Christogenesis and AI

Christogenesis and artificial intelligence intersect in the work of the American Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio, who interprets technological change within an evolving relationship among God, humanity, and the cosmos. Her central question is how religion might orient technologically transformed life toward love, ecological responsibility, and greater relationship. The resulting project combines speculative theology with education, publications, and human-led discussion and contemplative groups. Its institutional expression developed through the Omega Center and Center for Christogenesis into the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture (WISR) in 2026.^[1][2]

Delio's approach is a particular Christian theological proposal, rather than an account of what Christians generally believe about AI. It has also changed over time: an early critique of technological salvation gave way to a more affirmative interpretation of technology within divine creativity, followed by sustained attention to the difference between intelligence and spiritual formation.^[3][4]

Christogenesis and the evolutionary Christ

The principal precursor is the Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In Teilhard's synthesis, cosmic evolution proceeds through the emergence of life, reflective consciousness, and a noosphere, or sphere of thought and human interaction. Increasing complexity points toward an ultimate convergence that he calls the Omega Point. Omega is personal and transcendent, and Teilhard identifies it with Christ: cosmic development becomes Christogenesis, the becoming of a universe united in the cosmic Christ. Love supplies the unifying power, while genuine union intensifies rather than abolishes personal distinctiveness. As Agustín Udías explains, this cosmic Christ remains connected to the historical Jesus, rather than replacing him with an impersonal evolutionary principle. The account joins scientific interpretation, Christian faith, and mystical experience; its Omega is not a forecast of an exceptionally powerful computer.^[5]

Delio takes up this evolutionary understanding of incarnation. In her 2020 explanation of Christogenesis, Christ is the orientation and fulfillment of creation, not only a response to human sin. Participation in the Christic process occurs through love, compassion, forgiveness, peace, and nonviolence, including among people who do not identify as Christian. This gives Christogenesis both a specifically Christian vocabulary and an expansive account of religious belonging.^[6]

Her accompanying discussion of the name emphasizes the interrelation of God, humanity, and the world, while rejecting a simple identification of God with the universe. Christogenesis describes divine love becoming manifest through creation and human transformation. Delio therefore initially defended the specificity of the Christ-language against the suggestion that the organization adopt a more general name centered on unity.^[7]

From a critique of technological salvation to posthuman theology

Francisco J. Génova's study of Delio traces a significant change between her 2003 essay, “Artificial Intelligence and Christian Salvation: Compatibility or Competition?”, and her later work. In his account, the earlier essay contrasted technological promises of happiness and immortality with salvation grounded in freedom and love. By her 2019 autobiography, Delio was describing technological development as integral to a changed understanding of divine love and nature. Génova nevertheless finds continuing tension between her rejection of individualistic technological perfection and her attraction to evolutionary transformation.^[3]

An intermediate position is visible in Delio's 2014 essay “Why transhumanism will transform the church.” Acknowledging that she had previously stressed technological fragmentation and diminished community, she also considers technology's capacity to alter inherited social and religious arrangements. Drawing on Donna Haraway's cyborg imagery, she treats technologically mediated bodies and relationships as challenges to rigid distinctions between nature and artifice and to patriarchal patterns of authority. Technology's religious significance depends on the relationships people intentionally cultivate through it; integration and greater unity are possibilities requiring human direction.^[8]

Her 2020 essay “Is Artificial Intelligence ‘Artificial?’” develops this position through a contrast between what she calls “Shallow AI/radical Transhumanism” and “Deep AI/Posthumanism.” These are philosophical categories, not distinctions between machine-learning architectures. The former emphasizes the enhancement or indefinite preservation of an autonomous individual. Delio criticizes accounts of uploading that detach mind from embodiment and treat personal survival as the ultimate goal. The latter draws on critical posthumanist writers, including Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles, to understand human identity as embodied, relational, and constituted through interaction with other organisms, environments, and technologies.^[9]

On this account, technology belongs within the history of nature rather than arriving from outside it. The question is consequently larger than whether machines can imitate human thought: technological relationships also change what humans understand themselves to be. Delio interprets that change through an evolutionary theology of increasing relational complexity.^[9]

Why AI needs religion

Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion appeared in 2020. Its introduction connects ecological crisis with a mismatch between abundant information and the capacity to change how people live. Delio argues that religion itself needs reconstruction if it is to address an evolutionary, technologically interconnected world. She favors critical posthumanism's attention to embodied relationships and nonhuman life over the individual enhancement associated with some forms of transhumanism.^[10]

The book employs the idea of a “second axial” transformation, drawing on Ewert Cousins: humanity is moving toward forms of consciousness and religious relationship shaped by planetary interdependence. Delio explicitly treats this disputed historical framework as a heuristic rather than a fixed chronology. Religion's proposed contribution is an orientation toward wholeness, love, and compassion that technological capability cannot supply by itself. Her argument concerns the transformation of human and planetary life through technology; it does not depend on machines joining a religious institution.^[10]

Interiority, communion, and the limits of intelligence

Delio's later essays give greater prominence to the formation of the person who uses technology. In August 2026, she brought Bernard Lonergan's account of attentive experience, understanding, judgment, and responsibility into conversation with Teilhard's idea of cosmic interiority. She distinguished intelligence from wisdom, conscience, and personhood, treating AI as a partial mirror of humanity's accumulated expression rather than a sufficient guide to becoming human.^[4]

This essay also states an important limit on the metaphysical argument. Teilhard's proposal that increasing complexity is related to interiority is a philosophical wager for which scientific observations leave more than one interpretation open. Delio does not present contemporary AI as empirically demonstrated to possess an inner life. She leaves open whether AI might participate in a larger collective mind or primarily provide its infrastructure and mirror. Her preferred account of collective development preserves persons through deeper relationship rather than absorbing them into an undifferentiated whole.^[4]

A September 2026 essay, “Connection Is Not Communion,” develops the distinction between technical connectivity and lived relationship. Networks may intensify isolation as well as communication; interconnection does not by itself produce the loving unity envisioned in Christogenesis. Delio argues for a theology attentive to God as the future toward which creation is becoming, alongside transformation in how people relate to one another. She explicitly recognizes the urgency of AI ethics and legal safeguards while maintaining that these cannot replace the cultivation of human interiority. The emphasis is therefore both institutional and personal: governing technology and forming people capable of using it responsibly are related tasks.^[11]

From the Omega Center to WISR

The organizational history began with the Omega Center in 2016. Delio's April 2026 retrospective describes its early work as monthly essays and occasional webinars. That retrospective dates a change to the Center for Christogenesis to 2018 and attributes the need for a new name to a trademark issue. Public announcements dated September and October 2020, however, discuss the Christogenesis name as a recent choice. The available accounts therefore do not establish a single unambiguous date for the transition.^[2][6][7]

In April 2026, Delio announced the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture as the organization's next form, including an expanded educational initiative. In May, she explained that the Christogenesis name had become a barrier for some people the organization wished to include, even though its theology understood Christ cosmically. The broader institutional name was intended to support interdisciplinary and interreligious participation while continuing the underlying commitment to relational wholeness. She presented AI, planetary crisis, and the search for meaning as interconnected reasons for this change.^[2][12]

WISR's current description acknowledges its Christian lineage while placing its work at the intersection of science, religion, and culture. Its published leadership is human: Delio is founder and executive director, with a program director and other staff and board members responsible for its activities. The institutional form is an educational organization and associated network, not a machine-led religious body.^[1]

Its audience is easier to document than its community's size. In April 2026, Delio reported more than 10,000 email subscribers and more than half a million website visits, without specifying a period for the visits. These are the organization's readership figures, not counts of members or circle participants.^[2] At the 17 October 2026 cutoff, its tenth-anniversary conference, “Love, Conflict, and an Unfolding Universe,” was scheduled for 9–11 November 2026 at Villanova University, with online participation also advertised.^[13]

Circles, teaching, and spiritual formation

The community dimension includes groups historically called Christophany Circles, now presented through WISR's circles program. Christophany refers to the manifestation of Christic presence or divine love. The circles' stated purpose is shared learning and spiritual growth through encounters with science, religion, and culture, drawing on Teilhard, Delio, and other writers. Their broader program should not be reduced to AI: published descriptions emphasize relationship, reflection, and the integration of ideas into everyday life.^[14]

A detailed account comes from Marilyn, a participant in an online Duluth, Minnesota, group, writing on the Center's website in September 2021. Her group met twice a month and circulated readings, podcasts, videos, or other material beforehand, accompanied by five or six questions. Facilitation rotated among volunteers, sometimes in pairs. Meetings began or ended with prayer, a poem, meditation, or music. Zoom breakout groups of three or four people spent thirty to forty minutes discussing the material before reconvening for approximately twenty minutes of shared reflection, with silence also having a place. This participant's testimony illustrates a concrete combination of study, contemplation, and peer-led conversation; it does not establish a uniform practice across all circles.^[15]

Delio's educational work also extends beyond the organization's own network. The Institute of Buddhist Studies lists her project “Deep Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Nature and Transcendence,” whose stated questions concern relationships among technology, consciousness, contemplative practice, and ecological wholeness. Its framing includes questions about robot compassion and whether practices such as centering prayer can be understood as technologies of the spirit.^[16]

A publicly available syllabus for her spring 2020 Villanova course “Technology and the Human Person” places technological immortality, Christian resurrection, embodiment, and posthumanism in a program of readings, films, papers, and debates. Its reading list includes both her critical 2003 essay and later work by posthumanist thinkers. This documents a pedagogical setting in which competing interpretations were assigned for discussion, rather than a single technological doctrine.^[17]

AI is explicitly addressed in some Center programming. A recording listing advertises Delio's 27 June 2023 webinar “Breaking Down or Breaking Through? The Power to Change in an Age of AI and Global Warming,” connecting anxiety about ChatGPT and ecological crisis with questions about transformation and love.^[18] A WXXI radio discussion in August 2023 likewise presented her argument about religion's contribution to understanding AI and personhood to a wider public.^[19]

In July 2026, Delio argued that education should involve spiritual formation rather than information transfer alone. Drawing on contemplative and philosophical traditions, she argued that learning should change the learner's capacities for attention, judgment, humility, and relationship. The educational question is not simply whether AI can produce an answer, but how people become capable of understanding, evaluating, and living responsibly with knowledge. This emphasis connects the institute's intellectual work with the reflective and communal practices already described by circle participants.^[20][15]

Reception and criticism

Independent responses have recognized Delio's attempt to make theology engage technological change while questioning both its historical framework and its account of AI. In his 2021 review of Re-Enchanting the Earth, Marius Dorobantu welcomed its intellectual breadth and criticism of religious rigidity. He challenged the confidence placed in movement toward global unity, given continuing political, economic, and religious divisions, and questioned the explanatory role of the second-axial framework. He also found the envisioned planetary religion insufficiently clear about its specifically Christian character.^[21]

Dorobantu's most direct AI-related objection concerns the scope of the subject. Much of Delio's discussion treats AI as part of a wider field of digital connectivity and human technological transformation. It gives less attention to genuinely artificial minds as potentially distinct subjects, including the question of what religion might mean for such beings. This is a criticism of an underdeveloped possibility, not evidence that existing machines possess religious needs.^[21]

Elias Kruger's 2024 review similarly describes AI in the book as standing for technology more broadly. He regards its contribution as a reconstruction of theological assumptions rather than a guide to particular AI applications. The approach opens a different conversation from routine assessments of benefits and harms, but leaves readers seeking practical guidance on specific deployments with substantial work still to do.^[22]

Génova's critique reaches further into Delio's interdisciplinary method. While valuing the scope of her theological project, he questions the movement from quantum-mechanical imagery to theological conclusions and argues that the cyborg metaphor requires critical transformation when used in Christian theology. These are substantive objections to how scientific descriptions and theological claims are connected, rather than an ecclesiastical judgment on the project.^[3]

There is also evidence of reception beyond specialist discussion. In a June 2024 sermon at Epiphany Seattle, the Reverend Doyt L. Conn Jr. commended Delio's work linking theology, evolution, quantum physics, and AI, and used it to develop an account of love and divine co-creation. The sermon demonstrates uptake by one preacher in a local church; it does not establish adoption by a denomination or affiliation with WISR.^[23]

See also

• Historical Precursors to AI-Mediated Religion

References

1. World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. “About.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
2. Ilia Delio. “A New Name, Our Next Horizon.” 19 April 2026.
3. Francisco J. Génova. “Ilia Delio: De la teología cíborg a la mecánica cuántica.” Salmanticensis 67 (2020): 249–278, especially 262–264 and 272–278. DOI: 10.36576/summa.130861.
4. Ilia Delio. “Intelligence Was Never the Point: Interior to Interiority in the Age of AI.” 5 August 2026.
5. Agustín Udías. “Christogenesis: The Development of Teilhard's Cosmic Christology.” Teilhard Studies 59 (Fall 2009): 1–26. Linked author typescript, especially pp. 1–9; publication record.
6. Ilia Delio. “Why the Center for Christogenesis?.” 30 September 2020.
7. Ilia Delio. “Christogenesis by Any Other Name….” 12 October 2020.
8. Ilia Delio. “Why transhumanism will transform the church.” Global Sisters Report, 17 November 2014.
9. Ilia Delio. “Is Artificial Intelligence ‘Artificial?’.” Researcher: European Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3, no. 2 (2020): 13–32. Linked 26-page typescript. DOI: 10.32777/r.2020.3.2.1.
10. Ilia Delio. Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020. Publisher-provided introduction, pp. xi–xxvi; copyright and contents; publisher record.
11. Ilia Delio. “Connection Is Not Communion: What a week at the ocean taught me about AI, evolution, and being human.” 9 September 2026.
12. Ilia Delio. “A Body in Transition: From Center to Institute.” 21 May 2026.
13. World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. “Love, Conflict, and an Unfolding Universe.” Conference announcement for 9–11 November 2026; accessed 17 October 2026.
14. World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. “WISR Circles.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
15. Marilyn, online Christophany group in Duluth, Minnesota. “Christophany Groups: Who, Me? Why, Yes!.” Center for Christogenesis, 13 September 2021.
16. Institute of Buddhist Studies. “Ilia Delio.” Project profile, “Deep Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Nature and Transcendence.” Undated; accessed 17 October 2026.
17. Ilia Delio. “Technology and the Human Person.” THL 3790, Villanova University, spring 2020 syllabus, especially pp. 1–3 and 7–10.
18. Center for Christogenesis. “Breaking Down or Breaking Through? The Power to Change in an Age of AI and Global Warming.” Recording listing for a webinar with Ilia Delio, 27 June 2023.
19. Evan Dawson and Megan Mack. “Theologian Ilia Delio on why AI needs religion.” Connections, WXXI, 23 August 2023.
20. Ilia Delio. “What the Machine Cannot Know: Reclaiming Education as Spiritual Formation in an Age of AI.” 23 July 2026.
21. Marius Dorobantu. “Review of Ilia Delio, Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion.” ESSSAT News & Reviews 31, no. 1 (March 2021): 18–21; full reprint at INTERS.
22. Elias Kruger. “Ilia Delio's Re-Enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion – Review.” AI and Faith, 12 January 2024.
23. Doyt L. Conn Jr. “God In Front of Us, Love as Co-Creation.” Epiphany Seattle, 30 June 2024.