Spring 2026

The rise of artificial intelligence has intensified long-standing concerns about disconnection, fragmentation, and the thinning of human experience. Drawing on thinkers such as Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth, and James Carey—as well as emerging experiments in digital fasting and community-building—this talk explores how small acts of resistance can nurture deeper forms of attention, embodiment, and shared life. Rather than proposing a program of technological rejection, the lecture highlights simple, embodied practices that restore our sense of place and personhood in a world increasingly shaped by efficiency and automation. The invitation is to imagine resistance not as withdrawal but as cultivation: planting seeds of meaning and community that can grow even within the cracks of a digital age.

Brett Robinson is an Associate Professor of the Practice at the University of Notre
Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life . In this role, he teaches and conducts
research on media, technology and Church history. Brett is the founder of the Church
Communications Ecology Program at Notre Dame, a program for Church leaders to
engage more deeply with the challenges and opportunities created by the rise of digital
technology and artificial intelligence.

On the face of it, love and consciousness are wildly different things. But what if appearances mislead us? Indeed, what if it is precisely the conviction that consciousness is divorced from value, from sociality, and from striving for intimacy, that gets in the way of making sense of this phenomenon? In this talk, I take this possibility seriously. Consciousness itself, I argue, is an affair of the heart. Consciousness, I propose, like love, is bound up with the work of making relationships. And this provides the setting then in which I turn to the question of the very idea that machines might one day themselves come to think and feel.

Alva Noë is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also department chair. His most recent book is The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are.

Under the influence of digital technologies and in the shadow of artificial intelligence, human civilization is entering into an evolutionary bottleneck, a period of sustained pressure that threatens existing cultures, communities and individuals with obsolescence and extinction. Nothing human can be taken for granted and survival will increasingly depend on intentionality and intensity: Languages may disappear, art forms will vanish, religions and political worldviews and entire nations may fail, the reproduction of the species may be at risk — except among people who are somewhat fanatical in their belief in the value of the human person, and very deliberate and self-conscious about making sure that human things survive the cull.

Ross Douthat is columnist for the New York Times, the host of the podcast Interesting Times, and the author, most recently, of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.