Rebuilding Walls & Tending to Gardens: Jeremiah and John in Dialogue with Magnifica Humanitas

Pope Leo XIV has a name for the flattening we all feel in the age of AI: the “Babel syndrome” — the pretense that one language, even a digital one, can translate everything about being human into data and performance. Michael Morelli takes up the Pope’s call to respond by building, but adds an image the encyclical leaves underdeveloped: gardening. Drawing on Jeremiah’s instruction to exiles to “plant gardens and eat their fruit,” he’ll make the case that something as ordinary as tending a garden may be our most realistic act of resistance to a world being wired for AI. Practical, biblical, and quietly radical.

After lecture: Join Dr. K and Dr. H at Murrayville Town Pub