Theology
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Questions about AI are really religious questions
Every new technology carries an implicit vision of what it means to be human. That makes the deepest questions about AI fundamentally religious ones – even if much of the developed world would prefer the Church stayed silent on matters of profit and progress.
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The theological emptiness of the Petrocchi report
Phyllis Zagano’s analysis in America and in Flashes dismantles the Petrocchi Commission’s conclusions on women’s diaconate, showing they rest on no historical, theological, or anthropological documentation.
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“Pure-blood” bishops sound more like Harry Potter than the Gospels
Jesus measured faithfulness by whether people fed the hungry and visited the imprisoned, not by tracing clerical lineage. The doctrine of Apostolic Succession, built on mistranslation and selective memory, distracts from the radical simplicity of the Gospel’s own demands.
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Does the Bible give Israel divine rights over Palestinian land?
Genesis texts promising land to Abraham’s descendants are frequently cited to justify Israeli occupation. But modern biblical scholarship and Paul’s letter to the Romans challenge any claim that God permanently favours one people over another.
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Doing theology in times of political crisis
The collision of political sovereignty and ecclesial authority exposes fundamental questions of legitimacy within a fragmented normative landscape. Appeals to tradition obscure irreducible complexity, crisis functions as rhetorical apparatus, and the inexorable dynamics of imperial decline reconfigure authority itself—compelling discernment between authentic moral critique and instrumentalised religion.
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The graced life of trees
Trees do far more than grow — they warn, communicate, and heal. Drawing on ecological science and spiritual tradition, God’s graced presence in trees spills outward, cooling cities, filtering air, and offering the kind of quiet healing that many people instinctively seek in nature.
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Grace not an intermittent signal but a constant broadcast
Grace crashes into ordinary life uninvited — the dull commute, the 3am spiral, the grey Tuesday afternoon. Karl Rahner called this the heart of Jesuit theology: God’s presence as an unrelenting lifeline, available everywhere and always.
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The Church is not a ‘she’
Recent Vatican documents on women’s diaconate rely heavily on nuptial theology, arguing that female ordination would compromise the spousal relationship between Christ and church. This reasoning transforms metaphorical language into doctrinal necessity, creating theological problems by literalizing what tradition presents as symbolic representation.
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Beyond rest: envisioning eternal growth
What if eternity isn’t a pause, but a beginning? If heaven is movement, not stillness — a journey deeper into God’s light? Newman’s wisdom still stirs: to live is to change. Perhaps death simply opens the next chapter of transformation.
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Science changes everything
The Webb Space Telescope reveals astonishing new realities of creation, while psychology deepens our understanding of human brokenness and potential. Such knowledge questions inherited frameworks and calls theology to reconsider how it speaks of sin, grace, and humanity’s place in the vast unfolding universe.
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