Abstract Contemporary theological engagement with artificial intelligence (AI) has been dominated by applied ethics, focusing on bias, surveillance, and governance. This approach often treats algorithms as external instruments subject to moral regulation. This article argues that predictive systems must be understood as formative environments that shape attention, imagination, and desire through patterned repetition and the strategic management of salience. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s account of habitus and the doctrine of the invisibilis missio of the Holy Spirit , I propose that certain algorithmic architectures function as rival ecologies of habituation. These systems pre-structure deliberation by compressing the temporal interval between stimulus and assent and reinforcing probabilistic continuity with the past. Against this extractive economy of attention, sanctification is interpreted not as self-optimisation but as the Spirit’s infusion of charity, which reorders love and restores the temporal spaciousness required for mature freedom. By situating AI theology within pneumatology rather than metaphysical speculation about machine agency, the article reframes the central question: not whether AI can think, but how predictive systems participate in the formation of human desire. It offers a Thomistic grammar for discerning the limits of prediction and articulating a theological account of freedom in an age of algorithmic mediation.
Abstract This paper develops a new evidential challenge to a contemporary universalist account grounded in the doctrine of efficacious grace. Drawing primarily on the work of John Kronen and Eric Reitan, I argue that if God possesses a morally legitimate and effective means of transforming even the gravest sinners without violating rational freedom, then the continued existence of apparently gratuitous moral evils becomes especially difficult to explain. The challenge does not consist in the traditional claim that evil is incompatible with divine goodness, nor does it attempt to refute universalism as such. Rather, it asks why transformative grace capable of healing distorted agency is reserved for the eschaton if its earlier application could plausibly prevent at least some of history’s worst atrocities. After reconstructing the evidential problem of evil in Rowe and Russell, I examine the universalist account of efficacious grace and develop what I call the Evidential Challenge to Efficacious Grace. I then consider several possible universalist responses, including skeptical theism, appeals to the Fall, and arguments from divine sovereignty. I conclude that efficacious grace intensifies the explanatory burden generated by apparently gratuitous evil and therefore introduces a distinctive internal challenge for one influential form of contemporary universalism.
Abstract This paper defends a broadly Thomistic understanding of simplicity against a range of contemporary criticisms. Critics of divine simplicity argue that simplicity leads us to identify God with an abstract property and that it renders theological language semantically vacuous because divine simplicity cannot ground a plurality of true intrinsic predicates. I defuse these criticisms by employing some central Fregean distinctions – specifically, the distinctions between object and concept, predication and identification, and sense and reference. While these Fregean distinctions help to dissolve initial logical difficulties, they do not by themselves explain how theological predicates can have determinate content or truth-conditions. I therefore situate the relevant Fregean diagnostics within the Thomistic metaphysical framework of analogy. This framework supplies principled constraints on theological predication without reintroducing composition into God. I conclude by arguing that the Thomistic doctrine of analogy does not eliminate semantic openness but renders theological language sufficiently determinate for meaning and practice, grounding meaningful God-talk in both metaphysics and the formative practices of religious life.
Abstract In Sources of Christian Ethics , Servais Pinckaers submits that, contrary to the presumed disjunction between Scholastic theology and mystical spirituality, a harmony historically existed between the two. In support of Pinckaers’ claim, this study proposes that such a harmony may be found between the theological writings of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena. One key place of convergence is their respective treatments of charity. Christ’s charity figures prominently in the accounts of both Thomas and Catherine, who each describe its pedagogic and exemplary efficacy in relation to the charity of the baptized. When treating the effects of the Redemption, Thomas emphasizes the exemplary efficacy of Christ’s charity to elicit our charity. Similarly for Catherine, Christ’s charity – displayed emblematically by his Blood – enkindles a reciprocal charity in the soul who contemplates it. Furthermore, Thomas and Catherine conceive of charity as the foundation of the moral life, describing it as the ‘form’ of the virtues and the essence of spiritual perfection. Examining these accounts, drawn primarily from the Summa and Dialogue , yields insight into charity’s fundamental place in the theology of Aquinas and Catherine, as well as the complementary insights each offers regarding Christ’s charity and ours.
