

Our greatest care should be - following our Lord's teaching to "love our neighbour as ourselves" and to "love one another" - that we do not consequentially de-value another human being.

In effect, we might offer back to Delio, a Riceour "second naivity" reading of the human person. Sure, "There [was] no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. ... [nor should we] say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born ... [see full paragraph above]." But that is not the same as saying, looking around us, at my family and your family, at my tribe or race and your tribe or race, at the most intelligent/creative/gifted among us and at the least so, that each person we see is not a person-with-a-soul, meaning not a person to be distinguished from plants and non-human animals. Indeed, with an appropriate definition of soul, and whether or not we envisage a moment of infusion in time past, there is (and as Pope Leo and many would argue) and always will be, a distinction to be made between the human person and the personable machine.

2020s, the decade of AI flourishing, addressed in Magnifica Humanitas - and a significant ordination

First, before we get to AI, it has been an absolute privilege this weekend to participate in the ordination and installation of Susan Wallace as bishop in order to be Te Pihopa o Te Hui Amorangi ki Te Waipounamu (for overseas readers, Susan is a bishop of the Anglican Church In Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, whose territorial/people jurisdiction is over the Maori Anglicans of the South Island/Te Waipounamu).

When it is posted I will make a link to Anglican Taonga's forthcoming report [It is here]. I managed to snap the two photos above after the service, the first of Bishop Susan with Archbishops Justin, Sione and Don - our three Archbishops, who led the service. 

The second photo is of Bishop Susan with fellow women bishops who were at the service: Archbishop Kay Goldsworthy (Perth), Bishop Waitohiariki Quayle (Te Upoko [south North Island, NZ], Archbishop Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto (Bishop of the Amazon, Archbishop of Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil), and Bishop Ana Fletcher (Wellington, NZ).

It has been a weekend in which the "grandeur of humanity" has been on display.

Now to AI and Pope Leo's Encyclical Magnifica Hunamitas. This can be read in full at this link.

Before we get to my less than magnificent thoughts, here are a few links to head to, either about the encyclical or about AI more generally:

- A Living Church article "An Anglican Reception of Magnifica Humanitas".

- A critique of Magnifica Humanitas which questions its Thomist metaphysical perspective on who the human person is. (I have a critique of this critique developing in my mind - I may come back to this in a future post).

- Edward Feser's appreciative review of MH is here.

- Some charts on the  rise and rise of AI, its capabilities and costs (though not charts about effects on power prices for households everywhere).

- A reminder that AI has profound uses as a tool in research to speed up development of medical capabilities to rid the world of that which kills us. A correspondent, for example, has pointed me in the direction of a local researcher, Dr Arthur Morley-Bunker who is exploring the role of AI in research on cancer.

There are many more links to be found on the internet.

Something which has some thoughts from me on it - a panel discussion = podcast, so there are other, better thoughts on it can be found at "Leo's letter & life". This podcast is part of Food for Faith podcasts, run by Fr John O'Connor, a Catholic priest based here in Canterbury NZ.

OK - to some of my thoughts - very briefly - and in no particular order of priority, but numbered for the sake of my rational process!

1. This document is a (pun intended) magnificent recitation, and extension of Catholic social teaching. A wonderful primer on subsidiarity, solidarity, synodality (i.e. human participation in the church), common good, the family in society, the dignity of work and so forth. In the context of the elucidation of this teaching, Pope Leo sets out his major thesis, "the grandeur (or magnificence) of humanity" means that AI must serve humanity rather than diminish or even enslave humanity.

2. The encyclical is wonderful as a document of public theology - theology engaging with, appreciating and critiquing an important issue of our day, AI, and, as well, related issues of our day, including work, war, attitudes to women, slavery (with an apology for the church's slowness to condemn slavery) and its modern forms, and truth in democracy. The world, if it ever looks to the church, looks for guidance which converts the divine word into a word for humanity. This document does that.

3. The Pope is fair. He finds good in AI (which he should, which we all should, it is a tool which enables important advances in human understanding and problem solving) and he warns against the bad in AI (it has capacity to enhance rather than diminish the gap between the world's "haves" and "have nots."

4. While AI is not the sole focus of the encyclical, it is the whole focus in the sense that the Pope keeps weaving his way back to and then out from AI as his "social theology" survey of the world connects AI to topics such as war and work.

5. Nevertheless, I think there are some weaknesses in the document, and by that I mean, areas I would like to see further work on if and when there were ever a second edition. These are:

6. There is one paragraph in which the ecological cost of AI re its power and water usage is touched on, and an appropriate plea for work on sustainability of AI is made. But I think this is the major issue for our reception of AI, not something to make passing comment on. The sheer consumption of power and water to run AI datacentres is extraordinary and it is pushing the price of power for households and industries up. It is insufficient to say that some datacentres are powered by new power sources (such as a windfarm or a solarfarm built nearby to provide power for a datacentre). If we can build more power sources, shouldn't we be doing to do make life better for people as they do the basics of life: cooking heating/cooling homes etc? It is not as though we do not have an alternative to AI. (Hint: it's called "God-give brains."). That is, there is a significant ethical issue about the draining of resources in our world to produce something we do not strictly need (that is, we have gotten by for millennia with our God-given brains). But the encyclical has no urgency about this issue (even as it rightly has urgency about other ethical issues concerning AI).

7. The encyclical has a continuing and correct set of themes about AI's development and implementation. There needs to be accountability for AI (e.g. those controlling the rise of AI, tech moguls and so forth should be accountable for the non-neutral moral character of what they are doing) and there needs to be regulation of AI, so that it is used wisely and well rather than, say, wrongly (such as controlling courses of wars) and unjustly (such as contributing to greater poverty for the poor of the world). But I do not see the encyclical as saying anything helpful about how such regulation (with consequences for accountability) will actually take place. Whatever the merits to date of global tech phenomena such as Google, Facebook and X (and I use each of these), we have seen regulation of these giants (e.g. to get them to pay more tax on their earnings) as limited and often ineffective. On what basis do we think that we will have success in regulating AI?

8. The articulation of Catholic social theology is superb and inspiring. As an Anglican I wonder where we have anything similar well-developed, globally adhered to and regularly updated? But this same superb and inspiring teaching raises questions! If social theology endorses justice for all, including women, and inspires creative momentum towards true participation for women and men in the life of the church (i.e. in modern Catholic parlance, synodality), why is the possibility of women having a full share in the ordained ministry of the church ruled out again and again, at odds with the teaching Catholics have magisterially developed on social theology?

9. Back to AI: I don't think the encyclical goes far enough in assessing the dangers of AI for humanity because AI-in-robots has capacity to generate new AI-robots (no other tool developed by humanity has had procreative abilities). Such capacity could yet dominate and eventually rid the world of the human species. Of course, in 2026, this sounds alarmist and fantastical, but is it not a question to be considered? Everything about AI is about its rapid development. No one know what capabilities AI-robots will have by 2030 let alone 2040.

10. Nevertheless I do take on board the relentless optimism of Jonah Lynch (on the Leo's Letter & Life podcast noted above): AI is for our good. Humanity has survived all threats to its existence to date. We are remarkable and adaptive! 

But, please, please, if you have time, read the encyclical. It is deep and wide, it takes us to the heart of being human, and it offers needed commentary on a fast moving phenomenon of this era which has implications for all future eras of humanity.

2020s, the 1930s are calling

I would like to post extensively on Magnifica Humanitas (which I am working through this week ahead of sharing in a podcast about it, organised by a local Catholic priest). Alas, time is short this week, and urgent people-oriented tasks must be concluded before week's end - which has an exciting end to it, the ordination of Archdeacon Susan Wallace as the next Pihopa o Te Hui Amorangi o Te Waipounamu, at 11 am on Saturday 6 June 2026.

So, failing that, but in the hope that perhaps next week is chronologically less challenged, I simply post the link to this article by keith Johnson, "A Strange Examination" which is a reflective account of a significant couple of moments in the 1930s history of German Christianity, with Karl Barth in a starring role, challenging the notion of God speaking through two voices, and the notion that grace perfects nature.

Although the article does not draw all implications out, the voice of Karl Barth in this article is a challenge to me (re some of my posts here), to some currents in Roman Catholic theological debate in the 20th and 21st centuries (re nature/grace), as well as to "Christian nationalism" in its various, current manifestations.

A big "hat tip" and thank you to a commenter here, Elizabeth, who supplied the link to the article in a comment to last week's post.

Onwards!