Framing "artificial intelligence" in a context of Ignatian pedagogy

Following the invitation of Pope Francis to support the dignified agency of our students

In February 2026 I was invited to offer a keynote at the annual meeting of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Network on Pastoral, Ministerial, and Theological Education (AJCU-PMTE). What follows below is a lightly-revised draft of my remarks. Eventually, I will re-work these thoughts into a journal article. For now, I welcome your comments and concerns. to help me think more fully about these important issues. Thank you.

As part of their preparations for the presentation, I asked the conference participants to read some of my previous writings on the subject. In particular, I sent them an article I wrote for the Christian Century, “The Parasocial Power of AI,” and an essay I wrote for this platform, “Artificial Intelligence in an Ignatian Context.” Both of these may be helpful to you, as well, but they are not necessary to understand and engage with what I am doing here.

Like the whole system of higher education in the world, our institutions of university education are constantly threatened by three strains of virus with highly contagious variants: fragmentation, superficiality, and instrumentality. The illness that these viruses produce threatens the identity that unites us, inspired by the charism that Ignatius expressed by using the phrase “to help souls” as the goal of the Society of Jesus, desiring to serve the mission of the Lord entrusted to the Church. “To help souls” is the Ignatian commitment that leads to integral attention to persons in all dimensions of personal and social life and in all that they need.

- Arturo Sosa, SJ, “Discerning the Present to Prepare for the Future of the University Education of the Society of Jesus”¹

Violence isn’t merely an excess of negativity; it can also be an excess of positivity, the accumulation of the positive, which manifests as overachievement, overproduction, overcommunication, hyper-attention, and hyperactivity. The violence of positivity is possibly even more disastrous than that of negativity because it is neither visible nor evident, and it evades immunological defense because of its positivity.

- Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence²

As Jesuit educators, we seek and refine our pedagogies in the interest of cura personalis - that is, we seek to engage with our students as whole persons.

In contrast, neoliberal institutions—and our universities, including Jesuit universities, are fully in the thrall of neoliberalism—seek to take each individual at some other level than that of the whole person. Following the thought of Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, neoliberal institutions seek to shift all participants, whether students, faculty, or staff, from individuals into dividuals.³ A “dividual” is Delueze’s term for the fragmentation of the individual into data points, samples, and market segments within modern “societies of control.” That is, the fullness of the whole person is stripped down to a discrete set of deliverables, and only those deliverables seem to be legible and acknowledged by the institution.

And so, following the insights our colleague Maureen O’Connell has guided us to this weekend, we seek this afternoon to arrive at the right sort of question about this phenomenon referred to as “artificial intelligence.”

I want to reach a question that does not accept the dividualization of our students. Rather I seek a question that is framed in such a way as to honor the genius of our students as whole persons. I want to honor that these whole persons are on an extraordinary variety of paths in their educational journeys. Some of these paths might align with our interests as educators, and many of these paths might well diverge from our interests.

Perhaps some of you expect me to provide an easy summary, wherein we could finish today and say “artificial intelligence is good” or “artificial intelligence is bad.” This is not going to be that sort of talk. It’s just going to be weird. A useful sort of weird, I hope, but weird nonetheless.

My hope, as a result of the weirdness, will be to arrive at a version of a question that is rooted in Jesuit values, and honors the idea of cura personalis. My further hope is that this question will help us to maneuver, in our ensuing discussions, in a manner that opens space for each of you to discern your own morally serious⁴ positions with regard to this important and distracting subject.

With that, we are underway.

2.

I would like to begin with comments made by Pope Francis in 2015, when he spoke to the assembled leaders of the United Nations.⁵

My friends in the room will recognize this move, because I talk about this all the time. I am kind of obsessed with this speech, and with good reason. For me, the 2015 UN speech offers us a *frame* in which to analyze and understand many of the questions and issues we will be wrestling with today.

I will return to this matter of the *frame* in a moment, but for now, I would like to highlight two interrelated passages from Pope Francis’s remarks.

The first passage is,

It must never be forgotten that political and economic activity is only effective when it is understood as a prudential activity, guided by a perennial concept of justice and constantly conscious of the fact that, above and beyond our plans and programs, we are dealing with real men and women [and nonbinary persons] who live, struggle and suffer, and are often forced to live in great poverty, deprived of all rights.

We recognize this language, yes? Pope Francis is talking about the poor. In our social imaginations we have been taught to think of the poor in the most abstract and remote of terms. That is, we can so abstract the idea of the poor that we end up imagining that *we* are the poor—as when we stand in our pews and sing the old hymn, “I’m just a poor wayfarin’ stranger.”

At the same time, our abstractions invite us to imagine the poor as always the poor *over there*—as in, the poor are the ones we help. The poor are the ones who we allow to live (or not) through the maintenance of our comfort and way of life.

Here, Pope Francis challenges us to shake off our identifications and abstractions. He speaks of the poor as *real* men and women and nonbinary persons, each living a life disentangled and decoupled from my needs, my comfort, my interests—our needs, our comforts, our interests.

The poor suffer, yes, and too often the only way we can see them in their concreteness is to see their suffering.

But Pope Francis does not leave us in this position. Though he names the suffering of the poor, he offers us a path to move beyond our urge to reduce the poor to one dimension, the suffering dimension.

In his speech, he continues in the next passage, saying:

To enable these real men and women [and nonbinary persons] to escape from extreme poverty, we must allow them to be [[dignified agents of their own destiny]]. Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed. They must be built up and allowed to unfold for each individual, for every family, in communion with others, and in a right relationship with all those areas in which human social life develops…

I want us to linger for a moment, in the dynamism between these two passages.

In the first passage, real men and women and nonbinary persons are struggling and suffering, and our reflex is to view these populations—the poor—through the lens of this suffering.

Indigenous scholar and educational theorist Eve Tuck refers to this reflex as “damage centered research”—a way of looking at populations and only seeing their pain.⁶ Similaraly, the writer Ursula K. LeGuin, in her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, refers to these stories as “death stories.”⁷

But note the shift in the second passage. Following Ursula LeGuin’s logic, Pope Francis is moving us from the “death story,” the “damage centered” view of the poor, to a “life story” of the poor. Instead of focusing on the narrative of damage—struggling, suffering, deprivation of rights—Pope Francis names a new narrative, for all real persons of the world: Dignity, Agency, Destiny.

Again, his words: “We must allow them to become dignified agents of their own destiny.”

And then the phrase that pays: “Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed.”⁸

This, for me, is the substance of Pope Francis’s notion of pastoral protagonism:⁹ Every single human being is called to the flourishing of their dignified agency, toward their own destinies, and the exercise of that dignity cannot be imposed.

So this is the frame in which i would like to place my remarks today—my ideas both about this phenomenon which has been given the ambitious and misleading name of “artificial intelligence,” and my ideas about how Ignatian practices and pedagogy might understand and engage with this phenomenon.

In what follows, i would like to invite you to think about our students in this peculiar frame.

By definition, our students come to us in a certain sort of poverty: a poverty of knowledge, a poverty of social status, an institutional poverty. We, as professional educators, are the gatekeepers of all the riches the academy might offer: Knowledge, yes, but also the grades and the recommendations, and the social credibility, that allows our students to grow, advance, and flourish.

My challenge, following Pope Francis, is how to move beyond seeing students through a narrative of damage, and to shift to seeing them in a narrative of protagonism. That is, to move beyond framing our students in a death story, and supporting them in creating and enacting their own life stories.

Encountering my students as the poor, how do I support the dignified agency of their destinies, and how do I cease my urge to impose a destiny upon them, or define for them a narrow gateway to their dignity and their agency?

How do we engage with these students, these real men, women, and nonbinary persons, as protagonists?

3.

Some of you who have known me a while know that I love to talk about my dear friend Julia, who I met in college. The patient and gentle way she shared the Bible with me, back in the day, was one of the factors that led to my eventually becoming Christian.

We keep in touch regularly. So I was talking with Julia the other day. She’s just had cataract surgery one one eye, and this coming week she’s going to have cataract surgery on her other eye.

Now, what I learned from her about cataract surgery—and maybe you already knew this—is that when you get cataract surgery, they don’t just fix the occlusion, but they can often fix your nearsightedness or your farsightedness. They literally put a new lens in your eye.

More than this, the eye surgeon gives you a whole list of options. You can reset both eyes to have closeup vision, or both eyes reset to have far vision, or you can get one of each, with one eye that works well close up, and one eye that sees clearly far away. And, as you might imagine, there are pros and cons to all of these options.

Julia was telling me all about this. A few days earlier, Julia said the eye doctor had told her all this, and then looked at her and said, “So what do you want to do?”

Julia, as one might expect, was overwhelmed. It was too much information to take in all at once, in that context. So the doctor gave her a few days to decide.

I should mention that Julia works at a major southern research university. And like many universities, this school has contracted with Microsoft to allow staff to use a service called CoPilot, which Microsoft calls “your AI companion.”

So Julia went home from the eye doctor’s office and put all the information the doctor had given her into CoPilot. She asked it to generate a pros and cons list, Ben Franklin style, for each option.

She was very pleased with the result. More pleased with how CoPilot arranged the information, in fact, than with how her doctor arranged the information, even though it was the same information.

We’ll return to this in a moment.

4.

One of the theorists I keep coming back to when I think about pedagogy is John Holt. A couple of decades ago, I happened upon two of his books—How Children Learn and How Children Fail.¹⁰

They were revolutionary for me, in particular, because Holt unearths and interrogates how schools, from the very first moments of educating students as young children, begin the process of socializing students to be docile. Holt’s claim is that this is accomplished in large part by terrorizing them.

Sometimes the terror is overt, as in when a child is ridiculed or punished. More often, however, the terror is covert. A child is made to feel that they are inadequate, or that they will not be treasured or loved, if they do not please the teacher.

As Holt observed, this leads to disastrous, and counter-educational, results:

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, “Because they’re scared.” I used to suspect that children’s defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of “Onward! You can do it!” **What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence**, the way it affects a child’s whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.

Now Holt is dealing with students at early grade levels, where this fear is often visible. Some of us in this room teach undergraduates. By the time our students reach that age, they have had more than a decade and a half of navigating this fear-producing system, and many of them have learned how to mask the fear very well. They use regular strategies to survive the fear, in complex and masterful ways.

Of course, those that don’t learn how to mask are mostly managed out of the system. We have lots of ways to deal with students who cannot deny themselves and their dis-regulation in our classrooms. Some of these mechanisms are subtle, many are not so subtle. All of them, however, reinforce the basic observation made by Holt: This classroom is a place where the teacher is safe and has access to exclusionary violence, and the students are socially precarious and have very little agency and power. “Success,” for the student in this context, consists in finding the most efficient ways to deliver what they imagine the teacher might want, and has very little to do with their real situations or what the students themselves might actually need and want.

By the time students get to graduate school, where I encounter them, they have become extraordinarily well-socialized. In most cases, as their teacher, I will never need to present them with a direct or overt threat to get them to conform to the social expectations of the classroom. Instead, as with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon,¹¹ they will be self-monitoring and self-regulating in the classroom.

The docility of our students does not mean that efficient learning, or indeed any learning, is occurring. Instead, what we can expect is that up to half the students in our classes, maybe more, are sitting in the classroom in a state of well-hidden terror. They have been so well-socialized that they have learned to hide it from us, their instructors, and in many cases they have learned even to hide it from themselves.

But this socialization into fear does not lead to better learning outcomes. Following Holt’s insight above, it leads instead to the destruction of the possibility of learning, and even to the destruction of intelligence itself.

The unreflective structure of the “normal” classroom is based around the threat of violent exclusion, and the naive deployment of “expertise” as a coercive force. This creates the situation where students are led to less learning, and less active intelligence, by their very participation in that structure. This educational structure is the very opposite of care for the whole person.

5.

Let me put my cards fully on the table here: I am a humanist. Philosophically, I want to center the concerns of real men, women, and nonbinary persons over the concerns of nonhuman entities. That means, philosophically, I am going to choose the care of all humans, even those who are defined as our enemies, over a myriad of other, non-human, contenders. These contenders include wild animal populations, endangered species, and your beloved pets. Cards on the table, I have a bigotry towards humanity and against the wider natural world.

I admit this humanism, I hold, in its present form, is flawed. I recognize that there are a lot of problems with my humanism, and I am willing to be persuaded toward better options.

For example, I have been very persuaded by Pope Francis, in Laudato Si’ and other writings, toward this notion of integral ecology.¹² In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis engaged with the works of post-structuralist and post-humanist thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Inspired by this, I have followed the Holy Father’s invitation to myself imagine what it would mean to engage with the agency and the dignity of various flora and non-human fauna.

As a shorthand of what I am talking about, think of the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of books such as Braiding Sweetgrass.¹³ Echoing the integral ecology of Laudato Si’, Kimmerer argues for a reciprocal, gift-based interrelationship with the earth and the creatures of the earth. I am open and eager to accept with this invitation to expand my humanistic preferences to embrace more of the created world, though I admit I am not quite there yet.

So it should surprise no one that my humanism would be absolutely corrosively skeptical about popular claims that corporations or other fictional entities are “persons.” I recognize that these fictions exist in our legal landscape. I recognize that these fictions have a powerful imfluence on our public discourse. Nevertheless, I work hard to tune my language and my imagination to always maintain clarity that these entities are social and legal fictions.

Let me explain. I’m not a Thomist, but if I was, the Thomistic “great chain of being” for me would be something like a pyramid with God at the top, then angels, then humans, then your pets and the trees and the other animals, and then nowhere at all anywhere ever, the fictional “persons” like corporations, nation states, and yes—these various large language models that we refer to with the term “artificial intelligence.”

We humans seem very hard wired to anthropomorphize these non-human creations. I wrote about this tendency recently in an article for The Christian Century, “The parasocial power of AI.” We form parasocial relationships with sports teams, television characters, brands, and yes, even with these Large Language Models.

6.

So let’s come back to my friend Julia, and her sorting out all those details about her cataract surgeries.

She sits in her eye doctor’s office, feeling overwhelmed by the information. As she tells me, her brain just couldn’t process it.

Then she comes home, she takes this same information, and puts it into Microsoft CoPilot, and it puts together this pleasant presentation for her. She really likes what CoPilot does with the information. As really didn’t like how the eye doctor handled the information. It was the same information.

So I asked Julia about that difference. I assumed the eye doctor just had a rotten bedside manner or something, or that the doctor was a bad communicator. It turns out, no, that was not the issue. Turns out, like so many of us (including me), Julia is kind of terrified of going to the doctor—even a doctor she really likes and trusts. The entire frame of the medical system disorients her thinking.

Aha—here’s that idea of the *frame* again.

Where did this fear come from? It wasn’t from one event, but from hundreds of little interactions with doctors and nurses and administrators over five decades. It comes from her navigating a loved one’s cancer diagnosis, and managing their care in an opaque and hostile American medical system. Often the fear did not arise from brutal treatment, but from an indifferent bureaucracy.

So as we talked about this, what we learned is that Julia really liked that when she put the information into CoPilot, that she felt like she had greater agency than when she was sitting in the doctor’s office.

The CoPilot interface is designed to be very polite and encouraging. With CoPilot, Julia’s questions were not in a frame where she felt like they were silly questions, or where her choices might be judged. Instead, she felt like CoPilot was there to support her decision making, not impose its authority or judgement on her. As a result, she felt a greater amount of dignity.

It was the same information, and the eye doctor is not a bad doctor. The eye doctor is a good and competent doctor, and is well-liked by Julia.

But the *frame* was wrong. The entire apparatus of the medical system created feelings of overwhelm, opacity, and fear.

As a result, Julia’s decision making capacities were inhibited in the immediate moment.

Her choice to turn to CoPilot put the same information into a context where she felt a restoration of clarity, safety, and agency.

7.

Let’s go back to educational theorist John Holt for a moment.

His 1964 book, called How Children Fail, is a mixture of classroom observations and extended reflections on what he is learning from the students he observes as they navigate the school as a social structure.

With your indulgence, i would like to read an extended quotation from the book, because I think that what Holt gives us here can offer a structure through which I can weave all these disconnected strands from Pope Francis in his 2015 UN speech and Laudato Si’, as well as the experience of my friend Julia, and our own experiences in the classroom with our students.

So Holt here is discussing a young student named Emily, who is a fifth grader in a class that Holt observed on an extended basis over a number of months:

I have mentioned Emily, who spelled “microscopic” MINCOPERT. She obviously made a wild grab at an answer, and having written it down never looked at it, never checked to see if it looked right. I see a lot of this oneway, don’t-look-back-it’s-too awful strategy among students. Emily in particular has shown instances of it so striking that I would like you to know about them.

Some time after the spelling test in question I wrote MINCOPERT on the blackboard. Emily and one other student—a good speller, interestingly enough- said that it was supposed to be “microscopic.” Everyone found this very amusing, including Emily. She is a child who shows in her voice, look, coloring, and gestures much of what she is thinking and she has not shown the least indication that she knows she is the creator of MINCOPERT. In fact, her attitude suggests that she rejects scornfully the idea that she would ever be so foolish as to spell the word in such a way.

Today she handed me, for display, a piece of tagboard on which she had pasted some jokes that a friend had cut out of a newspaper. I found when I got to the last one that she had put the paste on the joke side, so that all there was to read was the meaningless fragment of a news story. I was surprised that she would paste a joke on backwards, without even looking to see whether she had it on the right way. When it was posted, and the other kids were looking at it, I said to Emily, “You’ll have to explain that last joke to us; we don’t get it.” I thought she might look at it, for the first time, see that it was meaningless, and realize that she had pasted it on backside up. To my amazement, she smiled and said with the utmost nonchalance, “As a matter of fact, I don’t get it myself.” She had looked at it. She was perfectly ready to accept the fact that she had posted a joke that was meaningless. The possibility that she had made a mistake, and that the real joke was on the other side, did not occur to her…

This child must be right. She cannot bear to be wrong, or even to imagine that she might be wrong.

When she is wrong, as she often is, the only thing to do is to forget it as quickly as possible. Naturally she will not tell herself that she is wrong, it is bad enough when others tell her. When she is told to do something, she does it quickly and fearfully, hands it to some higher authority, and awaits the magic word right or wrong. If the word is right, she does not have to think about that problem anymore; if the word is wrong, she does not want to, cannot bring herself to think about it.

This fear leads her to other strategies, which other children used as well. She knows that in a recitation period the teacher’s attention is divided among twenty students. She also knows the teacher’s strategy of asking questions of students who seem confused, or not paying attention. She therefore feels safe waving her hand in the air, as if she were bursting to tell the answer, whether she really knows it or not. This is her safe way of telling me that she, at least, knows all about whatever is going on in class. When someone else answers correctly, she nods her head in emphatic agreement. Sometimes she even adds a comment, though her expression and tone of voice show that she feels this is risky. It is also interesting to note that she does not raise her hand unless there are at least- half a dozen other hands up.

Sometimes she gets called on. The question arose the other day, “What is half of forty-eight?” Her hand was up; in the tiniest whisper she said, ‘Twenty-four.” I asked her to repeat it. She said, loudly, “I said,” then whispered “twenty-four,” I asked her to repeat it again, because many couldn’t hear her. Her face showing tension, she said, very loudly, “I said that one half of forty-eight is...” and then, very softly, “twenty-four.” Still, not many of the students heard. She said, indignantly, “Okay, I’ll shout.” I said that that would be fine. She shouted, in a self-righteous tone, “The question is, what is half of forty-eight, right?” I agreed. And once again, in a voice scarcely above a whisper, she said, ‘”twenty four.” I could not convince her that she had shouted the question but not the answer.

Of course, this is a strategy that often pays off, A teacher who asks a question is tuned to the right answer, ready to hear it, eager to hear it, since it will tell him that his teaching is good and that he can go on to the next topic. He will assume that anything that sounds close to the right answer is meant to be the right answer. So, for a student who is not sure of the answer, a mumble may be his best bet. If he’s not sure whether something is spelled with an a or an o, he writes a letter that could be either one of them.

The mumble strategy is particularly effective in language classes. In my French classes, the students used to work it on me, without my knowing what was going on. It is particularly effective with a teacher who is finicky about accents and proud of his own. To get such a teacher to answer his own questions is a cinch. Just make some mumbled, garbled, hideously unFrench answer, and the teacher, with a shudder, will give the correct answer in elegant French. The student will have to repeat it after him, but by that time, he is out of the worst danger.

Game theorists have a name for the strategy, which maximizes your chances of winning and minimizes your losses if you should lose. They call it minimax. Kids are expert at finding such strategies. They can always find ways to hedge, to cover their bets.

8.

At the outset of my remarks, I said that my challenge, following Pope Francis, is how to move beyond seeing students through a narrative of damage, and to shift to seeing them in a narrative of protagonism.

As an educator, I have inherited a number of ready-made narratives that I could use to describe a student like Emily: “She’s a bad student,” “she’s unintelligent,” “she’s trying to game the system,” or “she’s a shirker.”

When colleagues get together, sometimes we compare stories, and we complain about students like this—students we feel are doing everything in hing in the classroom except the learning we expect them to do. We act as if each individual student is our adversary, strategizing how to trick us out of the grand goal of getting them educated.

And along with those narratives, I feel the peer pressure that pushes me towards ways to “deal with” students like Emily in my classroom. These so-called “solutions” often are tied up in making my classroom an even more hostile and punishing environment for students like Emily.

The assumption behind all these narratives is that all of us in the classroom understand and agree what we’re all doing here. They are the needy students—the poor—and I am the wise benefactor of knowledge. They will be improved by our interactions, and they should seek that improvement out of a kind of rational self-interest.

But our students often don’t see it this way. They are in the classroom because some curriculum plan or advisor told them to be there. They may be uninterested or antipathetic to the subject matter - and yet they know that if they do not survive my class with some kind of good grade, they will be directly or indirectly punished.

So many of my students are like fifth-grade Emily, but they are much more sophisticated in their masking and their strategies to get out from under the threat that the entire structure of the classroom creates.

9.

When my friend Julia felt overwhelmed, she felt empowered to change the frame. She utilized a technology that—at least for a moment—seemed to reaffirm her agency, and to feel greater dignity than she was able to feel within the bureaucracy of the medical system.

My sense is that when our students grab for these Large Language Model technologies, that they—like Julia—are trying to acheive a similar frame shift. It’s not that they agree with the game we teachers are playing, and they are trying to cheat. Rather, they feel they have been dropped in the middle of a field where a game is being played—a game whose rules they do not fully understand, and whose stakes are dire and mortal. If they lose the game, they will be punished in the near or long term.

So they simply want to get off the field, and to do so as quickly as possible. They want to get out from the frame we have put them in, and to get into a place where they can “deliver” what we are demanding, but from a safe distance.

Our students often do not discern a meaningful difference between learning, and the theatrical motions of learning. In our demand for right answers, and for pure methods of answer delivery, we push them to more and more elaborate theater, or more and more cunning frame shifting.

10.

In the book of Galatians, Paul writes -

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed! (Gal. 1:6-9)

A plain reading of the Galatians text certainly would imply that Paul claims that there is an authentic gospel, a genuine gospel, which he had offered to the Galatians, and it has become “perverted” by a group that has moved into the community in Paul’s absence. In this reading, Paul is assuming the role of guardian, but it is very pointedly as a guardian of the teaching, meaning he is writing to the Galatians to chastise them for letting the purity of the teaching become sullied by the “false” teaching of these interlopers.

I wish to offer an alternate reading, which pushes back against this plain reading. What if, instead of acting in the role of guardian of the teaching, Paul is instead writing to the community in Galatia in the role of guardian of the learners? What if we put the emphasis of his concern, not on the goal of keeping the teaching itself unsullied by the discourse in the Galatian church, but rather on making sure that the various members of the community were safe and cared for in light of the discourse? In other words, what if we read the emphasis of Paul’s concern here not in the possibility that the teaching might be compromised, but rather in the fear that members of this community, whom Paul knows and loves, might not be flourishing?

11.

We have many reasons to resist so-called “Artificial Intelligence,” based on the environmental costs.

As priests in the cult of knowledge, we have all sorts of reasons why students shouldn’t use so-called “Artificial Intelligence,” because it is a cheap shortcut to real learning.

But our students feel overwhelmed. They are dropped in the middle of a field in a game they did not ask or wish to play. We are the coaches and referees, shouting at them to perform, perform, perform. So they grab what they can, as fast as they can, so they can get off the field and out of the pressure.

In grabbing for so called “Artificial Intelligence,” our students are showing us that they are willing to burn down the entire world to give us what we want—what we teachers want.

“Hey professor - You want an essay?, here’s your god damn essay. You want an answer?, here’s your god-damn answer.”

What would it be like to follow our students through this frame shift? Where instead of breaking our students to keep the integrity and the sanctity of our educations institutions and expectations, we break and rearrange those institutions and expectations for the sake of our students?

Following Paul, what it would look like to protect the students, rather than protecting the teachings?

Following Pope Francis, what would it look like to support our students to be the dignified agents of their own destinies, understanding that Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed?

Finally, I hope we have arrived at a proper framing of the right question: How do we affirm the dignity and agency of our students as whole persons, in an environment that seeks to divide them and punish them in favor of the interests of fictional persons, in the form of our institutions, our charismatic brands, and our large language models?

1. Arturo Sosa, SJ, “Discerning the Present to Prepare for the Future of the University Education of the Society of Jesus,” in Michael J. Garanzini, SJ, and James P. McCartin, eds., The Catholic University as a Social Project: Reflections on Jesuit and Catholic Higher Education. (Washington: Georgetown UP, 2026), 13.

2. Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), viii.

3. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” L’Autre journal, no. 1 (May, 1990). Anthologized in Negotiations (New York: Columbia UP, 1997)

4. I was first interoduced to the concept of “moral seriousness” by my friend and colleague David Dark. For those who are interested, I address this concept and attempt to develop it more fully in Chapter 2 of my book, The Accessorized Bible (New Haven: Yale UP, 2026).

5. Larisa Epatko, “Full text of Pope Francis’ speech to United Nations.” PBS News, September 25, 2015.

6. Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 79, No. 3, Fall 2009.

7. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction. (Gardena, CA: Cosmogenesis, 2024).

8. We could say that this is Pope Francis at his most Franciscan, if we recall the love that Saint Francis had for releasing doves and rabbits and other fauna from their captivity and returning them to the wilds of creation. But this is an idea for another day.

9. Lisa Zengarini, “Pope Francis calls for greater lay protagonism in the Church,” Vatican News, February 18, 2023.

10. John Holt, How Children Learn, (New York: Balance, 2017), and How Children Fail, (New York: Balance, 1995).

11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage, 1995)

12. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis On the Care for Our Common Home, May 24, 2015.

13. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. (New York: Milkweed Editions, 2015).