THE RELATIONAL DANGERS OF AI

'The artificial imitation of positive human communication - words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love - can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can be particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.'

Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, p.83.

EVALUATING AI

'Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, for they either foster participation and justice or exacerbate inequality, control and exclusion. For this reason, they must be evaluated by asking a crucial question: Do they truly help individuals and peoples to become more humane and fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations?'

Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, p.73.

CHRISTIAN OBEDIENCE IS FAMILIAL

'To obey is to live in a state of sonship. It is to confess with the full force of my freedom that I have an infinitely good Father who loves me with infinte love.'

Erik Varden, Entering the Twofold Mystery, p.22.

WE SEE THE FALL IN DAILY LIFE

'What we know of the Fall from Scripture, we verify daily through experience.'

Erik Varden, Entering the Twofold Mystery, p.22.

BEING IN THE IMAGE OF GOD MEANS BEING INCOMPLETE WITHOUT HIM

'To be created "in the image" of God is to exist on the basis of a relationhip. It is to be constituted in such a way that our being and flourishing depend on a power outside ourselves that exceeds us infinitely. This relational nature of man - the fact that we are, by definition, incomplete in ourselves - lies at the heart of religious obedience.'

Erik Varden, Entering the Twofold Mystery, p.21.

YOU ARE A SIGN OF DIVINITY IN CREATION

'God, we know, is Spirit. He cannot be bound by time and space. He cannot he contained in matter. Yet with the creation of man, he leaves an imprint of himself in the temporal, spatial reality of our world. The human being is to be a sign of divinity in creation, a bridge between time and eternity.'

Erik Varden, Entering the Twofold Mystery, p.20.

THE HAPPINESS THAT COMES FROM DEPENDENCE

'The religious person constructs his life on the certainity that he is not autonomous, and glories in it. Happiness, he knows, is a function of dependence; true freedom, for him, is found through obedience.'

Erik Varden, Entering the Twofold Mystery: On Christian Conversion, p.20.

GRACE IS BY DEFINITION UNDESERVED

'The problem of expecting to live in a perfectly fair world is that there is no grace in that world, for grace is grace only when it is undeserved.'

Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised, p.112.

THE IMPORTANCE OF READING MATTER

'Hilary was a fast reader and dreaded nothing more than being stranded without print. He would read anything sooner than nothing...'

Marghanita Laski, Little Boy Lost, p.124.

HOW TO JUDGE A CUTURE

'A culture is no better than its woods.'
WH Auden in Michael Malay, Late Light, p.209.