Toward a Theological Ethic of Creaturely Listening: Animal Theology in an Age of AI

Abstract

Advances in artificial intelligence are creating new possibilities for interpreting the communicative lives of non-human animals, prompting fresh ethical and theological questions about how such technologies ought to be received. This article develops a theological ethic of creaturely listening, arguing that the significance of AI-assisted animal communication lies less in its technical capabilities than in the moral formation it demands of those who employ it. Rather than treating communication as a problem of translation alone, the article contends that listening is a spiritual practice requiring humility, attentiveness, and solidarity with vulnerable creatures. To this end, it proposes three complementary practices that shape Christian engagement with emerging technologies: listening as a theological virtue, fasting as a discipline that interrupts the commodification of animals, and Sabbath as a practice of creaturely liberation that resists instrumentalization and cultivates receptive attention. Together, these practices offer a constructive theological framework for evaluating AI-assisted animal communication, suggesting that the Church’s primary task is not to discover new creaturely voices but to become a community capable of hearing (and responding to) the voices that have always been present. Listening becomes the primary moral orientation through which Christians discern and respond to the communicative claims of other creatures.

1. Introduction

Artificial intelligence is transforming humanity’s capacity to perceive the more-than-human world. Advances in machine learning, bioacoustics, and computational linguistics increasingly enable researchers to identify patterns within animal vocalisations, behaviours, and social interactions that were previously inaccessible to human observation. These developments have generated growing interest in the possibility of AI-assisted animal communication, raising questions not only about the limits of technology but also about the moral responsibilities that accompany new forms of understanding. If humans learn to hear animals differently, how should they respond?

For Christian theology, this question is fundamentally one of listening. Scripture consistently portrays creation as expressive before God: the heavens declare divine glory, the earth bears witness to its Creator, creatures praise, groan, and participate in God’s purposes. The theological challenge has therefore never been the absence of creaturely voices but the formation of listeners capable of receiving them faithfully. Emerging technologies may increase humanity’s capacity to perceive animal expression, yet they cannot determine how those expressions ought to be interpreted or what obligations they place upon those who hear them.

This article argues that AI-assisted animal communication should be approached not primarily as a technological achievement but as a theological invitation. Rather than asking whether machines can successfully translate animal communication, the more pressing question concerns the moral and spiritual formation of the human listener. If artificial intelligence expands humanity’s capacity to attend to other creatures, then it simultaneously intensifies humanity’s responsibility to respond with humility, discernment, and care. The ethical challenge is therefore not principally technological but theological: how might Christian practices form the kind of community capable of hearing other creatures without reducing them to objects of human mastery?

To address this question, the article develops a theological ethic of creaturely listening through three complementary practices. First, it proposes listening as a spiritual virtue shaped by humility, solidarity, and attentiveness. Second, it explores fasting as a discipline that interrupts the commodification of animals by exposing the moral habits that sustain their exploitation. Third, it considers Sabbath as a practice of creaturely liberation that resists economies of productivity and forms a posture of receptive attention. Collectively, these practices suggest that the significance of AI lies not in granting animals a voice they have never possessed, but in challenging the Church to recover the spiritual disciplines required to hear the voices that have always been present.

2. AI Technologies and Attentiveness to Creaturely Expression

Long before the emergence of AI-assisted translation, scholars sought to understand the communicative worlds of non-human animals.1 These efforts developed into the field of zoosemiotics, which investigates how animals communicate through species-specific signs and behaviours rather than human language.2

Recent advances in machine learning have significantly accelerated efforts to interpret animal communication, positioning AI as a powerful interpretive tool rather than a simple translator of animal “language.” Rather than analysing vocalisations in isolation, contemporary approaches integrate multiple streams of information (including behaviour, physiological responses, social interactions, and environmental context) to identify patterns of communication that would otherwise remain inaccessible to human observers. Such technologies promise to reveal previously unrecognised complexity within animal communication systems while providing new opportunities to improve conservation, monitor welfare, and better understand species-specific needs (Rutz et al. 2023). At the same time, these developments demand caution. Machine learning cannot independently determine the meaning of animal communication; rather, its interpretations remain dependent upon careful behavioural observation, biological expertise, and empirical validation. Consequently, AI should not be understood as replacing traditional ethological research but as augmenting humanity’s capacity to attend more carefully to the communicative lives of other creatures. As our ability to interpret animal expression increases, so too does our ethical responsibility to ensure that such knowledge serves the flourishing of animals rather than their exploitation.

Research suggests that when animals exhibit characteristics that appear recognisably human, people are more likely to respond to them with empathy ordinarily reserved for other humans (Butterfield et al. 2012). As AI technologies increasingly translate or interpret animal behaviour in ways that are intelligible to human audiences, they may further enhance this sense of relatability. Rather than altering the ontological, moral status of animals, these technologies may influence how humans perceive and respond to them, strengthening anthropomorphic tendencies that can, in turn, expand moral concern (Mamak 2026, p. 4). In this sense, AI has the potential to reinforce anthropomorphism as a psychological mechanism through which humans extend ethical consideration to non-human animals.

The focus of current AI ethics is increasingly directed towards partially and fully autonomous systems capable of acting and making decisions with varying degrees of independence. These technologies now extend across a wide range of applications, including conversational agents, care and service robots, military drones, autonomous vehicles, and algorithmic trading systems.3 As efforts continue to increase machine autonomy, ethical questions surrounding their operation have become increasingly urgent (Bendel 2013, p. 106). Although genuinely autonomous moral machines remain largely theoretical and are still in the design phase, their rapid development demands sustained ethical reflection (Bendel 2013, p. 107). One of the most significant challenges concerns the attribution of moral responsibility, as increasing machine autonomy complicates traditional understandings of accountability for decisions and their consequences (Bendel 2013, p. 108).

AI-assisted communication with animals also raises critical ethical questions concerning the assumptions that underpin this emerging field. Much of the discussion proceeds on the expectation that enabling communication with animals will strengthen human moral concern by revealing their preferences, experiences, and subjective lives. Greater insight into what animals value, fear, or suffer may indeed deepen empathy and reinforce arguments for their moral consideration. Yet this expectation is not guaranteed. If AI-mediated communication reveals forms of cognition or experience that differ significantly from human expectations, or if animals communicate realities that humans find unsettling, there is no certainty that moral concern will increase. Indeed, such discoveries could be interpreted in ways that further marginalise animals rather than elevate their moral standing (Mamak 2026, p. 8).

Mamak suggests a related challenge concerns how humans will interpret the realities of the natural world once they are given an apparent “voice”(Mamak 2026, p. 8).4 Animal life includes behaviours such as predation, infanticide, and cannibalism, all of which conflict with contemporary human moral intuitions. While these behaviours arise from instinct and ecological necessity rather than moral agency, AI-assisted communication may invite anthropocentric moral judgements that misunderstand the nature of animal existence. Consequently, the ethical challenge is not simply whether animals can communicate, but whether humans possess the interpretive frameworks necessary to receive that communication without imposing exclusively human moral categories upon it.

AI-assisted animal communication extends beyond the “translation” of animal communication into human language. It does so by employing machine learning to identify recurring patterns across diverse forms of data, including vocalisations, body movements, social interactions, environmental conditions, and physiological responses. For example, the Earth Species Project illustrates this emerging approach by employing artificial intelligence to investigate animal communication across species, developing computational tools that seek to identify communicative patterns while advancing scientific understanding of the more-than-human world.5 By analysing these data simultaneously, AI can detect associations that would be difficult, or even impossible, for human observers to recognise through observation alone (Rutz et al. 2023, p. 154).6 For example, if a particular whale vocalisation consistently occurs alongside specific behavioural responses, environmental conditions, and social interactions, the system identifies this recurring pattern and proposes a possible communicative function. Importantly, these outputs are not treated as definitive translations but as interpretive hypotheses that require validation through behavioural observation and controlled experimentation. AI, therefore, functions less as an autonomous translator than as an interpretive tool that assists researchers in recognising patterns within complex communicative systems.

One emerging example of AI as a technology of listening is Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), an interdisciplinary collaboration that seeks to understand sperm whale communication through advances in machine learning, bioacoustics, robotics, and linguistics. Rather than assuming that animal vocalisations can simply be translated into human language, the project adopts a linguistically informed framework, asking whether whale communication exhibits identifiable building blocks analogous to phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (Andreas et al. 2022). By combining large-scale acoustic recordings with behavioural, ecological, and social data, machine learning models are trained to identify recurring vocal patterns, infer possible linguistic structures, and generate hypotheses that can later be tested through carefully designed playback experiments. Significantly, the authors caution against anthropomorphic interpretation, arguing that AI should not impose human linguistic categories upon whales but instead allow communicative structures to emerge from the animals’ own behavioural contexts. In this sense, AI functions less as a translator than as an interpretive instrument, expanding humanity’s capacity to attend to creaturely expression through computational listening. Such technologies represent an important development in bioacoustics, not because they promise perfect access to animal meaning, but because they cultivate new ways of recognising non-human agency, communication, and relational presence within creation.

Yet listening through technology is not identical to listening through sustained relational presence. AI may extend human perception, identifying patterns and associations that exceed ordinary sensory capacities, but it also introduces another interpretive layer between the creature and the one who listens. What is heard through AI has already passed through decisions about what is recorded, measured, classified, and rendered significant. This does not diminish the value of such technologies, but it does complicate the act of listening. AI may allow humans to hear more while, paradoxically, requiring greater humility about what they believe they have heard. Creaturely listening must therefore resist allowing computational interpretation to displace embodied attention to animals themselves. The technological mediation of animal communication should deepen, rather than replace, practices of observation, presence, patience, and relationship. AI can extend the reach of human listening, but it cannot substitute for the encounter with the creature whose voice it seeks to make intelligible.

3. Toward an Ethic of Creaturely Listening

The possibility that AI may one day facilitate more sophisticated forms of animal communication presents a significant ethical opportunity, but it also demands considerable caution. While advances in machine learning may enable humans to better interpret animal vocalisations, behaviours, physiological responses, and even patterns of interspecies communication, such technologies should not be mistaken for the recovery of an equal dialogue between humans and animals. As Singer and Tse argue, animals remain unable to participate in the design of AI systems, challenge the harms imposed upon them, or communicate their interests in the way humans can (Singer and Tse 2022, pp. 547–48). Consequently, AI does not absolve humanity of the responsibility to listen well; it intensifies that responsibility. The ethical challenge is therefore not principally technological but moral. Every act of interpretation reflects a posture towards the other, and nowhere is this more apparent than in humanity’s relationship with non-human creatures. Theological ethics calls for an interpretive posture marked by humility, recognising both the limits of human knowledge and the asymmetry of power that characterises human–animal relations. Whether AI becomes an instrument of domination or an aid to creaturely flourishing depends less upon the technology itself than upon the moral imagination of those who employ it. The more AI enables us to hear the voices of animals, the greater our moral obligation becomes to respond with justice, compassion, and restraint.

If AI expands humanity’s capacity to hear other creatures, then theology must ask how that capacity ought to be exercised. Rather than offering an exhaustive ethical framework, the following three strategies propose a theological orientation for cultivating an ethic of creaturely listening. They are intended as constructive starting points rather than comprehensive treatments, identifying practices that may shape how Christians engage AI-assisted animal communication with humility, discernment, and responsibility. The three strategies explored are as follows: (1) cultivating a spiritual posture of creaturely listening; (2) fasting as interrupting the commodification of animals; and (3) Sabbath as a practice of creaturely liberation. Collectively, they offer the contours of a theological ethic of creaturely listening, one that resists reducing animals to commodities and provides a constructive framework for engaging with emerging technologies of animal communication.

4. Strategy One: Cultivating a Spiritual Posture of Creaturely Listening

The emergence of AI-assisted animal communication is often framed as a technological challenge of interpretation or translation. From a theological perspective, however, it first raises a question of moral and spiritual posture. Advances in machine learning and bioacoustics may enable humans to perceive patterns of animal communication with increasing sophistication, but technology alone cannot determine how those voices ought to be received or what responsibilities accompany hearing them. Long before artificial intelligence sought to bridge the communicative divide between humans and other creatures, people pursued deeper forms of interspecies understanding through scientific inquiry, intuitive practices, and relational ways of knowing. AI therefore represents not the beginning of humanity’s desire to understand animals, but its latest expression. The more pressing ethical question is whether, having gained new capacities to hear, we are prepared to listen—and, having listened, whether we are willing to respond in ways that promote the flourishing of the creatures whose voices are finally becoming more intelligible. An ethic of creaturely listening therefore begins not with technology, but with the cultivation of a spiritual posture that recognises animal voices as morally significant and responds to them in ways that promote their flourishing.

Cultivating an ethic of creaturely listening requires more than technological innovation; it necessitates a spiritual posture of attentiveness. Before asking whether AI can translate animal communication, theology must first ask what kind of listeners humans ought to become. Such listening calls for humility, recognising that Western scientific rationality has not exhausted the possible ways in which creatures communicate or humans come to know the more-than-human world. This is not to reject empirical inquiry, but to acknowledge that other epistemological traditions—including Indigenous and relational ways of knowing—have long approached the natural world as communicative, participatory, and worthy of attentive listening.7

Long before the materialization of AI-assisted animal communication, humans sought ways of overcoming the apparent communicative divide between themselves and other creatures. Beyond scientific investigations into animal cognition and communication, alternative traditions have proposed that meaningful interspecies communication occurs through intuitive or telepathic means. Those commonly described as “animal communicators” assert that communication extends beyond spoken language to include emotions, images, sensations, and intuitive perception. Animals emerge as understood, communicative subjects whose inner experiences can be apprehended through forms of awareness that transcend conventional linguistic exchange. Although such claims remain highly contested and lie largely outside mainstream scientific inquiry, their popularity is nevertheless significant (Kulick 2017, pp. 362–64).8 While popular discourse often frames these practices through the language of “pet psychics,” Claire Wijngaarden argues that experiences of intuitive interspecies communication should be understood within a much broader epistemological landscape (Wijngaarden 2023).9

Instead of dismissing such claims as paranormal phenomena, Wijngaarden situates them alongside Indigenous knowledge systems and relational ontologies that have long recognised intuition, embodied perception, and reciprocal relationships with other-than-human beings as legitimate ways of knowing. On this account, intuition operates through embodied awareness, affective perception, and relational attentiveness alongside analytical reasoning, rather than in place of it. Proponents therefore present intuition as a complementary epistemological approach, cultivated through sustained attentiveness to the more-than-human world rather than as an alternative to rational inquiry. In multispecies and Indigenous scholarship, intuitive knowing is frequently associated with relational ontologies that reject strict divisions between humans and other living beings, emphasising interconnectedness, reciprocity, and experiential forms of knowledge. Wijngaarden argues that, while intuition remains difficult to verify using conventional empirical methods, its widespread presence across diverse cultural traditions warrants greater methodological consideration, particularly where research seeks to understand animals as communicative subjects instead of merely objects of scientific observation. Although Wijngaarden acknowledges the methodological difficulties of interpretation and verification, she contends that these perspectives invite scholars to reconsider Western conventions about knowledge production and the possibility of dialogical engagement with animals.

The precise means by which communication occurs is, however, only part of the theological question. Equally important is the disposition of the one who listens. If animals are to be encountered as communicative subjects rather than objects of inquiry, then attention must also be given to the moral and spiritual formation of the listener. Theological reflection, therefore, shifts the discussion from how communication occurs to how the listener is formed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood listening not simply as a communicative skill but as a theological discipline that shapes the moral character of the listener. Reflecting on Christian community, he argues that genuine listening requires humility, patience, attentiveness, and the willingness to relinquish the impulse to speak first (Bonhoeffer 1954, p. 76). Such listening resists the exercise of power, for it refuses to dominate the other by assuming their experience can be anticipated, interpreted, or dismissed before it is heard.10 Thus, Bonhoeffer’s account of listening is presented as a spiritual virtue and a formative practice. He writes, “Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They will not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening” (Bonhoeffer 1954, p. 75). To listen well is to relinquish the impulse to control the conversation and instead become receptive to voices that have been overlooked or silenced. This resonates with the repeated biblical refrain, “Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2–3), where hearing is inseparable from obedience. Such hearing shapes the moral imagination from which an ethic of creaturely listening can develop. This posture of receptivity finds a natural parallel in the practice of prayer, where listening has long been understood as a means of encountering God. Tania Harris notes that “hearing God’s voice” involves the possibility of direct contact with God through the Holy Spirit, apart from Scripture or human intermediaries (Harris 2021, p. 243). Prayer, in this sense, presupposes that God may be encountered experientially, and that the worshipper must learn to become receptive to divine presence and address. Yet such encounter need not be confined to an interior or disembodied experience. Joseph Soloveitchik describes prayer as grounded in aesthesis: an immediate, sensuous encounter with the living God in which divine nearness is not simply believed but experienced (Soloveitchik 2003, pp. 62–63). Prayer, therefore, forms a particular kind of attention, teaching the worshipper to remain open to the presence of God as it presses upon embodied and creaturely life. If creation itself bears witness to its Creator, creaturely listening may consequently involve more than learning something about animals. In attending carefully to the creature before us, there remains the possibility that we might also encounter something of the God whose life sustains her.

As technologies increasingly enable humanity to perceive the communicative lives of other creatures, the question is not simply whether we can hear them, but whether we are spiritually prepared to receive what they communicate. What are animals expressing through their suffering, flourishing, and ways of being? What are those who call for justice on their behalf asking the Church to hear? Such listening resists the exercise of power because it refuses to dismiss, instrumentalize, or speak over the other. Instead, it forms disciples whose attentiveness leads to repentance, compassion, and action.

Theological reflection has often assumed that the voices demanding our attention are exclusively human. Yet the margins extend beyond humanity. Animals occupy one of the most neglected peripheries of theological and ethical reflection, their lives routinely instrumentalised and their forms of communication dismissed as insignificant or unintelligible. Reflecting on Pope Francis’ vision of the Church, Julian Paparella argues that Christian discipleship is characterised by a willingness to listen to those on the margins, for it is there that the Church encounters Christ and discerns God’s wisdom at work in the world (Paparella 2024, p. 89). Although Francis directs this call towards human communities that have experienced social, political, and economic exclusion, the theological posture it commends is not confined to human relationships. It is, fundamentally, a discipline of attentive listening. Francis petitions the church to listen to the voices on the periphery, which in turn corresponds to his conviction that “they have much to teach us” (Paparella 2024, p. 89). Extending this theological vision, the more-than-human world also emerges as a neglected periphery. The biblical narrative opens with God speaking creation into being, suggesting that communication is not an incidental feature of the created order but one of its founding realities. From the first divine utterance, creation is constituted through relationship, presence, and response. Extending Francis’ vision in this way does not erase the distinction between human and non-human creatures. Rather, it broadens the Church’s vocation of attentive listening to include the communicative lives of fellow creatures, recognising that the God who addresses creation also calls humanity to receive its voices with humility and care.

Building on Pope Francis’ call to attend to voices from the peripheries, Fides Del Castillo argues that theology must be undertaken not merely about the marginalized but with them, allowing their experiences to shape theological reflection (Del Castillo 2022). Listening therefore becomes more than an act of recognition; it is an expression of solidarity that places the Church alongside those whose voices have been muted by social, political, and cultural structures. For non-human creatures, these structures extend beyond the social sphere into the systems through which animals are routinely commodified and instrumentalized, including industrial agriculture, scientific experimentation, entertainment, and other human practices that frequently suppress their capacity to flourish while rendering their experiences ethically invisible. Del Castillo states, “In lending our ears to the voices of the marginalized, we also demonstrate our solidarity with our neighbours and struggle with them against knotted systems” (Del Castillo 2022, p. 9). To listen is to share in their struggle against systems that perpetuate exclusion and to allow their experiences to illuminate the work of God in the world. This posture is exemplified in Christ himself, whose obedience to the Father’s voice culminated in the self-giving act of the cross. Christ’s listening was not passive attentiveness but sacrificial participation in the flourishing of others. Listening transcends the acquisition of knowledge, becoming a transformative spiritual practice that calls the listener towards humility, compassion, and self-giving love. If listening is fundamentally an act of solidarity that demands self-giving rather than control, then AI-assisted animal communication cannot be evaluated simply by its ability to increase human knowledge. It must also be judged by whether it cultivates a willingness to stand with vulnerable creatures and respond to what is heard with self-sacrificial action.

In the context of AI-assisted animal communication, the ethical challenge is therefore not simply whether technology can amplify the voices of animals, but whether humans are willing to relinquish their position as the sole interpreters of creation. This challenge becomes more pressing as such technologies move beyond interpretation toward the possibility of address—generating synthetic calls, testing behavioural responses, initiating exchange rather than simply receiving it. Where interpretation invites humans to attend more carefully to creaturely life, communication invites them to act upon it, and it is precisely at this point that the older impulse to control reasserts itself. To listen well, then, is to resist the temptation to commodify or reduce animals to objects of human knowledge and use, even where the means to respond to them now lies within human reach.

Listening becomes, in this sense, an act of creaturely solidarity rather than a preliminary step toward mastery. If emerging technologies enable humans to hear more clearly the experiences of other creatures, those voices do not simply supply new information to be managed or deployed; they place moral claims upon those who hear them. But moral claims of this kind have been made before, on other grounds, and have not always been heeded.

The case for animal sentience (that animals feel pain, fear, and joy) was made decades ago, and animal advocacy has long assumed that establishing this fact would be sufficient to check human violence against animals. It has not been. The knowledge that animals suffer has coexisted, without evident contradiction, with industrial slaughter, habitat destruction, and routine cruelty. If proof of feeling did not dent the violence, it is not clear that proof of voice will do so either. The deeper question, then, is not whether animals can be shown to communicate, but what humans are actually prepared to hear if they do. Are we ready to hear them name us as their aggressors, rather than confirm what we already suspected of their inner lives? Scripture offers an unsettling precedent. When Balaam’s donkey speaks, she does not confirm her sentience for Balaam’s edification; she confronts him, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” (Numbers 22:28). The donkey does not ask to be believed. She asks to be answered for (Rizzo 2024, pp. 77–78). If AI-assisted communication one day allows creatures to speak in terms legible to us, the theological question will not be whether we can finally verify their experience, but whether we are prepared, as Balaam was not, to be indicted by what they say.

5. Strategy Two: Fasting as Interruption

Eating is never a morally neutral act. Every meal situates the body within networks of production, dependence, and sacrifice, whether acknowledged or not. Fasting interrupts this moral unconsciousness. By suspending consumption, it exposes the hidden relationships that ordinarily disappear behind abundance, allowing appetite to become an occasion for ethical and theological reflection. Before AI can teach humanity to hear animals differently, Christian spirituality must first cultivate a willingness to stop consuming them unreflectively.

Contemporary research increasingly demonstrates that religious fasting is associated with a range of positive health outcomes, including improvements in cardiovascular markers, metabolic health, and dietary quality, particularly within Orthodox Christian fasting traditions.11 Therefore, the choice between bodily flourishing and ethical abstention may be a false dichotomy. Fasting can simultaneously cultivate spiritual attentiveness, promote physical well-being, and interrupt patterns of consumption that perpetuate animal suffering.

Fasting interrupts more than appetite. It disrupts the moral habits that dull human attentiveness to the suffering of other creatures. Much of modern eating is characterized by distance: animals disappear behind packaging, industrial systems obscure the conditions of production, and consumption proceeds with little awareness of the lives that sustain it. Within such a context, fasting becomes more than the temporary refusal of food. It is a refusal to participate unquestioningly in patterns of consumption that conceal suffering. Abstention creates space for attention. By willingly denying oneself what is readily available, the Christian learns to recognize that eating is never purely a biological necessity but a profoundly moral and theological act.

Christian reflection has long recognized that fasting is undertaken not purely for oneself but for the sake of another (Hartman 2010, p. 49). Whether expressed in Andrew Linzey’s identification of the suffering animal with the innocent Christ, (Linzey 1998, pp. 14–15). Wendell Berry’s account of the sacrificial destruction of the soil (Hartman 2010, p. 49), or Michael Northcott’s critique of industrial agriculture as a contemporary form of idolatry, each locates abstention within a theology of solidarity (Hartman 2010, p. 49). What is relinquished is less important than what the relinquishment signifies. Fasting becomes a refusal to benefit unquestioningly from sacrifices borne by others. Its purpose is therefore not moral exceptionalism but the formation of love capable of recognizing suffering where consumption has taught us not to look. Within the context of industrial animal agriculture, abstaining from particular foods need not arise from legalism but from a desire to interrupt patterns of consumption that have rendered suffering invisible. Therefore, the purpose of fasting is not moral superiority but is motivated by love; a practice that reorders desire so that feasting itself becomes an act of justice, gratitude, and communion rather than consumption detached from the suffering of others.

Within Wesleyan and early Pentecostal traditions, fasting is closely bound to repentance: the confession of sin, the turning away from it, and the reorientation of life towards God (Martin 2014, p. 152). As an aid to self-examination, fasting exposes not only personal failures but the desires that sustain them: pride, greed, self-justification, and the will to power. Sin possesses a social life. Pride, greed, self-justification, and the desire for power do not remain within the individual but become sedimented in institutions, economies, and cultural habits that render exploitation ordinary while concealing its moral cost. Fasting, therefore, creates space for repentance from more than private wrongdoing. By refusing foods produced through systems of animal suffering, the Christian body enacts a turning away from the structures in which it has participated. Such abstention does not claim moral purity; it confesses complicity. It becomes an embodied repentance that rejects the ordinary violence of prevailing food systems and seeks a different allegiance, ordered towards God, neighbour, and the flourishing of fellow creatures.

Todd Daly observes that the primary aim of Christian fasting was never simply the transformation of the body, even if bodily transformation often accompanied it. Rather, fasting sought to restore the proper ordering of the person, bringing bodily desires into harmony with the soul and the soul into communion with God (Daly 2022, p. 9). The body itself becomes a teacher, exposing the disorder of appetite so that desire may be rightly reoriented. Significantly, this reordered existence was understood by figures such as St Antony not merely as ascetic discipline but as an anticipation of humanity’s restoration to the peace of Eden.12 If fasting is a movement towards Adam’s prelapsarian state, then it gestures towards a form of human existence characterised not by domination or violence but by peaceful participation within creation.13

Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent further expands the theological significance of fasting by demonstrating that, within the Syriac tradition, abstention functioned as a form of non-violent resistance. The martyrs refused to retaliate against the violence inflicted upon them. Instead, they exercised authority over their own bodies by refusing to consume food associated with pagan worship, transforming fasting into an embodied act of protest against oppressive powers (Saint-Laurent 2025, p. 461). Their refusal to eat became an act of witness that inverted conventional understandings of power: violence was met not with force but with disciplined restraint, and bodily deprivation became a pathway towards peace. The implication is that eating (and perhaps more significantly, refusing to eat) was never a morally neutral act but a theological declaration of allegiance that challenged the structures of empire seeking to dominate both body and spirit. Saint-Laurent’s account suggests that refusing food can become a rejection of the systems that produce it. If fasting enabled the martyrs to resist imperial power, it may likewise enable Christians to confront the contemporary infrastructures that normalise the exploitation of animals. In this sense, what one declines to consume becomes a theological statement about the kind of world one refuses to endorse. This reordering of appetite belongs to a much wider Christian ascetical tradition in which fasting has rarely meant deprivation for its own sake. Rather, the voluntary limitation of desire becomes a means through which desire itself is examined, disciplined, and redirected towards God. Fasting might therefore be understood as a pedagogy of desire: by learning that not everything available for consumption must be consumed, the Christian is formed into a less possessive way of inhabiting the world. Such restraint reaches beyond the self, opening the possibility of relationships with neighbour and fellow creatures that are governed less by appetite and acquisition and more by attentiveness, communion, and peace. Within this tradition, the discipline of appetite becomes inseparable from the question of what kind of creature the Christian is being formed to become.

In an age of artificial intelligence, the restraint cultivated through fasting may extend beyond what is consumed by the body to what is consumed as knowledge. Technologies capable of revealing increasingly intimate dimensions of animal life can generate another kind of appetite: the desire to know more, decode more, and make creaturely experience increasingly available to human scrutiny. Yet greater access does not necessarily confer greater entitlement. Fasting offers a theological discipline for resisting this epistemic appetite, reminding the listener that the capacity to know does not carry with it an obligation to extract, interpret, or possess everything that can be known. Just as fasting interrupts consumption in the presence of abundance, it can cultivate restraint in the presence of an abundance of information. Within an ethic of creaturely listening, such restraint leaves room for mystery, creaturely otherness, and the possibility that some dimensions of animal life need not become human knowledge in order to possess value. The absence has never been one of animal expression, but of human attentiveness. Fasting addresses this failure not by giving animals speech but by reshaping the listener. It is therefore a preparatory discipline for every theological ethic of listening, teaching the Church that hearing begins not with the ear but with the reordering of desire.

6. Strategy Three: Sabbath as Liberation

Fasting is not the only practice that prepares the church to listen differently. Sabbath likewise interrupts the rhythms of consumption and productivity that shape human relationships with both animals and the technologies through which we are increasingly invited to hear them.

Within the Christian tradition, Sabbath likewise functions as an act of resistance against economic systems that reduce life to production, efficiency, and acquisition. Walter Brueggemann argues that Sabbath is a visible refusal to allow creaturely existence to be defined by the endless cycles of production and consumption demanded by empire (Brueggemann 2014, p. xiv). Rather than participating in economies governed by scarcity, competition, and accumulation, Sabbath reorients communities toward God’s abundance, where life is received as gift rather than possessed as commodity. More than a cessation of labour, Sabbath stands as a theological protest against any social order that measures the value of life according to its usefulness, including what Brueggemann calls “the insatiable requirements of our society and its taxation for the sake of imperialism in its social conformity” (Brueggemann 2014, p. xv). Sabbath exposes the commodification of non-human creatures. Industrial systems rarely permit animals to exist apart from their economic function: they are bred, confined, manipulated, and slaughtered according to the demands of production. Sabbath challenges precisely this economic imagination. If creation is fundamentally a gift before it is a resource, then animals cannot be understood as commodities for human consumption. Sabbath becomes a practice of creaturely restraint that resists reducing living beings to economic value and instead acknowledges them as fellow recipients of God’s loving and sustaining care.

Sabbath also recalls not only God’s creative activity but God’s liberating power (Wolfteich 2024b, p. 83). The command to keep the Sabbath is repeatedly grounded in Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15), reminding God’s people that they were freed from systems of endless labour, exploitation, and domination. Significantly, this liberation is never restricted to humans alone. Sabbath rest extends to servants, foreigners, animals, and ultimately to the land itself through the sabbatical year, where fields are left uncultivated and their produce made available to both the poor and wild animals (Exodus 23:10–11; Leviticus 25:1–7). Sabbath therefore establishes a rhythm of justice that interrupts every form of exploitation by acknowledging that neither people, animals, nor the earth exist solely for economic productivity. As a liberating force, Sabbath “recalls the divine gift of freedom,” from the relentless pursuit of profit, which extends to all species (Wolfteich 2024a, pp. 208, 210).

By interrupting the ordinary rhythms of work, Sabbath cultivates a spiritual posture of receptivity rather than productivity. As Ana Levy-Lyons observes, “Sabbath observance is a spiritual practice: it takes discipline, ironically, to enter into an undisciplined, formless time. It takes discipline to reimagine our world. It takes courage to assert and reassert our freedom” (Levy-Lyons 2012, pp. 66–67). Such formation is indispensable in an age of artificial intelligence. Technologies may enable new forms of communication with animals, but they cannot cultivate the attentiveness required to receive those communications faithfully. Sabbath trains the church to become the kind of community capable of listening before it seeks to interpret, manage, or exploit.

Applied to AI-assisted animal communication, Sabbath introduces an important limit to the practice of listening: faithful attention must also know when not to listen. The technological capacity to continuously monitor, record, analyse, and interpret animal life does not establish a theological mandate to do so. Sabbath interrupts the conjecture that greater access should always lead to greater acquisition, creating space in which creatures are permitted simply to be, apart from human observation, interpretation, or use. Such restraint is not a rejection of knowledge but a recognition of creaturely otherness, acknowledging that animals possess lives that are neither exhausted by what humans can know of them nor dependent upon human understanding for their significance. Sabbath therefore places a boundary around technological attention. It reminds the listener that attentiveness can become another form of possession when it refuses to relinquish its gaze, and that sometimes the most faithful act of listening is to withdraw, releasing the creature to rest beyond the reach of human scrutiny.

This understanding of Sabbath has meaningful implications for the church’s engagement with artificial intelligence. If Sabbath interrupts the rhythms of fallen systems in order to expose them to critical examination, then it likewise interrupts the contemporary assumptions that technological progress is inevitable, neutral, or inherently beneficial. Rather than receiving AI uncritically or rejecting it reflexively, Sabbath creates a theological space in which emerging technologies may be discerned in light of God’s purposes for creation. Such discernment represents a conversion of attention, reorienting human action away from instrumentalization and control and toward practices that honour creaturely flourishing.

Yet Sabbath signifies more than liberation from exploitative economies or the interruption of endless production. It opens creation beyond the closed logic of usefulness and necessity towards its ultimate end in God. Creation rests not simply because work has ceased, but because its meaning and fulfilment are found in the presence and glory of its Creator. Sabbath therefore carries an eschatological horizon: it anticipates a creation no longer ordered by scarcity, productivity, violence, or domination, but gathered into the peace of God. For non-human creatures, this is especially significant. Their value is no longer determined by what they produce, provide, or contribute to human life; they are received instead as creatures whose existence finds its meaning first in relation to God (Rizzo 2026, p. 150). Sabbath thus offers a foretaste of creaturely life released from the demand to be useful, allowing creation simply to delight in God and, perhaps more importantly, God to delight in creation.

7. Conclusions: Listening as Moral Resistance

The emergence of AI-assisted animal communication belongs to a much longer human story of seeking to understand other creatures. Across scientific, philosophical, and religious traditions, humans have long assumed that animals possess meaningful forms of communication worthy of careful attention. AI represents the latest attempt to bridge that communicative divide, inviting renewed theological reflection on how such knowledge ought to be received. If Pentecost represents the Spirit’s expansion of communicative understanding, then these emerging technologies present the church with a fresh occasion for discernment. The question is not whether machines can translate, but whether Christians have become the kind of people capable of receiving those translations faithfully.

Creaturely attentiveness is not a spiritual posture invented in response to emerging technologies. Christian tradition preserves a rich hagiographical memory of saints whose holiness was expressed, in part, through unusual relationships of attention, trust, and peace with other creatures. Accounts associated with Francis of Assisi, Gerasimus of the Jordan, Martin de Porres, and Seraphim of Sarov, among others, imagine the sanctified life as one in which relationships fractured by fear, violence, and domination might be otherwise. Whatever historical claims are made of individual accounts, their persistence within Christian memory is itself theologically suggestive. They bear witness to a longstanding Christian imagination in which attentiveness to animals can become an expression of holiness and creaturely peace. AI may offer new means of perceiving animal communication, but the spiritual task of learning to attend to other creatures is considerably older.

The development of technologies of listening must therefore be accompanied by the formation of communities capable of listening well. Throughout this article, fasting and Sabbath have been presented as disciplines that resist the formative power of systems ordered by consumption, productivity, and control. By interrupting these habits, they nurture humility, restraint, and attentiveness toward the more-than-human world. Listening, therefore, is not the passive reception of information but an act of moral resistance, refusing the impulse to master, define, or instrumentalize the other and instead receiving creation as God’s gift and fellow participant in the divine economy.

Theological ethics, therefore, has an indispensable role in shaping the church’s engagement with artificial intelligence. AI-assisted animal communication should not primarily be understood as a technological achievement but as a theological invitation to conversion. Emerging technologies may amplify humanity’s capacity to perceive the voices of other creatures, but they cannot themselves cultivate the virtues necessary to respond accordingly. Animals have never lacked voices; what has too often been lacking is a human community formed to listen.

To listen faithfully is therefore to resist. It is to resist economies that commodify life, technologies that encourage the objectification of living creatures, and patterns of domination that silence the vulnerable. Such listening is an act of discipleship that reorients humanity’s relationship with the more-than-human world, not by granting animals a voice they never possessed, but by recovering the moral and spiritual practices that enable the church to hear (and respond to!) the voices that have always been there. In this respect, AI does not replace the work of theological formation; it intensifies the church’s responsibility to embody it. Only a community formed by humility, restraint, and love will be able to ensure that new technologies become instruments of creaturely flourishing rather than further expressions of human mastery.