Political Theology, Emerging Technologies, and the Common Life

Overview

Recent technological developments, particularly artificial intelligence, have intensified long-standing questions about what it means to be human, the distinctive character of human relationships, the future of work, the distribution of economic power, and the form, quality, and purpose of our common life. They have also exposed the limits of approaches to the ethics of technology that focus simply on principles, ethical codes, professional ethics, and procedural compliance while leaving underlying questions about purpose, personhood, and political economy untouched. What is at stake extends beyond the immediate challenges of AI safety and the pressing need for effective policy and regulation, important though these concerns remain. At a deeper level lie questions about the kinds of persons and communities we are becoming as we are shaped by emerging technological systems and the cultural patterns and economic structures these generate. 

 

This workstream explores how Christian moral and political theology can generate creative and constructive responses to the challenges posed by emerging technologies. In particular, it examines the conditions and possibilities through which artificial intelligence might be shaped to sustain human dignity and renew the conditions for mutualistic, meaningful, and just forms of work and political economy. This specific focus is situated within a broader inquiry into how these technologies are altering the character and quality of human relationships—with one another, with the nonhuman creation, and with God. 

 

Our approach directs theological attention to the formation of personhood, practices of care, the dignity of labour, and the pursuit of economic democracy in and through relationship with technology. It also attends to the social, material, and spiritual conditions necessary for communities to deliberate well and to act together with love and wisdom in contexts where knowledge and many dimensions of human relationships are mediated through emerging technologies. 

 

Importantly, besides critical and interrogative modes of enquiry, this project seeks to identify and lift up initiatives, movements, and institutional experiments that can remake, redirect, or resist AI and emerging technologies in ways that sustain wisdom and a more just and generous common life. The research is interdisciplinary in character, drawing on diverse traditions of moral and political theology, the history of Christian responses to earlier industrial revolutions, and dialogue with other fields. Its aim is to resource contemporary moral imagination and practice.

 

Key Questions

I. Political Economy, Power, and Agency 

  • How might we accurately name and interpret the forms of power, distributions of agency, configurations of economic relations, and patterns of labour that AI is generating within contemporary political economies? 

  • How can theological visions articulate and animate forms of political formation and democratic practice that resist the consolidation of power and capital, and empower those most affected by technological change? 

  • How can theological discernment inform institutional design such that emerging technological systems are governed through forms of economic democracy? 

 

II. Theories of Technological Change and Development 

  • What might be learned from Christian responses to earlier general-purpose technologies, particularly in the agricultural and industrial revolutions? 

  • How have theological traditions interpreted technological change in relation to providence, eschatological hope, and the moral ordering of society? 

  • To what extent do these historical resources challenge contemporary assumptions of progress, inevitability, neutrality, or determinism in technological development? 

 

III. Theological Anthropology and the Ordering of Human-Technology Collaboration 

  • How might critical traditions of Christian humanism—illuminated by the revelation of Jesus Christ as the true human—enable us to imagine and narrate fitting goals of technological development? 

  • How do the technocratic imperatives of optimisation, efficiency, and probabilistic reasoning align—or stand in tension with—theological accounts of the human person? 

  • How might AI reshape human practices of attention, judgment, moral formation and affection – and how could Christian traditions of virtue, including prudence, justice, and charity, inform the governance and use of AI? 

 

IV. Idolatry, Desire, and Spiritual Discernment 

  • In what ways might contemporary technological systems give rise to new forms of idolatry? 

  • How do such systems reorder human desire, imagination, and trust, and what practices of theological discernment are required to diagnose and resist them? 

  • What liturgical, communal, or ascetic practices might reorient persons and communities toward rightly ordered loves in a technological age? 

 

V. Creation and Common Life 

  • In what ways can theological reflection guide more attuned and responsible engagement with nonhuman forms of existence—both artificial and ecological—within a shared order of creation? 

  • How can the affordances of technological change be discerned and directed so as to cultivate more just, generous, mutualistic, and participatory forms of common life? 

  • What theological resources are needed to sustain forms of life within which AI can contribute to enhancing human solidarities and relationships of care? 

 

VI. Institutions, the Commons and Common Goods 

  • What would it mean to design institutions that integrate technological systems while remaining oriented toward human flourishing rather than mere efficiency? 

  • What forms of social, political, and ecclesial life are needed to ensure that technological development serves the cultivation of the commons and common goods rather than their enclosure and commodification? 

  • What forms of technological application might foster rather than denude Spirit-given pluralities of language, community, and wisdom?

 

 

People

This workstream is led by McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Samuel Tranter, in collaboration with the Director of the McDonald Centre, Prof Luke Bretherton.  We welcome enquiries about postgraduate study and research in moral and political theology in this area. 

 

 

Plans

The McDonald Centre annual conference 2027 (10-12 June 2027, Christ Church, Oxford) will focus on the theme ‘AI, Christian Humanism, and Political Economy’.  Watch this space and follow us on social media for further updates this and other, related events.