The Catholics Who Broke With Rome. Again.

When Tradition Becomes TroubleOn the side of a mountain in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, a fanciful event attracting a small but ardent group of Catholic traditionalists gathered to celebrate the consecration of 4 new bishops…Who were then promptly excommunicated from the Catholic Church along with the bishop who appointed them.The group is called the Society of St. Pius the Tenth, or SSPX. It has spent decades claiming to defend the true Catholic tradition against a church it see

Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI, and the future of healingFor the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve talked Vatican positioning, Silicon Valley philosophers, Catholic ethics, corporate power, doomsday language, all circling the question of who gets to shape the future these machines are confining us in.But most of those conversations begin from the same assumption: AI is a tool built somewhere else, by someone else, to give us answers.Productivity. Efficien

Anthropic, the Vatican, and the Moral Branding of AIImagine you're an engineer at one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. You've built a system that can write poetry, pass the bar exam, and hold a conversation that feels startlingly human. And then someone asks you: but does it know how to say it's sorry?That question — about fault, correction, forgiveness — is not a technical question. It's a theological one. And the fact that engineers at Anthropic were asking it, and that they

A theology of sorts has been building in Silicon Valley, where questions about digital, biological and spiritual life are beginning to converge.For most of us, AI means chatbots, recipe tips, work tools and strange little images. But in other circles, the conversation is darker and far more existential. Some believe AI could give humanity powers that once belonged to science fiction: curing disease, extending life, even overcoming death. Others look at the same advances and see catastrophe — e

In 1891, Pope Leo 13th looked at the Industrial Revolution — factories, machines, workers being displaced and exploited — and decided the Church had a role to play.The result was an encyclical: Rerum Novarum, translated as “On New Things,” it became one of the foundational documents of modern Catholic social teaching.135 years later, another Pope Leo sees another technological revolution enveloping humanity: his first encyclical is about artificial intelligence.The Ethics of AI is not a qu

Who gets to tell America's story?Hillsdale College is small by most reckoning, but punching above its weight in influence, with its ethos and teaching saturating all levels of education far beyond its campus in Michigan.It is showing up in charter schools. In civics curriculum. In state-level fights over history education. In Trump-aligned patriotic education projects. And recently, in Rededicate 250, a faith-filled gathering on the National Mall where conservative Christian leaders, politica