Welcome to Nexus

Kind greetings, and welcome to Nexus: Conversations on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, a digital-age journal that amplifies and publishes scholarly dialogue taking place in the Hank Center here at Loyola University Chicago. We are pleased to report that Nexus is achieving what we hoped it would: providing fresh insight and sturdy scholarship in a relatively fast, farm-to-table “turnaround” time. It is a delight to host and convey a diversity of compelling thought and reflection by high-echelon thinkers on topics from across the living tapestry of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. It is a delight further still to share the scholarship and insight taking place in Nexus as the Hank Center begins a year of 20th anniversary celebrations.

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With this issue, our sixth, we take up a most timely set of topics and questions, that of media and communication ecologies—with a deft eye on the Artificial Intelligence and Automation intrigues that both propel and complicate these ecologies. This is familiar ground for the Church as Catholics have been doing mass media long before "media studies" existed. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition has also long thought in terms of “ecologies,” explicitly so since St. Pope John Paul II coined the term “human ecology” in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. In that landmark letter, the pontiff argued for more holistic integration in Catholic social teaching, asserting, among other things, that the natural environment cannot be protected without first protecting the human person. This integration, of course, was not an “either/or” proposition but served as a kind of course correction—as encyclicals often do—a call to a fullness in understanding of the various ecologies in play in our lives as creatures made in the Imago Dei who inhabit a unique ecclesial life and tradition.

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The figure of “ecology” was also important to Pope Benedict XVI who, it may surprise some, is called the “Green Pope.” Questions of ecology were also of wide interest to Pope Francis and articulated beautifully in his watershed encyclical, Laudato si’ (2015); and, while Laudato si’ is known as the “Green Encyclical,” it is as much about the recognition of an “integral ecology”—the vibrant dynamism of the many ecologies that constitute the interconnected nature of life and faith. In a similar way, Pope Leo’s recent Magnifica humanitas (2026) is being received as the “AI Encyclical,” but it, too, is better understood as the social encyclical that it is—a meditation about the vigor and coincidence of a host of human and divine ecologies that interpenetrate and dwell together under the mystery of dignity, peace, and gift.

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The authors of this issue of Nexus, “Catholic Media Ecology: Realists, Influencers, Neighbors,” are part of a community first called together by Dr. Brett Robinson, a media scholar to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. In 2022, Dr. Robinson created a grant-bearing program, the Church Communications Ecology Program (CCEP), at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, a program in which the Hank Center participated. The CCEP provided Church leaders with a philosophical and theological foundation for engaging digital technology: evaluating, on one hand, how media ecosystems reshape cultural habits, and on the other, exploring how digital environments form human desires, practices, and communities.

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Building on the success of the CCEP, Dr. Robinson expanded the community’s specific focus on Catholic media ecologies to the phenomenon of Catholic “media influencers.” The result was the first ever Catholic Media Influencer Summit, a three-day meeting that took place at the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, IL in the fall of 2024. The summit was a direct response to the XVI Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops and called for the Church to support safe and effective online environments for the faithful and all people of good will. The summit brought together over 60 leading digital creators, clergy, and media experts to examine the challenges of evangelization in digital spaces. Summit participants explored the risks and rewards of digital ministry, discussed how algorithms shape communication, and addressed the problem of echo chambers. Additionally, they considered if a balance could be struck among various pressing concerns: the call to authentic witness, the pressures inherent to influencer culture, and the spiritual dangers that arise when influence becomes celebrity.

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The critical work achieved by Dr. Robinson and the McGrath Center on these topics intersects well with the scholarship and priorities of the Hank Center, and the relationship has been, and continues to be, most fruitful. This issue of Nexus seeks to showcase the relationship by featuring the fruit of the various gatherings, summits, and conversations that have taken place these last few years. The “ecology” framework that this community of writers posit in these pages flows from these edifying encounters and develop a self-conscious list of concerns and priorities to which to attend as we enter the “Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The most important of these is that media are not just neutral tools, but immersive "environments" that subtly condition how we think, worship, and relate to one another.  One need only to look to the rise of “influencer culture” and the experience of social media these last 20 years to behold a prime (and now deeply entrenched and all-encompassing) case study—and the essays, poetry, and interview that comprise this issue of Nexus do well to explore the peaks and valleys of this new terrain from a variety of perspectives.

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Recently, four of the writers featured in this issue of Nexus were invited to Preserving Human Voices and Faces, a conference hosted by the Vatican Dicastery for Communication in Rome in late May and in concert with the promulgation of Magnifica humanitas. The conference—a unique gathering of media professionals, Vatican leadership, theologians, philosophers, Silicon Valley engineers, and entrepreneurs—took as the guide text this insight of Pope Leo XIV given in his address on the 60th World Day of Social Communications: “The question at heart,” he mused, “is not what machines can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to achieve, by growing in humanity and knowledge through the wise use of the powerful tools at our service.” With Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo develops this priority, rooted in Catholic realism, and provides a sustained Augustinian approach to technology and digitally mediated life. He at once affirms the constructive possibilities of this exciting new human innovation, but also, to extend Pope Francis’ astute interventions about the technocratic paradigm conveyed in Laudato si’, also cautions us about the profound, often deleterious influence of these truly novel “tools” that are already at work in the veins of human culture and communities.  

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In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo employs the metaphors of building, reminding us that human beings should seek to be “wise architects” whose “construction sites” should always be directed towards a telos—grounded both in the mandates of the Gospel and ordered towards the mysteries of Christian revelation. The question for Pope Leo—and for us—is not so much whether humans will build interesting things (as it is in our nature to do so do) but rather, as a collection of would-be Dr. Frankensteins, to ask what kinds of things will we choose to build, for whom, and to what end? As Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, put so starkly in a welcome letter to conference attendees here at Loyola University Chicago last March: “The question is not whether machines can imitate certain functions of intelligence. The question is what image of humanity we are handing over to them, and what image of ourselves we are externalizing as we craft this new era.” These are the questions that need to be asked post haste. In a world of rapid AI adoption and integration where new forms of digital media dominate cultural terrain, who will challenge and correct the lazy, wild west approaches to these powerful innovations? Who will be the adult in the room providing needed wisdom in this new era of the Technocene?

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Pope Leo asks early in the encyclical, in a most Augustinian fashion, whether Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) will become another Tower of Babel, or, like the prophet Nehemiah’s community-centered work in Jerusalem, become an ordered, intentional project that cultivates human flourishing and spiritual communion. Pope Leo is most lucid on this point:

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The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones. Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language — not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord. (Magnifica humanitas, 8)

 

This, of course, speaks to the heart of this issue of Nexus: realist, neighborly, and mindful that true strength and wisdom comes only from God and that we all would do well to recall the proper order of operations.

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The experience of hyperactive digitalization, algorithmic nudging, and outsized social media influence these last decades is of a piece with the AI revolution and has done anything but engender the communion for which Pope Leo hopes.  Rather, the era of social media has served as a dry run for the advent of the “Age of Artificial Intelligence,” and the early returns on the epochal shift to digital culture—by the saturation of screens and cell phones, through reflexively approved 1-1 laptop programs in schools, and by hyperactive social media engagement—are exceedingly poor.  There is a large group of “tech pessimists” amassing from across the world and across divergent demographic locations working hard to tame and regulate the unbridled horses of Silicon Valley and the arms race mentality that increasingly characterizes AI industry and culture. For my part, I have been working on the idea of an Ignatian Option these last few years, mainly as a way to respond to the Ignatian heart of Laudato si’  and by imagining the integral ecology Pope Francis proposes under the lights and styles of Jesuit cosmopolitanism.  But the technocratic paradigm intervenes and complicates in ways that are more and more implacable, and so maybe what is needed today is a more Augustinian approach after all—a clarity about what is proper to the City of God and what is proper to the City of Humans.

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In any event, the invitation for us, in a world characterized more and more by the excarnating impact of digital culture, is to do what the Church counsels to do in any season: to put our bodies where our loving hearts and ordered minds are. In this sense, we might think about developing technologies of the Incarnation. We need to recast and retrieve technology (especially in digital media ecologies and AI interface) as a patterns of embodied relations and rhythms rather than merely as a network of excarnated objects and experiences.  We need to recognize the possibilities implicit in technological interfaces as places for edifying encounter since they bear, in some way, the image and likeness of God. Is this possible? Can technological interfaces help us to be in true proximity to one another? How might these excarnate-seeming technologies, imagined and made by humans and riddled with all manner “influencer” objectives, help us to be in more loving relationship with the maker of all humans and with each other? How might we hear the voice of God through all of this digital noise—the voice that counsels “Be still and know that I am”?

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I hope you enjoy the excellent pieces in this volume of Nexus—and the special interview with the great Eugene McCarraher as well. My profound thanks to issue co-editor, Bo Bonner, not only for his superb work here, but for being a most pleasant a working companion—and for keeping it real. A heartfelt final thanks is reserved for our stellar designer, Caroline Wood (CAS, ‘23). Caroline’s signature imagination and artistry endow Nexus with additional dimensions of insight and reflection. 

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