17/07/2026
📣 🔔 We are privileged that Professor John Caputo will join our Conference on 22-23 September this year. He will deliver a keynote lecture entitled: "Postmodern, Post-Human, Post-Christian: In Search of a Magnifica Transhumanitas".
🟥 In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV alerts us to the promise and threats posed by contemporary AI, and in particular he points to the challenge to the human posed by transhumanism and posthumanism. Taking the Encyclical as a point of departure, I argue that we are fast reaching a point where the hitherto stable categories of human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, living and nonliving have become porous and creatively unstable.
🟧 Humanitas does not have an essence; it has a history, and this historicality is at the heart of humanity’s magnifico. Today our imagination has taken a postmodern and posthuman turn, and the question is whether that is also a post-Christian turn, inasmuch as the foundational stories of Christianity were created in an enchanted pre-modern world that no longer exists.
🟨 If the Incarnation is taken literally, as a metaphysical-theological God-man, then the redemptive work of that God would be confined to humanity and would fall into obsolescence for post-humans and irrelevance for other species. At the point of the posthuman, the question Cur Deus Homo? becomes obsolete.
🟩 Is it possible for Christian theology to expand its imagination in tandem with the contemporary imaginary? The approach to this problem found in the encyclical is pastoral, as it should be. Here Christianity is relevant. But there is another approach, a cosmic Christianity turning on a cosmic Christ, of the sort suggested by St. Paul, which explains the renewed show of interest by several Catholic theologians in the work of Teilhard de Chardin. In that approach, AI can be viewed as the latest stage in the evolution of consciousness—it’s not that the Word becomes flesh but that the flesh became word—and with its help something like Teilhard's noosphere is now in sight. Postmodern philosophers and non-Christians will reject the “Christo-genesis” in Teilhard’s story as dispensable and sectarian, but the larger vision still stands—some kind of collective, relational, planetary, social network, a social body, a “mystical body” fueled electronically, marked by a spirit of love, not of power and greed.
🟦 Can there be a transhuman religious imagination, a new species of theologians, a new theological mentality that is postmodern, posthuman, and post-Christian, if by “Christian” we mean the time-bound formulations of patristic theology and the fourth century Councils which confused their Neoplatonic speculations and premodern cosmology with eternal truth? Is there a post-Christian Christianity, the subject of a Magnifica Transhumanitas?
🟪 John David Caputo is one of the most influential American philosophers of religion in the contemporary intellectual landscape. Over the course of a distinguished academic career spanning several decades, he has held two eminent chairs: the Thomas J. Watson Professorship of Religion at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professorship of Philosophy at Villanova University, from both of which he retired with the honoured title of Emeritus.
🟫 Caputo first came to wider prominence as a seminal voice in postmodern Christianity and in the continental philosophy of religion. His most distinctive contribution to theological thought, however, lies in his founding of weak theology — a movement that deliberately relinquishes metaphysical certainty in order to let the event of faith speak on its own terms. His thinking is fundamentally shaped by hermeneutics and phenomenology — above all by the legacies of Heidegger and Husserl — yet he continually puts these traditions into provocative dialogue with deconstruction, particularly the work of Jacques Derrida.
