MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS: Truth, Work and Human Freedom in the AI Age

The fourth chapter of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas takes up questions that concern all people of goodwill amidst this present age of AI. 

• What happens to workers when machines supplant their tasks?
  

• How does the torrent of AI-generated “slop” undermine the ability to distinguish truth from fiction?
  
  
• What does it mean that a concentrated group of corporations (and governments they collaborate with) now hold the accumulated data of our personal lives?
  
  
• In a world of feeds engineered to hold our attention captive, what is becoming of human freedom?

Join us online for a conversation with Dr. César “CJ” Baldelomar, a member of our teaching team, as he considers the importance of Pope Leo XIV's message for our time. Dr. Baldelomar is joined by a panel of thought leaders to engage the encyclical's implications for the life and witness of the Church.

César “CJ” Baldelomar, Ph.D., LL.M., J.D., is a member of the teaching team at New College Berkeley. A scholar-teacher, he has held academic appointments at Boston College, Mount Holyoke College, and Saint Mary’s College of California. His several publications explore wide-ranging topics from ecotheology to questions of identities to the prospects of education and writing as society collapses. Dr. Baldelomar was a Commonweal Magazine Fellow and has appeared in several media-news outlets to discuss Leo’s election as pope and his unfolding papacy.

Dwight Friesen, D.Min., is a professor of Practical Theology at the Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. He explores how “people convene in local communities to cultivate imagination, practices, postures, and narratives that embody God’s shalom.” He has pastoral experience, having served with St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Bellevue, WA, and was formerly ordained by the Christian & Missionary Alliance Church.

Rebecca Hernandez, PhD, is Director of Operations for Remembering, Restorying, Reclaiming: A Community-Based Examination of Land Tenure and Public Schooling in California at UCLA, where she supports Native scholars in advancing community-driven research on land, education, and sovereignty. Previously, as Director of the American Indian Resource Center and Community Archivist at UC Santa Cruz, she worked to protect, sustain, and amplify community voices, memory, and cultural knowledge.

Delight Roberts, J.D. is a technology lawyer with expertise in online safety, privacy, and AI. She was one of the first employees hired at Microsoft to work on online safety issues and spent the past two decades working at Microsoft advising product teams, executives, and government officials on issues relating to new and emerging technologies. For the last decade she worked in the Artificial Intelligence and Research and Global Public Policy teams focusing on online safety, privacy, and AI--particularly issues impacting women, children, and other vulnerable groups. Prior to joining Microsoft she served as the Government Affairs Director for the Seattle School District and as the lobbyist for the Children's Alliance. She has also served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Office of the Washington Attorney General. After retiring from Microsoft, she joined the faculty at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law where she holds an adjunct appointment and teaches Deepfakes, Disinformation, and Online Harm in the Age of Generative AI and Transactional Law. She also works with parents, students, and teachers to raise awareness of and to solve problems pertaining to online safety and the future of AI.