The Machine Is a God Image with Ilia Delio

Homebrewed Christianity · May 30, 2026 · 1h 29m

Ilia Delio and I sat down a week before The Future of Religion class opens, in front of 500 people who already knew what they were signing up for. The conversation ranged — from the brain mutation she underwent when thirteen years of neuroscience gave way to a monastery ("Thomas Merton was my concussion"), to the single verb she would change in Pope Leo XIV's brand-new AI encyclical (turn remain into become), to why she keeps insisting both the problem and the cure are religious. AI is not what is annihilating us. Our refusal to acknowledge the divine ground within us is what is annihilating…