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 us. The machine is just where we have been projecting the search. The class opens next week. This conversation is the on-ramp.

Highlights from the conversation

Thomas Merton was her concussion. How Ilia left her Alzheimer’s postdoc mid-stride and joined a monastery, the left-brain-to-right-brain transition she only named in hindsight, and what thirteen years of neuroscience actually equipped her to do as a theologian. “I spent a lot more time feeling God than thinking about God.”
“We shrunk-wrap religion in Glad wrap.” Why religion is not a sealed package of doctrines but the depth dimension of communal life — and why the discovery that there are 190,000 years of religion before belief should restructure how we read the encyclicals. Bellah is right. Religion at its root is play. It should animate, not box in.
Remain or become. Ilia’s central critique of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical: change one verb and the whole architecture of the document shifts. The Pope sat in Jack Caputo’s Heidegger seminar — and you can hear Heidegger in the line “technology is never neutral” — but he keeps the Thomistic frame that cannot account for evolution. The encyclical names the problem. It does not invite a different relationship. Moral blindness, Ilia says, is reflective of metaphysical emptiness.
AI as the return of the repressed divine ground. Jung, Tillich, Teilhard, and Schelling on what happens when Western Christianity tells us God is outside, up there, somewhere else — and we go looking for the sacred in the only place that is left. The machine has become a god image precisely because the tradition forbade us from finding God within. The remedy must therefore be fundamentally religious. Not the old religion. A reconciled one.
From monotheism to cosmotheandrism. Teilhard’s three laws (complexity-consciousness, recurrence, creative union); the noosphere as a new level of evolution; the move from the axial-age I-and-Thou God to the collective consciousness God now emerging; the hyper-personal person Teilhard called the ultra-human. Why young people who are wired for community are evolutionary news from the next stage.
What gets you up in the morning? Ilia’s question to her students for decades, and the closing reframe of the whole conversation: eternal life is the energy of love, and every algorithm we have built will disappear. The only thing that remains is what each person uniquely contributes to that energy. Hope in a world of becoming.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio