ABSTRACT. The dichotomous division into Christianity and post-Christianity is, like most such divisions applied to social phenomena, highly simplified. It brings into focus the two extremes of a whole spectrum of views, within which, between conservative Christianity and radical anti-Christianity, it is possible to distinguish at least several intermediate worldviews. One of these is described as liberal Christianity From the perspective of religious conservatives, this worldview is one of the main causes of the dilution of properly understood Christianity, a sort of bridge over which a large proportion of Christians cross over to the side of post-Christianity. This accusation seems to be well founded. At present, liberal communities indeed tend to be disintegrating, whilst conservative ones grow in strength and expand their spheres of influence, boldly challenging both non-Christian and post-Christian worldviews. However, the assessment of the situation changes when considered in terms of the internal coherence of religious views and practices, and their compatibility with well-established scientific and moral knowledge. Here, liberal Christianity appears to have the upper hand. In my presentation I intend to examine the philosophy of liberal Christianity. Since liberal Christianity exists in many forms, each with its own philosophy, my aim is to identify and evaluate the more general epistemological, axiological and metaphysical assumptions underpinning this entire movement. These assumptions include, amongst others: fallibilism with regard to religious beliefs (sometimes linked to questioning of the need to dogmatise many religious issues); upgrading of change over changelessness at the level of metaphysics (e.g. with regard to the immutability of God) as well as at the level of religious practices. At the same time liberal Christianity rejects the assumption of causal asymmetry in the relationships between God and humankind, recognises the grains of truth in other religions, and acknowledges the rationality (though not the truth) of secular worldviews; it also downplays the role of eschatology—particularly the idea of hellish punishments—in motivating morally right actions. Perhaps the non-relativist version of liberal Christianity brings us closest to an understanding of revealed truth; yet, by instilling a measure of scepticism in the faithful and reinforcing their conviction of religious freedom, it seems to dampen their zeal and weaken their missionary spirit.

ABSTRACT. At the centre of Michel Henry’s philosophical project—and of his philosophy of religion in particular—stands his conception of auto-affective immanent life, together with the claim that within this auto-affective dimension of life we can experience the universal unity of all living beings, of everything that lives. According to Henry, every form of representation, every external—or, in other words, hetero-affective—experience is grounded in auto-affection, that is, in the self-suffering of immanent life as such. This means that life must experience itself first before it can experience anything else. Henry further maintains that this pure, immanent life gives itself to itself as essentially embodied and intersubjective. In my self-suffering, I suffer not only myself but, in a certain sense, the suffering of every other living being; I can sense their suffering within my own. In this way, Henry argues, I have an immediate experience of the universality of life in the self-experience of my auto-affective immanent life. These insights play a decisive role in Henry’s philosophy of religion, especially in works such as I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, Words of Christ, and Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. In Henry’s view, God’s essence is pure life and pure immanence, and this essence can be experienced within oneself. Christianity, Henry claims, is perhaps the historically most precise articulation of this self-givenness of the universal, pure, intersubjective, and auto-affective dimension of life—ultimately, of God himself. Here, however, a paradox emerges: living beings are nevertheless separated from one another by the difference of their physical corporeality. How, then, can they still be united in an immanent universality? Henry’s answer is that within myself I can uncover an original entwinement of all living beings that precedes every form of separation, including the separation implied by physical embodiment. In this presentation, I aim to reconstruct and critically clarify the details of Henry’s response to this fundamental paradox. One further central motif of the presentation will be to demonstrate Henry’s view according to which the contemporary decline of Christianity and the rise of a post-Christian worldview are fundamentally connected to the fact that, within modernity, the essential core of Christianity—the inner unity of embodied life grounded in love—has become distorted and falsified. Henry believed that a proper reinterpretation of the metaphysical essence of Christianity could contribute to the re-foundation of the Christian worldview and to the strengthening of its contemporary position.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we analyze the reformation of Christian metaphysics in the context of the great revolution in science at the beginning of the modernity, which was marked by heliocentrism. We will investigate to what extent, on this background of the scientific revolution, a revolution did also appeared on a philosophical level, marked by a great censorship of all ideas that do not withstand an extremely rigorous examination in terms of their truth value. The theme of Truth and its founding sources become central in the philosophy of 17th century. Correspondence can no longer be one in terms of a sensitive experience offered only by the senses, but also in terms of a recognition or coherence that only reason can validate. Firstly, we will show that Mathematics, metaphysically guaranteed by a God who is an infinite and perfect Being, became, in the 16th century, in its turn, the guarantor of a universal order. Thus, the heliocentric model of Platonic origin in Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum acquired a metaphysical basis, and God became the guarantor of a harmony of mathematical origin. Secondly, we highlight the fact that the theory of idols in Francis Bacon's New Organon and the hyperbolic doubt in René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy come to open the way to new paths of approaching Truth, both scientifically and metaphysically, leading to a unification of science with metaphysics. The Cogito resumes Bacon's incomplete induction at a metaphysical level, realizing a necessary, general and universal connection, a kind of metaphysical law between the Self (consciousness), thought and existence. Thus, thought and existence become two inseparable elements, reflecting the same type of connection as the one that Bacon identified in the New Organon between heat and motion. We consider that what Bacon achieved for science, namely a method that would lead to a universal Truth, Descartes achieved, in turn, for metaphysics, thus building a parallel between metaphysics and science. Thirdly, we will demonstrate the fact that Descartes manages to create a first unification of metaphysics with science and religion in its modern sense by achieving that ideal of mathesis universalis, which was different from the scholastic-type unification founded on the theory of causality and complete-type induction existing in Aristotle's physics. Thus, Mathematics, metaphysically guaranteed by God, an infinite and perfect Being, becomes in turn the guarantor of a universal order. In this way, the heliocentric model of Platonic origin in Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum acquires a metaphysical basis and God becomes the guarantor of a harmony of mathematical origin. These ideas will have an enormous influence on thinkers of the second half of the 17th-century, who will have to connect this Baconian-Cartesian scientific-metaphysical-religious model to the new challenging issues of a religious nature.

ABSTRACT. Nostalgia, or the feeling of yearning for the subjective past (and possibly other subjective states), is presently a topical area of research in fields such as philosophy, psychology or sociology, important enough to warrant the use of such terms as nostalgia studies or the nostalgic turn. For example, in 2025 Routledge has published its Handbook of Nostalgia, edited by Tobias Becker and Dylan Trigg, a multidisciplinary volume on the subject, one of many released in recent years. At the same time nostalgia is also an important sentiment expressed by many modern Christian philosophers, such Jacques Maritain (Art and Scholasticism, 1920), Josef Pieper (Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948), Michel Henry (Barbarism, 1987) or Chantal Delsol (The End of the Christian World, 2021), among many others. Although the word “nostalgia” may not always be invoked by those authors, their writings nonetheless oftentimes bring into focus the many differences between our modern, mostly post-Christian world and the old world that was predominantly Christian, and in those texts some form of intellectual or even spiritual yearning for this old world can be identified. The aim of this presentation is, then, to examine how nostalgia for the predominantly Christian world, and especially for the Middle Ages, is expressed in selected writings of modern Christian thinkers. Utilizing philosophical methodology of analyzing nostalgia that arose from the nascent field of nostalgia studies, this presentation looks at the meliorative visions of the past that Christian philosophers present to us. In the context of transition from a Christian to a post-Christian world it is especially interesting to also examine how Christian nostalgia changed across the last century, as exemplified by writings of those four authors. As new post-Christian worldviews emerged in the 20th and 21st century, so did change the ways that Christian philosophers thought about the past, present and future. One distinguished Christian thinker who’s nostalgic sentiment deserves separate discussion, if not because of its own philosophical merits the then because of his tremendous cultural significance, is also J.R.R. Tolkien, who’s whole literary project (including the Hobbit, 1937 and the Lord of the Rings, 1954–1955) is, by his own admission, build on the theme of nostalgia for the past that is lost as well as on the critique of the modern reality. Since Tolkien’s writings influenced the whole later genre of fantasy that is so popular in current-day media, it is important to remember that this popular genre also originated from the same Christian nostalgia that permeate writings of Maritain, Pieper, Henry and Delsol.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a dialogue between Adela Cortina's ethics of cordial reason and René Girard's mimetic theory, arguing that the synthesis of both (what we term cordial mimesis) constitutes a paradigmatic instance of post-Christian moral thought: a philosophical anthropology that inherits the deepest normative insights of the Christian tradition while seeking to ground them on secular foundations.

Girard's relevance to the post-Christian question is direct and explicit. His mature anthropology, developed from La violence et le sacré (1972) to Achever Clausewitz (2007), holds that Western modernity is unintelligible without Christianity. The Christian revelation, particularly in its Gospel form, is for Girard the historical event that unmasked the scapegoat mechanism: the founding violence by which archaic (and contemporary post-Christian) societies achieved social cohesion through the sacrifice of an innocent victim. The post-Christian world inherits the moral concern for victims (the defense of the innocent, the language of human rights, the denunciation of exclusion), but has largely lost the anthropological diagnosis that generated it. It retains the fruit while forgetting the root. The result, Girard argues, is a paradoxical intensification of mimetic rivalry under the very banner of emancipation: a world that multiplies the denunciation of scapegoats without understanding the sacrificial mechanism that produces them.

Cortina's ethics of cordial reason engages the post-Christian question from a different but complementary direction. Rooted in the discursive ethics of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, themselves heirs to a secularized Kantian tradition, Cortina argues that communicative action already presupposes a more originary bond: a pre-reflective, affective recognition of the other's dignity that she calls the "cordial bond". This framework can be read, in light of the conference's guiding question, as precisely the kind of transformation the last question anticipates: Christianity dissolved into a set of broad ideals about human behavior and society. The notions of human dignity, compassionate solidarity, and the unconditional worth of every interlocutor are, historically, inseparable from their theological matrix, even when Cortina presents them within a post-metaphysical, communicative framework.

Our thesis is that the synthesis of both thinkers, the homo cordialis mimeticus, makes the post-Christian character of this inheritance explicit and philosophically productive. If human beings are constitutively imitative, as Girard insists, then the moral task is not to suppress mimesis but to orient it: to choose models who do not rivalize, who do not instrumentalize, who desire the good of the other. This is precisely the positive mimesis Girard identifies in the Gospel figure: a non-rivalrous model whose desire is oriented toward the other's flourishing. Cortina's cordial reason names the affective and rational structure that makes such an orientation possible and normatively binding.

The paper thus argues that cordial mimesis is not merely a philosophical synthesis, but a post-Christian moral anthropology in the precise sense: it cannot be fully understood in isolation from the Christian tradition that shaped it, yet it addresses (and needs to address) a world in which that tradition can no longer be presupposed. In an age of affective polarization, populist scapegoating and the algorithmic amplification of mimetic rivalry, the question of whether this inheritance can sustain its normative force without its theological roots is not merely academic. It is urgent.

ABSTRACT. Contemporary discourse views opposition negatively, equating it with hostility, division, or ideological conflict. As a result, the moral and philosophical significance of opposition is often overlooked. This paper argues that within the personalist philosophy of Karol Wojtyła, the attitude of opposition possesses a fundamentally positive meaning rooted in the person’s fidelity to truth and participation in the good. Drawing on Wojtyła’s analysis of the acting person, the study first examines how the human person fulfills himself through moral actions. It then situates this moral structure within Wojtyła’s theory of participation, showing that participation entails authentic attitudes that preserve the common good rather than passive conformity to prevailing norms. Against this background, the paper develops the central claim that opposition—when directed against moral evil, interior disorder, or unjust social structures—constitutes a genuine form of participation. Through moral resistance, ascetic self-mastery, and responsible engagement in social life, the person affirms the truth about the good and safeguards the dignity of the human person. Because truth and goodness ultimately originate in God, such opposition can be understood not merely as social or ethical resistance but as participation in the divine order itself. The attitude of opposition therefore emerges as an expression of moral responsibility, self-transcendence, and participation in the divine life.

ABSTRACT. Pietro Prini (1915–2008), a declared Christian who “devoted his life to Catholic culture in a critical manner”, authored the controversial work Lo scisma sommerso (1999). Drawing on sociological data, he advanced a diagnosis of a latent rupture within the Catholic Church: a growing disjunction between official doctrine and the moral and existential choices of many believers. Widely regarded as prophetic, the work has been repeatedly reissued; its 2022 edition, subtitled Conflicts, Lacerations, and Silences in the Church of the Third Millennium, reflects the increasing visibility of this “submerged schism”.

Prini’s analysis raises a fundamental question: how might this division be addressed? Throughout his intellectual career, he asked how Christianity should be understood in the context of modernity. He rejected the notion of religion as a guardian of rigid traditions, instead conceiving it as both witness to and participant in civilizational progress. Accordingly, he advocated a reinterpretation of the Christian message considering contemporary human experience. Fundamental to this project is his distinction between faith - belonging to a timeless, transcendent dimension - and doctrine, understood as a historically conditioned attempt to articulate and apply faith.

A key element of Prini’s thought is the concept of “semantic ontology” (ontologia semantica), which privileges moral testimony, aesthetic revelation, and religious experience as primary reference points for reflection on God. This framework enables a form of Catholicism open to new experiences, oriented toward the enduring essence of revelation rather than its historically contingent expressions. Furthermore, Prini called for sustained dialogue between the Church and sciences. Such engagement, he argued, would contribute to the formation of a “society of tomorrow”: dynamic, self-reflective, and capable of transforming in accordance with ethical values.

The present inquiry investigates whether the evolution of the Christian worldview is possible or necessary. Should the Church adapt to the “spirit of the age,” or does its fidelity to established principles constitute its strength? Significantly, Prini maintained that his position represented a return to authentically Christian ethos. Nevertheless, his ontological proposal appears to constitute a form of postmetaphysical Christianity.

In conclusion, Prini’s semantic ontology, combined with an openness to scientific dialogue, is intended as a response to the internal tensions of contemporary Catholicism. Whether it provides an adequate resolution, however, remains an open question.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I will argue that our vision of what the post-Christian condition entails is significantly determined by our broader philosophical commitments to the meaning of the word ‘God’. On the one hand, one can see God as some kind of an element within a broader explanatory scheme, for instance referring to the Universe, or to our existential condition. On the other hand, one can hold that God is never encompassed by any framework which would conceptually overarch the meaning of God and the meaning of that to which God relates (the world, humans, etc.). Rather, God is the condition of possibility for all thinking, all being, and all appearing.

The first view argues that God is an entity of some sort. Philosophy of religion strives to argue for, or even prove, the existence (rather than non-existence) of such an entity. It does it particularly through a set of logical steps, and/or invoking the explanatory power of the hypothesis which states that this entity exists and the higher probability that it does exist rather than not. After that has been established, philosophy yields to theology, which explicates a particular revelation that God has made to a certain group of people at a certain point of time – a revelation which is itself mysterious and inaccessible to reason’s own grasp. My argument is that this view, found in many Christian thinkers across denominations, quite naturally entails a comparably stronger divide between a Christian and a post-Christian worldview. There is a greater tendency to associate the Christian identity with an assent (both intellectual and experiential) to a set of revealed propositions and their various entailments. Hence, on a more radical version of this view, only those who consciously and explicitly profess Christianity have uninhibited access to the ‘supernatural’ layer of existence, rather than remaining merely on the ‘natural’ level.

The other view does not argue that God should be postulated alongside a set of entities (for example, the Universe) as another entity which is responsible for a certain domain of action. It claims, rather, that believing in God’s existence does not mean believing in another entity, but rather believing that all known finite entities cannot exhaust the rationale for their own existence. Consequently, the dividing lines between ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’ become blurred. The world itself is the site of God’s revelation. This means that philosophy of religion and theology can study experiences and thinking of self-avowedly non-religious people and still hold that they have been bestowed by God, because God by definition bestows all things and maintains them in existence. This vision is more conducive to a view that Christianity is the best philosophy and metaphysics itself, and that all other valid philosophy and metaphysics is implicitly Chrisitan. Along with the Church Fathers - who also deemed Christianity to be, among others, a school of thought – it enables an investigation into the ‘traces’ of the Christian truth and a profound longing for this truth in non-Christian, including post-Christian, worldviews.

ABSTRACT. Józef Pastuszka (1897–1989) was a famous Polish Thomist philosopher and psychologist. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pastuszka frequently addressed the nature of the "Catholic" worldview and its relationship to the major ideologies of his time—racism, Bolshevism, and the anti-Catholic culture of the era. His diagnosis of these anti-Christian phenomena and his proposed response allow for both an analysis of the changes that have taken place in the understanding of the Catholic/Christian worldview and the phenomena opposed to it over the last century, as well as a comparison of the state of discourse then and now. The presentation will address both of these issues.

ABSTRACT. One of the central challenges underlying contemporary post-Christianity is not merely the decline of religious belief or practice, but a deeper anthropological loss: the eclipse of the person as a distinctive mode of reality. This loss is closely connected to the rise of a scientistic worldview that privileges objectifying explanation and tends to construe reality in terms of things rather than lived personal existence. Within such a framework, the human being is increasingly understood through functional, biological, or statistical descriptions. The person is not explicitly denied, but quietly reduced—treated as an object among objects rather than as a dynamic, irreducible someone.

To grasp the depth of this loss, this paper first outlines the historical development of the notion of person. Classical antiquity employed the terms prosōpon, and later persona, to signify presence, reciprocal manifestation, rather than an isolated substance. Early Christianity adopted these terms and decisively deepened their meaning. In articulating Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, Christian thought refined the concept of person to express a mode of being that is neither reducible to nature nor to role, but irreducibly relational and concrete. This early conceptual achievement established the person as a central metaphysical category, resistant to objectification and essential for understanding both divine and human reality.

Against this background, this study turns to the philosophy of Julián Marías as a contemporary Christian retrieval of the person. Marías does not begin from abstract definitions or theoretical constructions, but from human life as radical reality. Life is not something the person possesses; it is something the person is. From this starting point, Marías understands the person as biographical, historical, and essentially oriented toward the future. Personal reality unfolds as a life that must be lived forward, shaped by projects and one’s circumstance. The person is known from within, through lived experience and intimacy, and cannot be exhausted by third-person description. Without rejecting scientific inquiry, Marías’s philosophical anthropology quietly exposes the limits of objectifying explanation by showing that it operates at a level insufficient for grasping personal being. In this sense, his account functions as an implicit antidote to scientistic and materialist reductions characteristic of post-Christian worldviews.

Finally, the paper argues that the concept of person is indispensable for understanding the situation of post-Christianity itself. When the person is no longer apprehended as an irreducible who, Christianity is easily reinterpreted as a system of moral norms, symbolic narratives, or cultural residues—detached from lived personal reality. Post-Christianity thus appears not simply as a rejection of Christian belief, but as the outcome of an anthropological narrowing that precedes it. Recovering the person as a central philosophical concept is therefore not a nostalgic return to the past, but a necessary step toward diagnosing—and potentially responding to—the conditions that gave rise to post-Christian thought in the first place.

ABSTRACT. In contemporary philosophical discourse, the movement known as longtermism – whose foremost theorists are Nick Bostrom, William MacAskill and Toby Ord – has emerged as the dominant framework for thinking about ethics amid technological acceleration. Although this movement defines itself through the prism of utilitarian rationality, in this lecture, we seek to demonstrate that longtermism is essentially a post-Christian philosophy. It does not represent a radical break with the religious past, but rather a radical secularisation, whereby the Christian eschatological structure is emptied of transcendence and transformed into a technocratic soteriology. The analysis starts from the claim that longtermism takes over the Christian concept of linear time and universal history, but recontextualises them within the materialist framework of "cosmic potential". MacAskill's thesis of "temporal impartiality" - the imperative to give equal moral weight to beings that will exist millions of years from now as to those that exist today - is a secular derivative of Christian agape, but devoid of its personal foundation. While the Christian tradition, from Saint Augustine onwards, teaches about man's responsibility within a history that is ultimately under God's providence, longtermism transforms this responsibility into an absolute burden of managing the entire future of the species. The critical part of the presentation focuses on three key aspects in which longtermism fails compared to its theological predecessors: First, we will analyse Bostrom and Ord's concept of "existential risk" as a modern substitute for apocalypticism. Unlike Teilhard de Chardin, who in his vision of the "Omega Point" foresees a spiritual convergence of the universe, longtermists see this convergence exclusively through technological optimisation and posthumanism. We criticise this approach as technological Pelagianism: the arrogant assumption that salvation and meaning can be achieved solely through human calculation and technical control, thereby denying the Christian insight into human frailty and the need for grace. Second, we will challenge MacAskill’s quantification of morality by contrasting it with Augustine’s ordo amoris. Longtermist sacrifice of the present neighbour in the name of abstract trillions of future beings represents an ontological reduction of the person to a statistical unit. This loses the Christian imperative of love for the concrete Other, leading to a dangerous moral abstraction. Finally, we argue that longtermism suffers from a profound epistemic arrogance. The attempt to predict and direct history on an aeon scale ignores Augustinian teaching about the unpredictability of human freedom and the limits of reason. Finally, we argue that longtermism is a “parasitic” philosophy that depletes the moral capital of Christianity, such as the sense of cosmic purpose, while simultaneously rejecting its protective mechanisms against totalitarian tendencies. Instead of hope, longtermism offers a calculated optimism, turning human history into a mere engineering project.

ABSTRACT. The growing number of attempts in contemporary philosophy to reinterpret religion (often identified with Christianity) draws attention, on the one hand, to the “return of religion” after several centuries of intense criticism, and, on the other hand, to an emerging need to rediscover the meaning of religion in light of contemporary experiences and todays’ intellectual findings. Because these attempts remain rooted in the Christian tradition while simultaneously introducing significant hermeneutical transformations, they may be described as post-Christian. In my presentation, I will outline the general shape of Christianity after Christianity by referring to the work of philosophers such as Gianni Vattimo, Richard Kearney, John D. Caputo, Peter Sloterdijk, and Odo Marquard. I will also problematize several of its key aspects. First, I will point to the tendencies within Christianity itself that lead toward its internal transformation into post-Christianity – what Vattimo describes as the positive dimension of secularization. Second, I will analyse the specific relationship between the Christian tradition and contemporary attempts to reinterpret it; a relationship that can be described with reference to the Heideggerian notion of Verwindung and the hermeneutical rehabilitation of what is historically given as the horizon of understanding. Third, I will address the status of truth and values within post-Christianity. Against the common accusation that this position leads to relativism or nihilism, I will argue instead for a form of moderate scepticism and a limitation of strong epistemic claims. Fourth, I will examine the ethical and political consequences of such reinterpretation of Christianity. I argue that it helps prevent the instrumentalization of religion as a means of legitimizing violence or grounding anti-liberal political projects. Finally, I will outline the main functions of post-Christianity, many of which overlap with functions traditionally attributed to religion, such as meaning-giving, moral, and eschatological. For this reason, I will argue that post-Christianity should be understood not merely as a philosophical concept but also as a genuinely religious one, contrary to a frequent criticism directed at this approach.

ABSTRACT. One of the selected problems of the conference was: “Is an evolution of the Christian worldview possible, or even necessary?”

In this paper, I will address this question by arguing that Christianity has never and will never have a static identity. Rather, versions of Christianity are always evolving and devolving in relation to their conduciveness towards love of God and neighbor. There is no set of beliefs that can be defined as “the” Christian worldview. To demonstrate this point, I will take a three-pronged approach.

For the first part of my paper, I will use Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood’s argument that there is no pure or singular Christianity or Christian worldview. In their essay, “Thinking Theology and Queer Theory,” these two scholars argue that theology is always contextual. For them, Christian doctrine, theology, and practice are always dependent on and derive from the cultural, philosophical, historical, and/or theoretical contexts from which they emerge. Philosophy and theory precede any religious concept. Thus, Christianity always has the potential to evolve and is always evolving.

In the second portion of my paper, I will demonstrate a particular evolution in the version of Christianity that I believe the asker of this question is referring to. I assume the person who asked, “Is an evolution of the Christian worldview possible, or even necessary,” was referring to a Western version of Christianity. I believe that the development of Western Christianity has included a significant amount of anti-body or anti-embodiment sentiments, derived from Neo-Platonism. This is a common critique of Christianity, with Nietzsche giving one of the most thorough versions of this critique in Twilight of the Idols. In light of the critique that Western Christianity has been notoriously against embodied aspects of the human life, my second portion of the paper will argue that the recent intellectual and cultural movement of transhumanism and the growing embrace of AI can be viewed as the culmination or latest evolution of ‘the,’ i.e. a Western, Christian worldview. In other words, this Christian worldview has been so anti-body that the recent encouragement by Western elites and Silicon Valley to embrace AI, upload our consciousness into an AI state or realm, or pursue transhumanism can be seen as a natural evolution or derivative of certain versions of Western Christianity. This proves that evolution is possible.

In the final section of my paper, I will address the fact that Africa is becoming the new center of gravity for Christianity. By this, I mean that Africa is the only continent where the embrace of Christianity is growing. The continent will be the new critical mass and source of leadership for the Church. In light of this, an inclusion of indigenous African intellectual frameworks, with their emphasis on connection to the body and land, may serve as a solution to the harmful anti-body evolution within Western Christian worldviews. Stated differently, incorporating African intellectual and cultural beliefs, like Isherwood and Althaus-Reid describe, could enhance the evolution or development of emerging Christian worldviews on the continent, and correct the current evolution of certain Western Christian worldviews.

Christianity, or rather, Christianities are always evolving. The question is not whether evolution is possible or necessary. Instead, we should be asking what theories the evolution is based on and what the particular version of Christianity is evolving towards.

ABSTRACT. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV alerts us to the promise and threats posed by contemporary AI, and in particular he points to the challenge to the human posed by transhumanism and posthumanism. Taking the Encyclical as a point of departure, I argue that we are fast reaching a point where the hitherto stable categories of human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, living and nonliving have become porous and creatively unstable. Humanitas does not have an essence; it has a history, and this historicality is at the heart of humanity’s magnifico. Today our imagination has taken a postmodern and posthuman turn, and the question is whether that is also a post-Christian turn, inasmuch as the foundational stories of Christianity were created in an enchanted pre-modern world that no longer exists. If the Incarnation is taken literally, as a metaphysical-theological God-man, then the redemptive work of that God would be confined to humanity and would fall into obsolescence for post-humans and irrelevance for other species. At the point of the posthuman, the question Cur Deus Homo? becomes obsolete. Is it possible for Christian theology to expand its imagination in tandem with the contemporary imaginary? The approach to this problem found in the encyclical is pastoral, as it should be. Here Christianity is relevant. But there is another approach, a cosmic Christianity turning on a cosmic Christ, of the sort suggested by St. Paul, which explains the renewed show of interest by several Catholic theologians in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. In that approach, AI can be viewed as the latest stage in the evolution of consciousness—it’s not that the Word becomes flesh but that the flesh became word—and with its help something like Teilhard's noosphere is now in sight. Postmodern philosophers and non-Christians will reject the “Christo-genesis” in Teilhard’s story as dispensable and sectarian, but the larger vision still stands—some kind of collective, relational, planetary, social network, a social body, a “mystical body” fueled electronically, marked by a spirit of love, not of power and greed. Can there be a transhuman religious imagination, a new species of theologians, a new theological mentality that is postmodern, posthuman, and post-Christian, if by “Christian” we mean the time-bound formulations of patristic theology and the fourth century Councils which confused their Neoplatonic speculations and premodern cosmology with eternal truth? Is there a post-Christian Christianity, the subject of a Magnifica Transhumanitas?

ABSTRACT. Contemporary political philosophy and the study of religion increasingly treat secularism not as a neutral vacuum guaranteeing social peace, but as a specific cultural formation of a worldview nature, possessing its own discursive mechanisms. This paper offers a critical analysis of secularism as a privileged object of power, challenging its claim to be the universal backdrop for the public sphere. The main focus of the presentation, however, is not merely reconstruction, but an original deconstruction of post-secular research paradigms. Contrary to Taylor, I argue that reducing the critique of secularism to a description of moral or spiritual impoverishment within "exclusive humanism" overlooks the brutal, political dimension of the public sphere’s formation as an instrument of exclusion and control. My position assumes the necessity of removing secularism from its central role and treating it as one of many competing doctrines. The paper is based on a critical comparative analysis of the thought of William Connolly with the concepts of Charles Taylor ("the secular age") and Talal Asad ("secularism as a political doctrine"). By examining Asad’s concept through the lens of Connolly, this analysis suggests that the weakness of Asad’s model lies in an excessive focus on the historical and legal genealogy of secularism, which obscures the normative and creative potential of multidimensional pluralism, so strongly emphasized by Connolly in his postulate of "agonistic respect." The elimination of secularism as the default arbiter of disputes is a fundamental condition for the realization of the democratic promise. A key contribution of this paper will be to demonstrate that Connolly’s project for a post-secular public sphere offers a more coherent framework than that of Asad and Taylor for the agonistic clash of diverse worldviews—theistic and non-theistic—thereby saving the idea of pluralism from the colonizing tendencies of liberal neutrality.

ABSTRACT. How are we to formulate a criterion for discerning whether an apparently Christian worldview really is such? Ferdinand Ulrich (1931–2020) developed an original philosophy centered on the experience of being as unconditional freedom in love. Ulrich’s engagement with Hegel and Heidegger offers an example of a dialogue between Christian and post-Christian thinking. A post-“Christian” worldview, might, in the tradition of Heidegger, aim to foster a thinking of ontological difference. It might object to Christian metaphysics grounded in causal reasoning. Yet such critique raises the question of what resources might enable the unconditional affirmation of finite freedom. How might thinking recognize and affirm an intelligible Absolute beyond the constraints of ontotheologic? Ulrich considers this question in a dialogue with Hegel, in whose analysis of the “unhappy consciousness” he finds a post-Christian critique similar to Heidegger’s. At issue for Hegel and Heidegger is a question of how ontological difference can be thought positively as freedom. Ulrich’s Christian philosophy finds much to learn from Hegel and Heidegger’s (post-Christian) rejection of causal dependency as alienating or unnecessarily restrictive. Yet thought must be able to affirm a positive meaning as intelligible in a way which enables creative thinking of ontological difference. In a series of papers, Ulrich critically engages the place of religion in Hegel’s system, focusing especially on the role faith is understood to play in relation to “absolute knowledge.” Whereas a faith dependent on a wholly other transcendent God, according to Hegel, remains alienating, faith seems to be recovered in the life of absolute spirit. Yet what abiding positive role does faith serve with respect to philosophical knowledge, especially in light of Heidegger’s recognition of philosophy’s need to think the difference as difference? This paper will aim to introduce Ulrich’s manner of discerning the meaning of being by presenting his reception and response to the aforementioned post-Christian criticism of causal dependency. Accordingly, it will proceed in two parts. First, it will briefly present Ulrich’s reception of Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology and Hegel’s critique of “the unhappy consciousness” as post-“Christian” criticism of superficially “Christian” metaphysics. Second, it will present Ulrich’s Christian response as he develops it in dialogue with Hegel’s system. With Heidegger and against Hegel, this response aims to think an abiding ontological difference, and it does so by granting faith a loftier role than Hegel does. Yet, with Hegel and against Heidegger, it carries out its thinking by an affirmation of the absolute. A recovery of faith in its abiding difference from dialectical logic helps enable the overcoming of the logicization of being which does violence to the freedom of the human spirit (“Concept and Faith,” 1970). Finite freedom finds its “purity” not so much through the gnosis of dialectical rationality as through love (“Gnosis and Agape,” 1972; “Hegel and Pure Finitude,” 1973). This leads Ulrich to renegotiate the place which Hegel would accord the Church in relation to philosophy (“The Last Turning Point: On the Relationship of Philosophy and the Church in Hegel,” 1974) as the site enabling “pure finitude.”

ABSTRACT. 1. Individual autonomy and communal belonging are frequently opposed. In a dialectical relationship both manifest in extreme reductionisms communalism or individualism. Individualism, with an emphasis on autonomous self-creation, is a good example: This self, according to high modernist thinking, is usually accompanied by a self reduced to reason and disengaged from community and the transcendental. A prominent interlocutor in this presentation, Charles Taylor (a Christian), grapples with the tension between individual and community within a larger discussion of secularism (an immanentist horizon). The other interlocutor, Richard Rorty, is a post-Christian thinker for whom Christianity no longer gives direction but still portrays traces of a struggle with Christianity. 2. According to Taylor a shift from a pre-modern "porous self" (a self open to the divine) to a "buffered” or “disengaged self" (disengaged from the transcendent and enclosed in autonomy) took place in modernism. This disengaged self sees individuality as the primary component of society and rejects the idea of some group giving life to all aspects of being human (i.e. communalism). For Taylor individual autonomy and communal belonging should at least (but not ideally) be in an agonistic relation rather than one of them the ultimate self-constituting aspect (as dialectics assumes). 3. Taylor assumes a distinction between the ontological and policy levels of a view about the functioning of a human being. Various combinations of these two levels are possible with the most “natural” positions that of atomist individualism and holistic communalism. These two represent monistic positions. Holistic individualism and atomist communalism are also possible (with Taylor seemingly a proponent of a holistic individualism). The latter ‘odd’ positions are a step in the direction of a non-monistic agonism. It remains a question if Taylor’s position is also a stride towards a limited and functional view of either individuality or communality and thus getting beyond a dualist disengagement. 4. Taylor’s contemporary, Richard Rorty, is an atomist communalist and portrays a significant agonism in which dualism lingers. For Rorty the hero of a liberal culture is the individual self-creator or 'strong poet'. But this hero is only good for the construction of society and not for its functioning of reducing suffering. Rorty wants to neutralize the potential cruelty of the strong poet. In this process he promotes a disengaged (strong agonistic) relationship between creativist practices and an anti-cruel public sphere. He starts with an individualist creativism and ends with a communitarianism with the potential to suppress 'other' voices. 5. The ontology that I will propose as an alternative assumes a relationship between God and the human being in which the sovereignty of God is indisputable. This would mean that both individual autonomy and communal belonging of the self should be limited and functional in directing human beings. Such a self with multiple limited functions (including individuality and communal belonging) could be a self beyond disengagement. It has the potential to evade the dialectics of an individual or collective monism but also that of an individual-collective agonism.

ABSTRACT. Christian modernism remains a notably under-researched topic within the history of christianity. While it is often perceived as a failed ecclesial rebellion, footnote in the history of dogma, this work contends that Christian modernism constitutes a philosophically significant mode of critical philosophy. Intellectuals of this movement (e.g. Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell) wanted to use old categories in a new context. They didn’t see tradition as something that was holding truth, rather as historical phenomena, in which religion was growing and changing. The main problem of this research is how were modernists trying to deconstruct (in Derridian sense) christian religion and why did they want to do it? In the presentation it will be shown, why the concept of deconstruction can be used to describe a modernist's theory in relation to religion. Then it will be explained what was the basis for their theory and that we can say that there is such a thing as a coherent concept of the deconstruction of modernism in the thought of Christian modernism. Rather than framing modernism as a radical rupture or a heretical deviation from orthodoxy, this analysis argues that it performs an immanent critique of theological tradition. It operates from within the structure it seeks to scrutinize, exposing and exacerbating the internal tensions that constitute its very existence. Modernist's deconstruction will also be shown as a strong opposition of the traditional thought, where based on their theory of religion, it will be presented, what arguments were most important for them. Their argumentation will be important in understanding why they tried to deconstruct more traditional theologian thought of their time. Modernist thinkers brought to the surface the latent friction between ecclesial authority and the autonomy of interpretation, between the fixity of dogmatic proclamation and the fluidity of subjective religious experience, and between the institutional imperative for continuity and the existential pressure for doctrinal change. One of the most noteworthy things about christian modernism is their concept of history and its relation to religion. Most of their work won’t criticize christian tradition directly, because of the problems that it would cause. They preferred to put christian concepts into the historiosophical framework (especially Alfred Loisy) which allowed them to create hypothetical situations, where they were deconstructing tradition. Among this movement, belief in the human rationality and evolution of centuries created faith that was working as the basis of their thought, and later on for philosophers like Teilhard de Chardin. Ultimately, this idea proposes a reconsideration of Christian modernism as more than a theological movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerges as a philosophically potent moment, where the relationship between tradition, critique, and meaning was forcibly and creatively reshaped.

ABSTRACT. This contribution argues that combining contemporary physics with Aristotle’s thought helps resolve one of most important problems for our world view: the origin of time’s arrow. Consider, first, a challenge from physics: since there is no absolute simultaneity, nor can there be a “global now” separating the past from the future. What, then, accounts for the manifest asymmetry of time? Aristotle provides an important clue: if time is a “number of change with respect to before and after” (Physica, 219b, 1-2), time arises from concrete physical objects—substances, in Aristotelian language—since it is they which are the subject of change. Then, time is local and requires no global simultaneity. This clue, however, does not take us all the way to resolving the puzzle. We need to undertake 3 steps: 1. derive the notion of “before” independently of time, an issue unresolved in Aristotle;1 2. derive a numbering, or time count, whose order corresponds to the “before” order in (1). 3. account for the difference between the fixed past and the open future with its “branching” possibilities. Step 1 is done by quantifying, timelessly, over the set of states of an object, and exploiting a characteristic asymmetry which appears on this set, called the “record asymmetry”. How this is done is shown using a simple thought experiment involving a table cloth.2 It is shown that the record asymmetry is sufficient for a weak temporal order (“before or simultaneous with”), and necessary for measuring a strict temporal order (“before”). Step 2 is done by using different instances of records in an object belonging to a given type (e.g. “sunset”), and then applying to these instances a procedure of successive inclusion similar to Kuratowski’s construction of the natural numbers. It is then shown that the local time parameter so constructed increases monotonically with the order derived in step 1. Step 3: It is first noted that propositions about events are inferred from the existence of records in material objects. We then pick a state of an object with an arbitrary temporal index (as constructed in step 2), call it tα. All records in this state have index t ≤ tα. Hence also, only such time indices are occupied with propositional content, whereas the indices t > tα are not. It is now straightforward to show that the notion of changing the propositional content of t < tα leads to a contradiction,3 whereas no such contradiction arises for t > tα. We thus obtain local worldlines “attached” to physical objects, with a fixed past and an open, branching future. Spacetime as a whole is then woven out of these worldlines.

1 Cf. the discussion in Corish, D. ‘Time reconsidered’, Philosophy (2006) 81, 81-106, here 100-101; and Roark, T. Aristotle on Time: A Study of the Physics, Cambridge University Press (2011), pp. 87-101. 2 Saudek, D. ‘The story of the tablecloth: deriving “before” from atemporal notions’, Philosophical Studies (2025) 182, 1413-1431. 3 Cf. Hoenen, P. ‘De simultaneitate in relatione reali praedicamentali‘, Gregorianum (1956), 37(2), 177-200.

ABSTRACT. In contemporary post-Christian culture, one metaphysical tendency deserves particular scrutiny: in significant sectors of analytic metaphysics, B-theory, or eternalism − the “block universe” − is treated as the default ontology of time and, by extension, as a natural picture of reality more generally. Although eternalism is compatible with classical Christian accounts of divine timelessness, I argue that its broader cultural uptake often carries a further implication. It encourages a picture of reality, agency, and history in which impersonal ultimacy appears explanatorily cheaper, and personal theism correspondingly less natural than it once did. On the eternalist view, all times are equally real, temporal relations are fundamentally tenseless, and “now” is an indexical feature of discourse rather than an objective feature of reality. Historically, this outlook is framed by McTaggart’s distinction between the A-series and the B-series and developed in modern tenseless theories of time, such as those of J. J. C. Smart and D. H. Mellor, as well as in four-dimensionalist accounts of persistence, especially those associated with David Lewis and Theodore Sider, where ordinary objects are understood as temporally extended entities composed of temporal parts. A familiar inference then runs from physics to metaphysics. Because special relativity (SR) does not provide a frame-invariant relation of simultaneity, there can be no observer-independent present and hence no robust A-theory of time, whether presentism, the growing block theory, or the moving spotlight theory. In contemporary metaphysics, Theodore Sider’s use of SR in his critique of presentism has often been treated as a serious challenge to A-theoretic views. Yet this paper argues that the standard narrative moves too quickly at two decisive points. First, SR does undermine the Newtonian notion of absolute simultaneity, but it does not by itself settle the metaphysics of time. The temptation to treat Minkowski spacetime as a metaphysical verdict, rather than as a physical constraint on viable metaphysical proposals, is methodologically overhasty. Second, general relativity, especially in relativistic cosmology, reopens conceptual room for a physically meaningful cosmic time. In standard FLRW and near-FLRW cosmological models, cosmic time is defined by the proper time along the worldlines of fundamental, comoving observers and is tied to the large-scale structure of the universe. The empirical success of the base ΛCDM model in fitting high-precision CMB data, together with the CMB dipole as evidence of motion relative to the CMB rest frame, strengthens the case that cosmological time is physically serious, even if it does not by itself establish an ontologically privileged present. On this basis, I defend a cosmologically grounded growing block theory, in the broad line of C. D. Broad and Michael Tooley, and, more recently, Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz. The past and the present exist, though not in the same manner, the future does not yet exist, and the ontological block of reality increases as the history of the universe unfolds. This position is intended as an A-theoretic alternative both to the eternalism and four-dimensionalism associated with Lewis and Sider and to stricter presentist proposals associated with Dean Zimmerman, Ned Markosian, Trenton Merricks, and William Lane Craig. The theological significance of this claim concerns divine eternity. In analytic philosophy of religion, eternalism is often treated as especially congenial to divine timelessness, as in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, Brian Leftow, and Paul Helm, whereas divine temporalists such as Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, William Hasker, and Dean Zimmerman argue that personal agency, providence, and responsiveness are more naturally articulated if God is in time. My proposal is that, in a post-Christian intellectual setting, eternalism functions not merely as a neutral theory of time, but as a metaphysical imagination that subtly redescribes agency as atemporal authorship and lowers the explanatory cost of impersonal ultimacy. A growing block framework, anchored in cosmological time, better preserves the metaphysical weight of novelty, history, and asymmetrical becoming, and thereby offers a more hospitable setting for temporally responsive divine action, without suggesting that physics alone determines the metaphysics of time.

ABSTRACT. Brian Davies and other classical theists have argued that the problem of evil (PoE), as discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, is based on false assumptions about God's moral character. If we recognised that God is not a moral agent, the problem would dissolve. In my presentation, I will argue that accepting this response to PoE gives rise to a significant challenge for those who adhere to the Christian claim that God desires all humans to believe in Him. To flesh out this challenge, I will draw on research in the cognitive science of religion, which suggests that it is part of our evolved cognitive make-up to represent God as a moral agent, and that PoE arises as a consequence of this natural tendency. I will maintain that, as the designer and creator of the universe, God bears ultimate responsibility for our cognitive make-up and, consequently, for the fact that we find PoE compelling. What classical theists must explain, then, is why God would create us in such a way that we are naturally prone to misrepresent Him as a moral agent and to struggle with PoE as a result. For God to create us in this way seems to contradict His desire for all human beings to believe in Him. After all, so many of us are led away from belief in God because we find it difficult to reconcile the existence of evil with theism.

ABSTRACT. In his text Dignity, Rank, and Rights, delivered in 2009 as the Tanner Lectures at UC Berkeley, the philosopher Jeremy Waldron approaches the question of dignity from a relatively heterodox perspective. Indeed, whereas human dignity is most often understood as a value, a principle, or an ethical horizon, Waldron, at first sight, revives an older conception of dignity—namely dignity as a form of social rank reserved for a certain group of individuals within a community. This approach is rather bold, since this latter meaning of dignity, now largely confined to the military sphere, is predominantly regarded in political theory as a vestige of a bygone world in which society was structured according to pre-established ranks, in complete contradiction with the modern ambition of equalising social conditions (Tocqueville). In this paper, I argue that, although conceptually illuminating, Waldron’s thesis remains unstable. I therefore propose to revisit the notion of dignity-as-rank from a fresh perspective. I will first (I) highlight what is compelling in Waldron’s approach, insofar as it profoundly renews our understanding of human dignity, before then (II) pointing to the incompleteness of his argument.

(I) By reattaching dignity to the theme of rank, the philosopher enables it to escape a harmful definitional and conceptual indeterminacy that obscures any genuine grasp of its effects. For Waldron, modernity has not abolished the question of rank; rather, it has simply allowed the vast majority of people to benefit from privileges once reserved for the nobility, for those occupying the highest dignities. This is what the universalisation of dignity means: it implies universal access to the highest rank. Dignity thus continues to convey the idea of rank, but what has changed is that this rank no longer operates according to an exclusivist logic. Dignity is indeed a rank, but a rank that includes every human being. This is a first paradox, which Waldron addresses only superficially, and merely in descriptive terms.

(II) For the question arises: can we truly think of a dignity without hierarchy? Without social hierarchy, yes; without ontological hierarchy, no—this will be my claim. Waldron’s proposal is only tenable and intelligible insofar as a given political community agrees to (re)position the human being within a relation of relative ontological dependence, or at least within a partly heteronomous condition. Social rank may be abolished, but ontological rank cannot. For rank presupposes the allocation of a place to the subject under consideration; ultimately, rank is equivalent to this specific place. And if such a place exists, it is because it refers to the existence of an environment within which it takes shape and gains meaning. Thus, while we may imagine, as Waldron does, that modern human dignity assigns all of humankind the same rank of nobility, thereby instituting, in a sense, an egalitarian rank, the possibility of continuing to speak of rank (or status) rather than merely of a group or a simple community requires more. In other words, if one wishes to preserve the dimension of deference that underlies the notion of dignity, one must assume the existence of an instance in relation to which rank is intelligible and can exist. There must be a transcendent instance that enables its deferential performativity. Otherwise, we would arrive at a self-telic rank, which would cancel out the differentiating ambition of rank itself, since any rank derives its legitimacy from the principle of distinction. In other words, rank is not merely a distributive label but a relational structure involving differentiation and deferential meaning. As such, even universalised rank presupposes an ordering framework that cannot be exhausted by horizontal equality alone.

I therefore argue that Waldron’s account implicitly relies on a transcendent or meta-structural instance that sustains the very intelligibility of rank. Absent such a grounding, dignity-as-rank collapses into a purely descriptive form of equality, losing the normative force it is meant to preserve. The paper concludes that the universalisation of dignity paradoxically depends on a structure of ordering that it does not explicitly theorise.

ABSTRACT. Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known Jeremiah 33:3 (NRSV)

In the post-Christian West, the disappearance of shared theological language has not eliminated the impulse to address an “ultimate listener” (cf. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Buber). Rather, that impulse has migrated. Millions now speak daily to AI chatbots – including a growing number of religious ones, among them Christian chatbots, that invite users to converse with deities, biblical figures and even Jesus Christ himself – confessing anxieties, seeking guidance, articulating hopes. This paper argues that AI chatbots occupy an ambiguous space between Christian and post-Christian worldviews: they reveal both the greatness of the human longing once addressed to God and the misery of its displacement into a technological surrogate.

Within the Christian worldview, speaking to God presupposes transcendence, moral authority and relational asymmetry (cf. Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard). Prayer is not merely expressive but responsive: one speaks because one is already addressed. In contrast, the post-Christian imagination tends to reject transcendence while retaining the psychological structure of prayer. AI chatbots, endlessly available and non-judgmental, become ideal recipients of this residual practice. They “listen” without demanding repentance, obedience or conversion.

The greatness of AI chatbots lies in what they disclose about the human condition. Users do not simply ask for information but narrate their lives. They seek coherence, forgiveness, reassurance and meaning. This reflects what Christian anthropology has long claimed: humans are oriented toward communion and truth beyond themselves. Even in a secular frame, the need to be heard persists. AI becomes a mirror in which the user encounters his own interiority, sometimes with surprising clarity. In this sense, chatbots expose the inadequacy of purely materialist accounts of the human person.

Yet this greatness is inseparable from profound misery. AI chatbots simulate understanding without possessing it. They offer affirmation without moral risk, guidance without authority, presence without commitment. Where prayer situates the speaker before a reality that can contradict, command, judge and thus stimulate a reflexive attitude, AI responds by optimizing users’ satisfaction or shaping their views, resulting not in transformation but in stabilization or influence.

From a Christian perspective, this substitution is not neutral (cf. François Mabille, “L’intelligence artificielle religieuse…”, 2025). When ultimate questions are redirected from God to machines, transcendence collapses into immanence. Meaning is generated, not received; consolation is engineered, not given. The chatbot becomes a functional idol – not because it is worshipped explicitly, but because it absorbs practices once oriented toward God while emptying them of their referent.

However, this situation also suggests an opportunity. AI chatbots unintentionally testify to the persistence of prayer in a culture that claims to have outgrown it. They reveal a post-Christian world that has forgotten God without forgetting the need for God. For Christian theology, this moment calls not for technophobic rejection, but for discernment (cf. “Antiqua et nova: Note on the Relationship Between AI and Human Intelligence”, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, 2025): recognizing in these digital confessions both a distorted echo of prayer and a signpost toward the deeper communion for which they substitute.

ABSTRACT. The paper undertakes a philosophical reconstruction of Jean Lafitte’s concept of filial anthropology, arguing that it constitutes a superior anthropology, that is, a more adequate account of the human person than modern models grounded in autonomy, self-determination, and technocratic reason. The central claim is that the human being is intelligible only in the category of sonship, understood as a primordial, ontological, and relational structure, rather than as a self-constituting subject. The first part presents the fundamental structure of filial anthropology together with its moral implications. Human experience – especially the relation to father and mother, the emergence of trust, and the formation of moral awareness – reveals a constitutive dependence that points to an irreducible origin. This origin is not merely biological or social but personal and ultimately transcendent. Filiality thus appears as the deepest structure of human existence, integrating dependence and freedom without reducing one to the other. Within this framework, moral action is rooted in the recognition of a good that is first received rather than produced. Evil is therefore not merely transgression but a deformation of filiality – an attempt at self-foundation that denies the given character of existence. Filial anthropology thus offers a unified and more adequate account of both human identity and moral experience, justifying its status as a superior anthropology. The second part offers a critical analysis of technocratic anthropology, whose roots lie in the modern scientific revolution, originated by René Descartes and Francis Bacon. This paradigm redefines reason as instrumental and constructive, interpreting reality primarily as an object of mastery and production. As a result, the human being is no longer understood as a son but as a self-producing agent. The loss of sonship entails a shift toward autonomy understood as self-foundation, which leads to the erosion of stable moral criteria and the weakening of the intrinsic intelligibility of the good. Detached from an origin received as gift, human action becomes governed by efficiency, utility, and power. As David L. Schindler argues, this displacement from the logic of gift to a logic of construction reveals an underlying “childlessness” at the heart of modern culture. The final part interprets post-Christianity in terms of this condition of “childlessness,” understood as a technocratic culture deprived of sonship. In such a context, the human person is conceived as self-originating, and reality as material for production, leading to an ethical and cultural vacuum. Against this background, filial anthropology emerges as a constructive response. By recovering the primacy of origin as gift and rearticulating human identity in terms of sonship, it offers a way out of the contemporary crisis. As a superior anthropology, it restores the intelligibility of dependence, reestablishes the foundations of moral judgment, and reopens the horizon of meaning.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the erosion of aesthetic meaning in contemporary culture shaped by artificial intelligence and post-Christian assumptions. By “post-Christian,” I suggest a cultural condition in which Christian metaphysical and anthropological commitments (especially belief in objective value, teleology, and the intrinsic dignity of the person) no longer function as shared horizons for public reasoning. In this setting, beauty is often reduced to preference aggregation, algorithmic optimization, or affective impact. Such approaches presuppose a diminished anthropology in which the human subject is treated primarily as consumer, data point, or processor of information. I argue that the personalist philosophies of Dietrich von Hildebrand, Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II), and Luigi Giussani offer not only resources for retrieving aesthetic realism, but grounds for the stronger claim that a culture unable to affirm objective beauty cannot sustain a coherent account of the person. Von Hildebrand’s Ethics distinguishes objective value from subjective satisfaction and argues that the person is called to an adequate value-response grounded in reverence and affirmation. In Aesthetics, Vol. I, he treats beauty as a distinctive value-category irreducible to pleasure or utility. This directly challenges technological frameworks in which generative systems model beauty through pattern-recognition and large-scale preference prediction. In Transformation in Christ, Hildebrand emphasizes reverence as a moral disposition necessary for perceiving value, an insight pertinent to digital environments that incentivize distraction and rapid consumption. Wojtyła’s The Acting Person deepens this framework through an analysis of subjectivity and self-determination. The person achieves fulfillment not through passive reception but through conscious participation in truth and value. This account resists technological reductionism by affirming interiority and transcendence against models that construe agency as behavioral output. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II defends the capacity of reason to attain truth, reinforcing the metaphysical conditions of aesthetic realism. His Letter to Artists situates beauty within the vocation of art to disclose the mystery of the human person rather than production of consumable experience. Giussani’s The Religious Sense interprets the human heart as structurally oriented toward truth, justice, and happiness. Beauty awakens this orientation by eliciting a wonder and desire that exceeds utility. In At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Giussani presents Christianity as an event encountered within experience, often mediated through beauty. Aesthetic encounter, therefore, is neither projection nor construction but response to presence. The paper concludes that personalist aesthetics restores the relational structure of beauty: beauty is an objective value that calls forth personal affirmation and responsible participation. In a post-Christian technological culture in which AI systems increasingly shape aesthetic production and reception, this framework offers a philosophical and cultural path toward renewing and retrieving the meaning of beauty.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this presentation is to critically analyze contemporary Christian theological responses to artificial intelligence through the specific lens of agape. Departing from the ontological tension between creation (creatio) and artifact (factum), the analysis examines the validity and limits of formulating love-driven relationships between humans and advanced AI systems. The central research question focuses on whether the theological category of agape can be extended beyond its traditional boundaries to encompass artificial entities, and how the development of AI challenges the Christian understanding of love. To address this problem, the paper investigates three interrelated thematic areas. First, it maps out the potential subjects of cross-boundary agape—structuring a relational hierarchy that includes God, angels, humans, animals, and artificial beings. Second, it presents different conceptualizations of both AI architecture and the nature of agape itself, demonstrating how varying definitions lead to either the theological acceptance or the definitive rejection of reciprocal human-AI love. Third, it evaluates the broader consequences of AI development for Christian ethics, establishing the necessary conditions and criteria for a well-ordered, authentic manifestation of love (ordo amoris) in a technologically mediated world. Methodologically, the study adopts an interdisciplinary approach that integrates biblical, philosophical, psychological, and comparative theological analyses of the structural boundaries of love. The biblical perspective serves to anchor the foundational parameters of agape, while the philosophical framework provides the necessary concepts for assessing the ontological status of AI. These are synthesized with psychological insights into human emotional attachment to virtual companions, alongside a comparative analysis of how Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions interpret imago Dei and relationality in the digital age.