Search Results (108)

This article maps research on artificial intelligence (AI) in Christian Religious Education (CRE) during the first phase of rapid development following the widespread adoption of generative AI. A scoping review was conducted in Scopus, Web of Science, the Open Digital Theological Library, and IxTheo, supplemented by Google Scholar. Included were full-text English-language publications from 1 January 2023 to 31 March 2026 that addressed AI in Christian educational, catechetical, theological–educational, or formative contexts. The final corpus comprised 23 publications. Data were charted by publication type, geographical and educational context, main topic, and key claims or findings. The results show that the field is recent, methodologically heterogeneous, and not yet well consolidated, but that the emerging debate is organised around four inter-related strands: didactic potential and personalisation, ethical–technical limitations, anthropological–theological reflection, and systemic, institutional, and cultural–geographical conditions. The literature is marked by a tension between AI’s didactic potential and concerns regarding its ethical, theological, anthropological, and institutional implications. The review contributes a thematic synthesis that clarifies why AI integration in CRE requires not only educational innovation but also theologically informed, pedagogically mediated, and context-sensitive frameworks for religious formation. Significant gaps remain, including limited empirical and longitudinal research, insufficient attention to students’ and parents’ perspectives, cultural and linguistic contexts, and a lack of religion-specific, empirically tested didactic models. The review concludes that future research should move toward longitudinal, practice-based, and theologically grounded models for AI use in CRE. Full article

The article reflects on the care for the work of creation within Benedictine spirituality and within the broader tradition of the Cistercian Order. It seeks to demonstrate that monastic spirituality, though developed in a pre-modern context, contains enduring theological and ethical intuitions that remain relevant for contemporary ecological reflection. The starting point of the analysis is the Rule of Saint Benedict written by Benedict of Nursia, which, although it does not employ the modern vocabulary of ecology or environmental ethics, nevertheless articulates a coherent vision of human life characterized by reverence, moderation, and responsibility toward the created world. Particular attention is given to key spiritual and anthropological dimensions of the Benedictine tradition, such as attentive listening (obsculta), humility, moderation, stability, and responsible work, expressed synthetically in the principle ora et labora. These elements are interpreted not only as monastic disciplines shaping individual and communal life, but also as forming a relational anthropology in which the human person is understood as fundamentally embedded within a network of relationships with God, other people, and creation. In this sense, Benedictine spirituality already implies a non-exploitative attitude toward the natural world. The article then examines how concern for creation has been deepened and concretized in the spirituality, institutional practice, and historical development of the Cistercian Order. Drawing on selected Cistercian documents as well as contemporary monastic reflections, the study shows that care for the natural environment is inseparably linked with spiritual attentiveness to God, interior silence, openness of heart, and readiness to serve. The Cistercian tradition, with its emphasis on simplicity of life, manual labor, and harmonious integration with the surrounding environment, develops these Benedictine intuitions in a particularly concrete and historically embodied form. From this perspective, a pro-ecological attitude is not interpreted merely as a reactive response to contemporary environmental crises, but rather as a structural consequence of a theologically grounded vision of reality. It emerges from a deep relationship with God as Creator and from a sense of entrusted responsibility for creation understood as a gift rather than as an object of domination. Ecological sensitivity is thus presented as an intrinsic dimension of monastic spirituality rather than an external adaptation to modern concerns. The main research question of the article is: to what extent and in what way do Benedictine and Cistercian spiritual traditions provide theological, anthropological, and ethical foundations for an ecological attitude toward creation within the framework of contemporary integral ecology. To address this problem, the study employs qualitative research methods grounded in theological inquiry. The primary method is textual analysis of the Rule of Saint Benedict and selected Cistercian documents, complemented by theological–hermeneutical interpretation aimed at identifying key spiritual principles and their implicit ecological implications. In addition, the study applies a historical–critical perspective in order to situate monastic sources within their original cultural and theological context, as well as a comparative theological approach, which enables a dialogue between classical monastic spirituality and contemporary ecological theology. These methods are used not only to reconstruct historical meanings, but also to interpret monastic texts in light of contemporary debates on integral ecology, sustainability, and the ethics of responsibility for our common home. In this way, the article highlights a significant continuity between monastic wisdom and modern ecological reflection, showing their mutual capacity for enrichment. Full article

This article examines the understanding of paideia in the writings of Photios of Constantinople (c. 810–893) and argues that his educational vision cannot be reduced to literary cultivation or the preservation of classical learning. While modern scholarship has frequently emphasised Photios’ role in transmitting the intellectual heritage of antiquity, less attention has been given to the anthropological and theological framework within which he interpreted that inheritance. Through an analysis of his Myriobiblos, Amphilochia, letters and homilies, this study demonstrates that Photios understood education as the complete formation of the human person through the harmonious cooperation of body and soul. Classical philosophy, literature and aesthetics are valued not as autonomous disciplines but as instruments serving a higher theological purpose. In Photios’ thought, the Hellenic ideal of paideia undergoes a thorough Christian adaptation, recalibrated by doctrines of creation, incarnation, resurrection and deification. His anthropology is reflected in his understanding of virtue, ascetic discipline, beauty and cultural inheritance. The article argues that Photios’ engagement with the classical tradition was neither antiquarian nor merely apologetic but rather one of the most sophisticated syntheses of classical culture and revealed theology in the middle Byzantine period. Full article

Contemporary pastoral theology has increasingly absorbed the categories and methods of counseling psychology, yet this turn often leaves unexplained the theological ontology of the pastoral caregiver. This article develops a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue between Pauline theology, counseling psychology, and the pastoral theology of Witness Lee (1905–1997), proposing an ontological-participatory account of Christian shepherding. After surveying the therapeutic turn and major psychology–Christianity integration models, the study examines Lee’s reading of Paul’s pastoral pattern—nursing mother, exhorting father, and slave of Christ—and his interpretation of “shepherding according to God” (κατὰ Θεόν) in 1 Peter 5:2 as participation in the life, nature, and shepherding activity of the Triune God. Building on Lee’s doctrine of practical deification—believers becoming “God in life, nature, expression, and function, but not in the Godhead”—this article argues that pastoral care is mediated through persons constituted with Christ who minister divine life through cherishing, nourishing, and mutual shepherding. Placed into dialogue with counseling psychology, this vision yields convergences in empathy, presence, and holistic care, alongside tensions concerning anthropology and the telos of human transformation. The article offers an ontological-participatory framework that situates the descriptive achievements of the human sciences within a richer Pauline vision of participation in the Triune God’s ongoing shepherding ministry. Full article

African immigrant men in the United Kingdom (UK) experience forms of suffering that transcend both the clinical framework of acculturation stress and the political narrative of racial victimhood. Existing scholarship frequently overlooks how race, religion, and gender historically entangle to construct diasporic identities. This paper investigates how African immigrant men in the UK navigate the constitutive forces of race, gender, and religion in constructing and resisting diasporic identities. The paper develops “Ntu Fracture” as a theological–anthropological framework to diagnose the wounding of diasporic masculine personhood at the level of vital relationality. The framework draws upon Bantu philosophy (Ntu, ubuntu) and Yoruba cosmology (àṣẹ), placing them in critical dialogue with Fanon’s sociogeny and Butler’s concept of precarity. Utilising a qualitative desktop methodology, the findings suggest a fractured subjectivity among African men in the UK driven by three main mechanisms: (1) institutional racism as recognition-severing, (2) immigration enforcement as obligation-interruption and (3) parenting surveillance as domestic colonisation. The paper concludes that the lived experiences of African religious communities within the UK’s hostile environment stem from historical constructions of race, religion, and gender, categories experienced as unified entities that collapse conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Full article

This article examines the development of Catholic reflection on media, communication, and technology from nineteenth-century debates over press freedom to contemporary interventions on artificial intelligence. Drawing on a purposively selected corpus of Catholic documents issued at the universal level between 1832 and 2026, it combines historical–hermeneutical reconstruction, comparative document analysis, and juridical–institutional interpretation. The study distinguishes three heuristic phases: defensive regulation and the construction of Catholic media institutions; pastoral appropriation, dialogue, media education, and digital adaptation; and, since 2020, an anthropological deepening accompanied by growing concern with the political, economic, juridical, and social structures of AI. Particular attention is given to the Rome Call for AI Ethics, the two papal messages of 2024, Antiqua et nova, and Magnifica humanitas. The article argues that this history does not reveal an unchanged doctrine of human dignity, but a developing anthropological concern whose vocabulary, theological grounding, and normative function change over time. Earlier concerns with truth, moral order, ecclesial responsibility, and the salvation of souls are progressively reformulated through communication as communion, participation, rights, human agency, and integral human development. Full article

Unchecked artificial intelligence strengthened by large language models poses a crisis that reaches past ethics into ontology, and it demands that we reconfigure the basic categories of anthropological theology. Working by a hermeneutical–constructive method that places biblical exegesis in dialogue with philosophical thinking, this article advances three interconnected theses. The first is that contemporary AI is reminiscent of the theological hubris of the Tower of Babel narrative (Genesis 11:1–9); both instantiate a closed system of signification that forecloses transcendence by collapsing the distinction between naming and being named. The second concerns what algorithmic governance produces—what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life, a condition the biblical theology of nakedness in Genesis 2–3 can inversely illuminate, and which Simone Weil’s analysis of attention as decreative receptivity sharpens by exposing algorithmic distractedness as the spiritual antipode of contemplative openness. The third is christological: Agamben’s potentiality–impotentiality and Weil’s attention and décréation converge with the kenosis of Philippians 2:5–11 to ground an anthropology of voluntary self-emptying instead of replicable capacity. Reading imago Dei with Paul Ricœur as a dynamic process and drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, I argue that authentic existence in the algorithmic age requires a “second nakedness”, a deliberate refusal of egotistical self-assertion that reopens creaturely dependence, so that God’s grace becomes operative in the common life of humanity. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) governance has converged around transparency, accountability, safety, privacy, fairness, human rights, human oversight and risk management. However, this vocabulary remains limited when AI is understood as a sociotechnical force shaping agency, work, truth, democratic trust, meaning and long-term human futures. This article is a critical conceptual review, with a structured Scopus-based mapping of 48 peer-reviewed articles, a critical documentary analysis of six international AI governance frameworks and a supplementary interpretive engagement with Magnifica Humanitas. Using a PRISMA-informed flow diagram for transparent reporting and abductive thematic synthesis, the study identifies four fragmented literatures: AI ethics and governance; anthropological accounts of dignity, autonomy, agency and vulnerability; spiritual and theological approaches to meaning and moral formation; and civilizational analyses of democracy, war, transhumanism and existential risk. The findings do not suggest that these concerns are absent from AI ethics; rather, they show that they remain dispersed and are not consistently translated into governance criteria. This article proposes the Anthropological, Spiritual and Civilizational (ASC) Framework as a diagnostic heuristic for extending trustworthy AI toward dignity, truth, social justice and humane futures. The framework is conceptual and requires future empirical and expert validation. Full article

This article offers a point-by-point overview of the concept of Christian education as understood by popes Francis and Leo XIV. It could be argued that the writings of these recent popes return to the early Christian idea of paideia Christi. Pope Leo XIV refers directly to the term ‘paideia’ by using the phrase ‘Christian paideia’. Francis’s educational anthropology, on the other hand, is theologically and pedagogically consistent with the tradition of Christian paideia. Although Francis does not use the term ‘paideia’, his understanding of education is also centred on the human person and their integral development. In this theoretical framework, education is no longer viewed merely as a tool for achieving salvation. However, it serves to enable the human person to grow in their humanity and thereby attain integral maturity, the pinnacle of which is union with God. It is within this theoretical perspective that the significance of education for building peace and social order should also be understood. In this view, peace emerges as the result of a humanistic education; hence, to achieve genuine peace among people, the emphasis must be placed on a genuinely humanistic education. The idea is rooted primarily in the ancient Greek understanding of paideia. It has also been taken up throughout history, for example, by Comenius in Pampaedia, Dewey in Democracy and Education (1916), Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970), and, more recently, by Nussbaum in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). Pope Leo XIV also sees this perspective of internal coherence between authentic personal development. From the very beginning of his pontificate, one can observe in his teachings a linking of these two issues. In one of his earliest addresses, Pope Leo XIV emphasised that the concern for peace amongst people does indeed stem from the Christian faith. It could be said that building peace within human society is a Christian imperative, arising from the sharing of the gift which the Church has received from Christ himself: ‘Peace be with you!’. In this context, it is worth noting that the mission of bringing about peace is not merely the result of specific human activity, although this is, of course, important, and Leo indicates how it should be carried out. Nevertheless, what is crucial to the fulfilment of this mission is that the surest guarantee of its success is a personal relationship with Christ, from which flows the transmission of Christ’s gift of peace to the world. The Pope addressed the Italian Bishops’ Conference with the following words: “the relationship with Christ calls on us to develop a pastoral focus on the theme of peace”. Pope Leo thus points out that the path to building authentic peace in the world, which “is not the absence of conflict”, is the path of personal growth in one’s relationship with Christ, who is the source of peace. In this way, the maturing of a person of faith is the surest way of building—though in this context it would be more accurate to say: conveying—peace in the world. Full article

This article addresses the theological implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the broader Catholic theology of technology. The emergence of AI challenges the traditional theological accounts of technicity and human action and demands a renewed reflection capable of engaging current technological developments and transformations. The study first examines artificial intelligence through the point of view of postphenomenology, highlighting the mediating role of technology in human perception, agency, and world-formation. It then revisits the theological concept of the imago Dei, central to Christian reflections on human activity and technology, by placing in dialogue different theological interpretations of the image of God and their anthropological implications. Offering a brief bibliographic and interdisciplinary review, the article analyses how current debates on AI and the imago Dei reshape questions concerning human uniqueness, creativity, embodiment, and moral responsibility. A renewed theological interpretation of the image of God, integrated with contemporary philosophies of technology, offers valuable insights into the nature of human action and human nature within technologically mediated contexts. The article concludes that Catholic theology can contribute a distinctive and critically constructive perspective to current discussions on artificial intelligence by articulating a more dynamic and relational understanding of humanity, human activity and technological mediation. Full article

This article addresses the problem of the truth of religion from a personalist perspective, moving beyond classical propositional conceptions of truth. The starting point is the claim that, in Christianity, truth has a personal character and is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, which leads to a shift from truth understood as the correspondence of judgment and reality to truthfulness as the existential integrity of the human person. Methodologically, the study is located at the intersection of fundamental and systematic theology. It employs conceptual analysis, theological hermeneutics, and systematic argumentation in order to reconstruct, from within Christian personalism, a criterion of religious truthfulness. It is argued that the truth of religion cannot be reduced to doctrinal coherence, but is manifested in the degree to which religion fosters personal integration, relational capacity, and participation in communion. Particular attention is given to the role of the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, understood as a space of personal integration and transformation, in which the human person is drawn into relationship with God and the ecclesial community. The analysis further suggests that this criterion may have heuristic value in comparative theology, provided that the distinction between Christian claims to fullness and analogical participation in truthfulness is carefully maintained. In conclusion, a religion is true insofar as it makes the human person true, that is, integrated, relational, and capable of participation in communion. Such truthfulness has an ontological and personalist character, rather than being merely functional or pragmatic. Full article

This article examines the impact of the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) on human formation from the perspective of Christian theological anthropology. Although recent scholarship highlights the advantages of AI for personalised learning and educational efficiency t frequently neglects the ontological and spiritual dimensions of human development. This study argues that the widespread use of AI in education risks externalising interior processes such as reflection, discernment, and memory. In contrast, the Christian theological tradition—as articulated by Augustine of Hippo (Confessions), Dumitru Stăniloae (Orthodox Dogmatic Theology), John Zizioulas (Being as Communion), and Christos Yannaras (The Freedom of Morality)—conceives of education as an inner transformation rooted in communion and participation in divine life. Drawing on interdisciplinary dialogue among theology, the philosophy of technology, and AI studies, this article introduces the Integrative Theological Formation Model (ITFM), comprising three dimensions: functional, reflexive, and contemplative–relational. The model seeks to integrate technology into education while safeguarding interiority and the spiritual dimension of the person. The article concludes that, while AI can support educational processes, it cannot generate communion, interiority, or ontological transformation. Full article

This study proposes a theological-orthodox reinterpretation of contemporary management concepts—particularly “value innovation,” the “blue ocean strategy,” and the E.R.S.C. matrix—within the framework of church administration. Starting from the premise that such concepts cannot be directly imported into the ecclesial context without distortion, the paper argues for their “theological translation,” whereby their underlying logic is reoriented toward the service of the person, communion, and oikonomia. The analysis demonstrates that church administration cannot be understood as a neutral technical system, but as a form of diakonia, intrinsically linked to the ecclesial nature of the Church as the Body of Christ. Consequently, “value” is redefined not in utilitarian or economic terms, but as concrete good: the protection of human dignity, the strengthening of communion, the accessibility of liturgical and pastoral life, and the responsible use of resources. Within this framework, innovation is understood as a Christ-centered renewal of administrative practices, while differentiation (“blue ocean”) becomes a form of service rather than competition. The E.R.S.C. matrix is reinterpreted as an ascetical discipline of discernment, guiding administrative decisions through criteria rooted in theological anthropology and ecclesial ethics. Furthermore, the study addresses the ethical meaning of surplus, the role of transparency, the integration of virtue and competence in organizational culture, and the transformation of communication from image management into truthful witness. Ultimately, the paper argues that authentic church administration is not defined by procedural efficiency alone, but by its capacity to manifest, through structures and decisions, the love of Christ in concrete institutional life. Full article

Over the course of 2021, I conducted ethnographic research among transnational Pentecostal communities in Madrid. During this research, ethnographic data on manifestations of the Spirit was collected. This data appeared to defy the perspective of a distant and critical observer. In this article I explore how an anthropologist might incorporate Tillich’s theology of the Spirit to make sense of and think through existential religious experiences within Pentecostal communities, such as experiences of being possessed or grasped by the Holy Spirit. This article begins by presenting data from a Pentecostal culto in Madrid in which the Spirit plays a defining role. Initially, I reflect on how an anthropologist might make sense of similar ethnographic data. Subsequently, I turn to Paul Tillich’s theology of the Spirit. I discover how Tillich’s theology can aid in making sense of ethnographic data of manifestations of the Spirit. Tillich’s theology enables anthropologists to make sense of ethnographic encounters with the Spirit beyond secular registers dominant in the anthropological discipline. Full article

In this paper, I contribute to the recent dialogue between anthropologists and theologians by focusing on the disciplinary self-understanding of the latter. In the first part, I present the results of an analysis of interviews conducted with thirty theologians and religious studies scholars in the Netherlands and in Germany. I argue that the disciplinary coherence of theology found in these interviews is well captured by theology’s overarching purpose of ‘discerning life lived in God’s presence’. In the second part, I try to put more flesh on the bones of this ‘theology as discernment’. I start by introducing the work of Dutch theologian Erik Borgman, whose theology exemplifies what theology as discernment might look like. I then introduce a central discussion within theologically engaged anthropology, namely that on the relationship between description and judgment. Bringing the reflections of my main anthropological interlocutor, Joel Robbins, in dialogue with Borgman’s theology, I suggest that discernment can uniquely bring description and judgment together. In the final section, I return to the first part by reflecting on discernment as theology’s disciplinary coherence, tying this to the description/judgment discussion and drawing conclusions for what this means for the distinction between theology and anthropology. Full article