Resources by Meghan Henning

Pope Leo XIV has just released his first encyclical, focused on artificial intelligence and the future of human society. The timing could not be more urgent for theological institutions. Prior to the encyclical, Pope Leo already has stressed that emerging technologies place a particular mandate on Catholic educators: “Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge, but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation and prophetic witness. Drawing new maps of hope: this is the urgency of the mandate.”Pope Leo’s call to “draw new maps of hope,” echoes his predecessor, Pope Francis, who urged Catholic universities to “Be present as great laboratories of hope at this crossroads of history.” There is just one glaring problem with this captivating vision: hope is in short supply right now in higher education.Long before ChatGPT answered its first query, changes in demographics, pandemic-era disruptions in student preparation, and a political climate that seeks to undermine the value of critical reasoning had already dramatically decreased the level of hope in these intellectual “laboratories.” Reading student reflections that have been quite obviously written by robots is depressing; even more depressing are the despondent attitudes of students struggling to find value in classroom learning itself.Like most educators and administrators, I have wrestled with how to prepare our community for inevitable technological transformation. Last summer, I co-led a group of faculty at our private Catholic R1 university to discuss how we might prepare for inevitable technological transformation. These conversations renewed our confidence in a liberal arts education as the critical tool we will need to face the future.This era requires thought leaders who are trained to ask better questions, who know the value of human reason and creativity, and who can critically and ethically evaluate rapidly changing technologies and their applications. Liberal arts colleges and universities are designed to prepare precisely this kind of leader, and that should be the reason for our hope.Our curriculum does not teach students to find answers to arbitrary questions; it enlivens their creative capacity to refine their questions in order to build a more just world. At a moment when large language models promise instant answers at unprecedented speed, universities have a different responsibility. We must prepare students who know how to evaluate knowledge critically, recognize the limits of technological systems, and ask difficult moral and intellectual questions about the societies those systems are shaping. ‘Education in the round’Many institutions of higher education are grounded in an educational tradition that is vitally important for this historical moment. The Greco-Roman tradition of encyclios paideia, or “education in the round,” was a technology of the empire that worked by ensuring a common language and training, but also by educating the whole person. This circular, or complete, education was thought to advance society by forming the human soul through a set of shared educational habits, habits that shaped the ways humans would think, behave, and dialogue with each other to produce knowledge.The Catholic intellectual tradition is full to the brim with thinkers who leaned into inquiry in the face of dramatic change. Pope Leo underscores that “dynamic history” tracing it from the Desert Fathers to women educational reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries who led the way in educating the marginalized.Catholic higher education is part of a living tradition, and there are a few key features that I have observed as a historian working at a Catholic university that strike me as particularly valuable for this historical moment. First and foremost is that we continue to prioritize the dignity of the human person in the process of advancing knowledge. This means that the utility and profitability of discovery is not the sole telos of our research — the human metacognitive and dialogic processes by which we arrive at those discoveries in community are just as important. The human researcher is essential for the successful evaluation, interpretation, and integration of knowledge. New discoveries are not possible without human reason and verification in a community of researchers who are held accountable for their work. LLMs do not possess these essential human faculties, and when they are wrong, they bear no accountability.The ethical questions we face in this technological age are more complex than the citation or fabrication of sources; they strike at the foundations of human interdependence and its centrality for the advancement of human knowledge. LLMs promise to provide answers to human questions at an unprecedented rate, but they attempt to do so by indiscriminately pulling from available sources in ways that obscure the contexts and relationships between those sources, limit the perspectives considered, and reinforce inequalities. University education prepares students not just to examine the sources and evidence they can readily see, but to ask critical questions about the evidence itself. This is the intellectual scaffolding that meets the changing needs of our students and our world.Pope Leo reminds us, “education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good. This integral anthropological vision must remain the cornerstone of Catholic pedagogy." This does not mean we educate students on every injustice in our current world, but that we teach them discernment so they can “recognize and name both justice and oppression” in an ever-changing world.  In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo places particular emphasis on community and human relationships for achieving this learning: “Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere  by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” As AI threatens the biodiversity of human knowledge, university education “in the round” will be vitally important for protecting human innovation and its roots in the human community. We know as educators that we cannot possibly provide our students with all of the knowledge they will need ten or twenty years from now. Our hope is grounded in knowing that a student who graduates with the humility to recognize the limits of their knowledge, the curiosity to ask a different question, and the moral courage to ask a difficult question will be prepared for the uncertainty of a changing world. In the era of AI, the ability to stay curious and center human flourishing will distinguish the leaders from the users.