Timeline
1605 to 2026. Four hundred years of the same argument, in different registers.
Bacon's Advancement of Learning
Aligns knowledge with divine glory and public relief, not private gain.
Read the thinker →Bacon's Novum Organum
Connects Genesis, Fall, and lawful mastery; founds Christian activism in science.
Read the thinker →Bacon's New Atlantis
Institutionalizes research as social and political vocation.
Read the thinker →Boyle's Christian Virtuoso
Models experimental philosophy as Christian vocation.
Read the thinker →Guardini's Letters from Lake Como
Names the anthropological crisis of industrial modernity.
Read the thinker →Dessauer's Philosophie der Technik
Strongest twentieth-century theology of the engineering vocation.
Read the thinker →Lewis's The Abolition of Man
Places conditioning, eugenics, and anti-human power at the center of Christian critique.
Read the thinker →Lewis's That Hideous Strength
Dramatic narrative of N.I.C.E. as the abolition project incarnate.
Read the thinker →Ellul's The Technological Society
Recasts the problem from machines to la technique.
Read the thinker →Gaudium et Spes
Vatican II opens Catholic teaching to scientific-technological culture.
Read the Vatican corpus →Illich's Tools for Conviviality
Provides a Christian-social grammar for criticizing industrial systems.
Read the thinker →John Paul II's Laborem Exercens
Theology of work; the person is always the subject.
Read the Vatican corpus →Quinzio's La speranza nell'apocalisse
Pushes Christian hope back toward bodily resurrection against spiritualization.
Read the thinker →Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate
Warns against Promethean self-making; integral human development.
Read the Vatican corpus →Francis's Laudato si'
Makes the “technocratic paradigm” central to Catholic reflection.
Read the Vatican corpus →Scherz's Science and Christian Ethics
Diagnoses the moral crisis of the commodified research economy.
Read the thinker →Rome Call for AI Ethics
Six principles for AI: transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, security/privacy.
Read the Vatican corpus →Francis at the G7 on AI
First papal address to the G7; the most prominent Christian intervention in the AI debate.
Read the Vatican corpus →Thiel's apocalypse and Antichrist lectures
The most public contemporary attempt to bring Christian apocalyptic categories back into technology politics.
Read the thinker →Antiqua et nova
First full Vatican doctrinal note on artificial intelligence.
Read the Vatican corpus →Kingsnorth's Against the Machine
Contemporary anti-idolatry voice in ecological-apocalyptic Orthodox register.
Read the thinker →ITC's Quo vadis, humanitas?
Extends Vatican engagement to transhumanism, digital religion, and the future of the human.
Read the Vatican corpus →Tyszka-Drozdowski's Prometheus and Christ
Recent essay placing the Dessauer–Quinzio–Thiel line at the center of contemporary debate.
Read the contemporary prompt →Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas
The first papal encyclical fully devoted to AI. Babel vs. Nehemiah as the master image; extends the universal destination of goods to digital infrastructure.
Read the Vatican corpus →