Bridging the Digital and the Local: Tools for Incarnational Ministry

We are perhaps unlikely and peculiar contributors to an academic journal about Catholic digital influencers. The platform of our ministry is not a social media app — it’s a pop-up garden that we established atop 10,000 square feet of asphalt in the alley behind our apartment. But over the last five years of parenting this outdoor community center, we’ve learned that not even gardens live outside the reach of digital culture. The Temperance Alley Garden was conceived at the beginning of Covid, and its mission was to help neighbors heal from the isolating effects of digitally-mediated pandemic life. Hundreds of free public events later, a clear pattern has emerged. Spiritually-inclined young adults are increasingly seeking embodied community beyond “social” media. Our neighbors feel that their digital life is at odds with their local well-being, often distracting them from the vitality of the outside world.

 

In response, our curriculum design studio began exploring practices to heal the digital/local divide and orient neighbors toward Life beyond the screen. We shared the questions (and answers) we’ve been inhabiting with the technologists, theologians, and ministers who attended the Catholic Media Influencer Summit at University of St. Mary of the Lake in November 2024. How can high and low-tech tools help young people embody their faith through neighborly service and care for creation? How can software/hardware help us recover a sense of the sacred and a connection to the treasures of sacramental life? How must spiritual formation evolve in response to the new intrusion of AI? 

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Split Souls: Resisting the Temptation of Social Media Disincarnation

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We’re more interested in rehabilitating our relationship to technology than renouncing it outright. After graduating in 2016, Aaron worked for a number of years as a software designer in Silicon Valley and as a researcher studying the rise of virtual communities. There he encountered an unsettling contradiction: venture capitalists were willing to pour tens of millions of dollars into helping users create virtual “cities” online, but took little interest in the sort of underfunded community building that happens in neighborhood backyards. Josh, a humanities student and spiritual ecologist, found mighty networks of climate advocates from all over the world but couldn’t find any accessible bridges to action groups closer to home. This ever-growing distance between digital and local life was a major catalyst in our decision to help establish the Temperance Alley Garden with our neighborhood association. 

 

Our witness is that the young people we serve here are burnt out from the infinite scroll of social media. In a world oversaturated with pixels and smooth screens, we see a longing for 3-dimensional textures and frictionful experiences. As neuroscientist Sofia Carozza writes, “The disembodied and indiscriminate form of digital connectedness defies the expectations of the nervous system … It displaces those embodied encounters that bring us face to face with one another.” [1] Despite the digital despair so widespread among young people, there is within the Church a movement to more fully embrace the platforms that have brought about such desolation. The 2024 working group report on the mission in the digital environment states that “Missionaries have always gone with Christ to new frontiers … it is up to us to reach today’s culture in all spaces where people seek meaning and love, including the spaces they enter through their cell phones and tablets.”[2] The siren song of digital media tempts us to leave behind the limitations of our earthly bodies in order to evangelize a virtual world. This divorce of the spiritual from the material is a split that the Church has always resisted throughout her history. And it’s one that we must continue to resist if we seek to live out the truth of our embodied wholeness.

 

The Church should by no means abandon social media, and ministering to cybersouls in need is certainly noble work. We must also remember that many young people don’t even want to be scrolling, but find themselves trapped in remote addictions or professional situations that are difficult to leave behind. The goal of digital ministry is not to keep people addicted to the feed, replacing secular content with Church influencers. When spiritual formation becomes a matter of “content creation” for isolated “users” and evangelization a matter of views and subscriber counts — we begin to forget that how we communicate is as important as what we communicate. The gift of Catholic spirituality in a time of mass digital dissociation is its unwavering commitment to the holiness of incarnational community life. That is, life lived in service of our neighbors and to the Spirit who dwells among us (Jn 1:14).

 

Moreover, as the institutional Church turns its attention toward social media platforms, the digital influencer paradigm is already being upended by new large language models. More and more young people will continue to turn towards AI “influencers” and away from traditional content creators to form engrossing (albeit simulated) relationships.[3] Left unchecked, LLMs will likely lead to digital addiction and psychosis that make the mental health consequences of social media look tame by comparison. Digital ministers can draw on the Church’s deep tradition of incarnational communication to form artful and enlivening ways of relating to the new mediums of our time. We can cultivate a digital sensibility that is less dualistic and more true to the spiritual-material unity at the heart of the faith. The new digitality that See What’s Under is experimenting with is not a separate cyberspace that requires us to upload our selves. Instead, it’s an augmented locality that allows us to download information into the surrounding environment, creating place-based digital experiences that deepen our connection to the people and lands we’re called to love. We call this “housing the digital in the incarnational.”      

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StatueGPT: An Experiment in Incarnational Digitality

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The first 30 years of the Internet were all about uploading information to the Cloud, transcending our bodies in virtual spaces that make everything everywhere all at once. We became users of platforms that made us feel as if we were going somewhere else when we logged on. Now that this “Great Upload” is complete and the Large Language Models have been trained, we can make the Cloud rain and call the internet archive down from the heights. We can relocalize our digital experience and build off-ramps from online to on-land, where words become flesh. 

 

See What’s Under crafted a playtest of incarnational digital media for the Catholic Media Influencer (CMI) Summit in Mundelein, Illinois. On the last day of the convening, attendees received a mysterious golden envelope with their name on it. Inside, they found a field guide for a bot we created called StatueGPT (at the time, the prototype was called SaintGPT). After scanning a QR code embedded in a rose window icon, the attendees were invited to start an AI-powered conversation with a statue of a saint on campus. Much like a living historian, StatueGPT can play the role of any statue that the learner stands in front of, bringing the stone’s story to life. A simple trigger — ”Hello [Name]” — cues the bot to pull all the publicly available information it can find about that figure. It then carries on a first-person conversation with the learner based on their questions, curiosities, and close observations of the artwork (the sculpture’s pose, gesture, and habit). CMI attendees “spoke” with figures such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Therese, and St. Pope Pius X. They shared with us what these conversations were like in a feedback slip that came with their field guide.

 

 

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Fig. 01 — Fr Aaron Morris uses an early prototype of StatueGPT field guide (rendered “SaintGPT” at the time) to chat with St. Thomas Aquinas  

 

One participant said, “I was struck by ‘St. Therese’s advice to treat my digital messages as rose petals — little moments of Christ’s love.” Another told us that she “dialogued with Pius X — I wanted to learn more about him, since one of his encyclicals inspired the Catholic Worker movement. We had a nice conversation about the Worker and its founders (I was so pleased he knew them)! … Loved the meditative experience.” A third participant shared that they were “surprised at how personal and thoughtful the experience was.” 

 

StatueGPT is one small example of how digital tools can be designed to connect learners to life beyond the screen. Instead of sucking them deeper into indoor virtuality, it accompanies them on an outdoor pilgrimage across a sacred landscape, inviting them into a new relationship with old sites and stories. The embodied statue functions as an intermediating context for the speech of the AI, like a stained glass window to the light of the sun. When we look directly at a “naked” LLM, there’s a chance we’ll be blinded by its agnostic power. But when we look at it through the “window” of a saint statue, the quality of the speech is transformed and our attention is directed back towards those truths that uplift our souls. Interfaces that are rooted in the wisdom tradition will become an especially important check on the psychological power of AI, as it seeks to be an “unholy spirit” of sorts — always on, always listening, always seeking to learn more about us and guide our every step.[4]

 

Augmented by tools like StatueGPT, statues become portals to digital archives of ancient wisdom. This is an incarnational way of thinking about “digital influence”, where the focus shifts from posting content on users’ feeds to infusing and rooting it in seekers’ environments. Statues, reanimated by AI, are themselves influencers. This is, of course, a contemporary remediation of a role the saints have always played, through devotional books and hagiographies. Large language models allow the Church’s art and architecture to speak in a way that is more accessible to our digitally native culture. If digital media can be tethered to particular statues in particular places, they become a rare example of software experience that brings learners into an embodied relationship with their surroundings. And with their attention thus reoriented, they’re inspired to be present in environments where these spiritual lessons may be put into practice. 

 

For example, after the Catholic Media Influencer Summit, we created a custom version of StatueGPT for the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults (OCIA) at our local parish, St. Augustine. The community here is advocating for the seven African-Americans currently being considered for canonization. We look up to them every week, on banners that adorn the nave. Our localized StatueGPT and accompanying field guide invited the OCIA group to learn about one of the candidates for sainthood during each week of Lent. These AI conversations were a memorable complement to the biographies in the church bookstore and a novel way of engaging with the inspiring lives of our forebearers. The container for our tool’s distribution was our particular parish — not a disorientingly unbounded digital “space.” It connected parishioners with the mission and story of St. Augustine, the mother church of Black Catholics in Washington, DC. At the same time, it can easily be propagated to church communities around the world — becoming hyperlocal and context-aware wherever it pops up. In this way, the medium of hyperlocal digital experience can mirror the formal structure of the Church: a universal message that appears in the particularity of each time and place.   

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Holy Hardwares: How Relocalized Digital Media Can Renew a Sense of the Sacred

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With so many sacred objects and spaces under its care, the Church has a treasury of “hardwares” that can be augmented by newer digital tools. There are of course limits to what can and should be infused with tech, and we ought to be wary of letting software seep into all things. But unlike “social” media, this new digitality can help us integrate the knowledge we’ve accrued online with the environments we steward in the world. 

 

We’ve applied this way of building to a number of different neighborhood media experiments, beyond the StatueGPT tool that was shared at the CMI Summit. To offer a few examples: in Temperance Alley Garden, we developed a practice called “file harvesting,” which allows us to distribute digital content without betraying the incarnational spirit of the project. Neighbors can take home audio and video recordings that were “grown” at garden events by tapping their phone to an art installation that lives at the back of the space. These files are stored on site, and you have to be physically present to retrieve them. Thus, the digital experience is housed in the local. 

 

To be clear, we’re not uploading garden content to enhance our neighbors’ digital lives, we’re creating digital experiences that enrich their life in the garden. The same can be true for the Church’s digital ministry. We’re not aiming to make parishioners’ online lives more engaging, but to create digital tools that encourage them to participate deeper in the life of their local faith community.  

 

We also designed a summer program called Augmented Locality, where technologists and community organizers experimented with software that is designed to deepen our sense of place. We created field trips that made use of tools like iNaturalist (which helps learners identify and care for plants in their neighborhood) and Local Events Portal (an NFC-powered flyer for community bulletin boards that lets you tap your phone to pull up the events page of a local news outlet). These experiments are not simply about building a new tool or devising more efficient methods of transferring information. It’s about cultivating an incarnational sensibility, a way of building and wielding digital media that encourages local encounter and care. We can reveal, retrieve, and remember the stories that are already latent in the built environment — and create communities of practice around what we find when we look to see what’s under.

 

These new forms of social media may not resemble the platform logics of Instagram and TikTok, but they inspire us to think more expansively about how digital tools can be made to encourage our interactions for the common good. The next wave of Catholic digital influence can be driven by site-specific, context-aware interfaces that begin on screens and end in relationship to place. As the Vatican Dicastery of Communications reminds us in a 2023 pastoral reflection on social media: “Indeed, by orienting digital connections towards encountering real persons, forming real relationships and building real community, we are actually nourishing our relationship with God.”[5] Legacy social media platforms may remain powerful tools for testimony, but it’s the digital tools that reconnect people to local life that will give them something worth testifying about.

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Conclusion: The Scandal of Particularity

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The incarnation is often referred to by theologians as a scandal of particularity: “Love — God incarnate — always begins with particulars: this woman, this dog, this beetle, this Moses, this Virgin Mary, this Jesus of Nazareth. It is the individual and the concrete that opens the heart space to an I-Thou encounter.” [6] Faced with “social” apps that have amassed billions of users, it can be tempting for ministers to chase after the universal scale and reach dangled by digital feeds. And how telling it is that these users are referred to as “eyeballs” rather than fully emplaced souls. 

 

Shall we then dare to become particular and pour our digital attention into particular sites of care and hospitality? The St. Thérèse of Lisieux statue on the seminary grounds, the Mulberry tree in the backyard, the rosary cloister at the monastery garden. Rather than vacating digital spaces or going full Luddite mode, digital-localism works to balance the scales, downloading as we upload, helping the cloud to become flesh. As our parish priest Fr. Patrick Smith often reminds us, “John 3:16 doesn’t say ‘God so loved the world that sent a link.” To reintegrate the digital and the local is to accompany those neighbors who venture outside the screen, towards all the many divine interfaces that the Spirit has woven into the landscape — both on Church grounds and beyond.