Anne Snyder: From Comment Magazine, welcome to The Understory, where the future quietly takes root. I’m Anne Snyder.
At the centre of The Understory Festival stood a question as old as it is urgent: what is a human? We took it up first not with argument, but with an artistic inquiry into history. Friday morning opened with a short film made for the festival — What Is a Human? — by our friends at ChristianStory, a global team of painters, digital animators, theologians, and historians based in Oxford and Switzerland, who bring Christian history and theology to life through handcrafted visual storytelling. Their work is animated by a simple conviction: that history and theology need not be barriers to faith, but can deepen it.
That film rolled out a kind of red carpet for Dr. Luke Bretherton, currently Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University — and for years before that at Duke — who has had an outsized impact on Comment‘s missional compass during my tenure as editor. Across books like Christ and the Common Life and A Primer in Christian Ethics, Luke’s work draws together theology, democracy, community organizing, and the patient work of learning how strangers become neighbours. What I especially love about Luke’s work is his willingness to return again and again to the question posed to us in the parable of the Good Samaritan: who have we been conditioned not to hear? Across decades of scholarship and life among communities around the world, Luke has shown how new publics, new solidarities, and even new moral vocabularies emerge when we learn to receive the testimonies of those outside the usual circles of authority.
Here, on the second day of the Understory Festival, he brings that Christian humanist lens to our own moment — to a creeping crisis of agency, to institutions we no longer trust but cannot yet reimagine, and to a recovery of our humanity whose truest image, he argues, is not the powerful or the self-made, but the wounded Christ.
Recorded in the nave at the Understory Festival, here is What Is a Human? followed by a lecture on the same question by Dr. Luke Bretherton.
What Is a Human? ChristianStory
Christian humanism invites us towards a humane future. But we can’t be humane without first having a shared understanding of what makes us human in the first place. And today, that very understanding has been unravelling. The mere idea of humanity is in disrepair, challenged and questioned by technological innovation, the life sciences, climate change, and the long, dark shadow of human history, in which the humane treatment of one another has often been the exception. And yet, paradoxically, humanity continues to be the bedrock of our international moral order. We speak of human rights and human dignity. And yet we’ve lost the ability to mean by them anything more than individual liberty uprooted from our shared humanity. Perhaps no other epoch has leaned so much on the concept of the human while being so thoroughly confused about what that is supposed to mean.
The truth is, we remain a mystery to ourselves. Before the heights of human achievement and the abyss of our inhumanity, we stand puzzled. What is humankind? We compose Beethoven’s Sixth. We plumb the depths of quantum mechanics. Establish the Geneva Convention. Unleash artificial intelligence. Starve. Torture. Kill one another. Found schools and hospices. Build concentration camps. Love. Serve. Sacrifice. Hate. Destroy. Dehumanize.
What is humankind? We pierce through the secrets of the cosmos and reshape planets, all while being dumbfounded when confronted by the most basic phenomena of life, time, and being itself. Who can know the depths of our souls? Humanity is free to make the world better, yet seems bound to destroy it. We have the creative potential to express the very depths of our reality through our culture, and yet we invent soul-destroying tools of devastation. We grasp at things with our minds, and yet in our attempts to see through everything, we become blind to the inexhaustible mystery within them.
There is no lack of reductive explanations available to us. Humans are nothing more than complex assemblages of smaller particles — no more than mere animals, complicated meat computers, information processors. Every discipline in the natural and social sciences has devised its own ways to explain the human and what makes us tick, their own anthropologies. They recast the inexplicable mystery of humanity as a puzzle that we can solve or a problem that we can hack. But such reductive views can be extremely dangerous, because our ethics are downstream from our anthropology. And if we view humans as machines to fix or problems to solve, we will treat them accordingly. Human history has shown that even well-intentioned attempts to optimise humanity — be they ideological, technological, or sociological — have generated destructive and dehumanising regimes. Humanism, severed from something or someone beyond itself, becomes a self-contradictory and self-destructive dead end.
This is why the Jewish and Christian traditions have put forward a radically different anthropology: the Imago Dei. These traditions recognize that our anthropology is downstream from our theology. To claim that humans are made in the image of God is to claim that humanity is an expression of the creator of all things — the source of all being, consciousness, and bliss, who is beyond comprehension, unimaginable, an infinite mystery. If humans are in the image of this God, then they too are incomprehensible mysteries. And mysteries are like inexhaustible wellsprings. There’s always something surprising, deep, and unpredictable, something holy and inaccessible about being human. Ultimately, that is because humans manifest, in their particular limited way, the infinite creativity and rationality and freedom of the infinite mystery at the source of everything: God himself.
The Christian tradition then radicalised this anthropology with an unexpected turn: the infinite mystery took on a face. Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ — God striding over the face of the earth as a human man. He is the most fully realised image of God. This turn fundamentally changes the reference point of what we believe a human is. For if God became a human, ought not that human be our template, our pattern?
Christians were convinced that in Christ’s humanity, we discover our own. And in his humanity, we also see God. So wherever Christ is, there is God. Wherever Christ is, there is the truly human. And where was Christ? He was with the downtrodden, the mourning, the suffering, the pierced, the broken, the dying. And his crucifixion was not only a demonstration of divine love, but a disclosure of the human condition — that we are suffering, broken, mortal creatures. And yet, there was God.
And this is the heart of Christian humanism, the moral compass for a truly humane future. Christian humanism suggests that the height of humanity is not to be found in triumphant power and civilizational glory, but is found in the solidarity we share in our suffering and in a life given away for others. It suggests that when we look into the eyes of a fellow human, we see not only the inexhaustible mystery of God, but we encounter Christ himself. It suggests that our destiny is not towards greater mastery of the universe, but surrender to each other. To become more human — that is, more like Christ. This is what makes Christian humanism uniquely Christian.
And this vision has radically transformed history and our very notion of the human. It is why early Christian communities rescued exposed infants from roadsides and raised them. It is why the Emperor Constantine illegalized the disfigurement of prisoners, because even the most hated in society were made in the likeness of heavenly beauty. It’s why Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century believed that to deny anybody’s freedom through slavery was to blaspheme God himself — a revolutionary insight that would flower into the abolition movements a thousand years later, across traditions, be they Roman Catholic, Quaker, Methodist, or Evangelical, all insisting on the shared humanity to be found in Christ. It’s why Christian women throughout the ages have believed that education should be offered to all, for all were made in the image of God — whether in the medieval German monasteries of Hildegard of Bingen or the early modern schools of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico. It’s why the novels of Dostoevsky insist that suffering and beauty are held together in the core of the human condition, for Christ himself was the suffering beauty. From Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, and Pandita Ramabai to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King Jr., there has been a consistent and ecumenical voice insisting on the inviolable worth of each and every individual human as an image of God and the solidarity of Christ with those who suffer. And this voice cannot fade.
We are all inalienable images of God, an image fully revealed in Christ. This is the heart of Christian humanism. Living up to this standard remains our greatest task: to think it through, to express it creatively, to nurture it culturally, and to incarnate it socially and politically. To truly believe that the most profound thing about us, the deepest imprint of our identity as human beings, is something we share with one another, and something we all have a duty to respect, honour, and love in one another.
In the words of the 4th-century Christian philosopher Lactantius: if we are the work of the same God, what else are we but brothers and sisters? We must therefore show humanity if we want to deserve the name of human beings. And showing humanity means loving our fellow human beings because they are human beings, just as we are ourselves.
Luke Bretherton: Good morning. Really a joy to be with you. I don’t know about you, but I came away from last night deeply nourished — of body, mind, and spirit — and just really want to thank Anne, thank Tiffany, thank all those involved in the music, in the lighting, in the food, the poetry. It was a rich, rich feast that was set before us.
And what I want to do today is in many ways pick up on the themes that were laid out there. And by wonderful kind of spirit-infused or providential synchronicity, much of what I’m going to say is really just an exposition and an opening out of so much of what we heard last night. But in some ways, if last night was a kind of right-brain activity — it was more evoking the understory — I’m kind of moving a little bit more left-brain and going to join some dots and set up some frameworks. But one way to think about what I’m going to try to do with you this morning: it’s a kind of pathway through the forest. If we think of these great columns as the trees, we’re going to chart a pathway through that forest. We’re going to look up at the canopy, see what’s going on a bit around us, but also look out upon the understory and have a sense of the possibilities and newness that’s emerging in that understory.
And I want to begin with a very simple question — but it’s a profound question we don’t often ask ourselves — and that is: what does it mean to be human? This question sits at the heart of every political system, every moral vision, every faith. And I think, as the film made clear, this is a question that is pressed upon us with a certain existential urgency in our current moment. The ability to edit human DNA, the capacity to merge humans and machines at a cellular level, the ways in which artificial intelligence takes on characteristics of human consciousness — these lead some to ask whether there will emerge a different kind of human, or even a post-human. At the same time, political barriers and ideological divisions lead to the denial and demonization of other humans, so that any sense that we might have a shared humanity is severely strained. And so we stand, I think, in powerful currents that are dissolving the very idea of humanity as a coherent moral and political entity, which makes the need to recover and defend a sense of shared humanity — and with it the intrinsic dignity of each and every human — ever more urgent.
Now I think the currents that feed into this challenge take two different forms. The first is what I’ll call a crisis of agency. People feel acted upon by forces they can neither understand nor resist. We wake up in the morning and find that decisions about our work, about our institutions, even our children’s futures, are being made somewhere else by someone else, according to logics we can’t quite see or grasp. Artificial intelligence is only the most recent expression of this dynamic. It generates faceless processes driven by algorithms that decide who gets the mortgage, the interview, the scholarship, the surgery — without any accountability or comeback. The crisis here, though, is not first and foremost one of technology. It is a crisis of agency. We find ourselves acted on rather than being able to act in the world. Rather than being enabled to act with and for others, we so often find ourselves constantly positioned to act against others — in competition, in ideological conflict, in actual war. We find that we have to act by ourselves, hassling and hustling alone in a crowd, rather than being able to cultivate forms of meaningful and purposeful common life. My intuition is that what people really want is to have their sense of agency restored — to recover the belief that their lives are not meaningless or merely managed, but rather that they can act together with and for others, that there are ways we can come together and not be positioned in competition or simply to stand alone, that they can shape the world they live in rather than be passive consumers of judgements taken about them without them.
Now alongside this loss of agency sits another crisis: a loss of trust in the institutions that shape our common life. Hospitals, universities, schools, courts, museums are seen as distant, procedural, ideological — rather than spaces of belonging and common purpose that contribute to our shared flourishing. From the left, the charge is that institutions are oppressive: they’re racist, patriarchal, homophobic, extractivist, ableist, and so must be dismantled or abolished. From the right, the accusation is that they’re bureaucratic, unaccountable, elitist, and woke. In both cases, the result is the same: a disenchantment and disidentification with the very structures that once gave shape and continuity and purpose to our common life across generations.
Our current crisis, I would argue, is not one of people, ideas, or money. There are plenty of good people, beautiful people in the world. There’s a mass of great ideas, and it seems a lot of money around. No, the crisis is one of institutional imagination. We know the problems before us — environmental degradation, mass migration, social polarization, lack of good-quality affordable housing, and many, many other issues we could name. But we no longer trust the institutions we have, yet we cannot imagine the institutions we need to address the long-term problems we face.
And there are good reasons for this lack of trust in institutions and the structures that determine our living and working conditions. We are treated by them as either units of administration to be managed or units of data to be processed, optimised, and surveilled — with our relationships and emotions sold back to us as clicks and likes. And instead of the tools and technologies we create serving us and making life better, we find our lives and our identities re-engineered to serve them and their logics. And in this reversal — where we serve our tools rather than our tools serving us — we find that our own lives are drained of joy, of wonder, of human depth and connection. Life gets faster and more efficient, but less humane.
To understand our moment, though, I think we need to recover some historical perspective. The modern world, for all its individualism, was built through institutions. From the late 18th century onwards, we saw the invention of the modern university, museums, political parties, trade unions, prisons, public libraries, sports clubs, myriad other institutions. Each was an attempt to answer a collective problem or pursue a shared good, and to organise what was necessary for addressing that end through a form of common life that could be sustained over time. How do you get clean, potable water to a rapidly expanding urban population concentrated in increasingly close-knit communities? You create an institution: the Municipal Sewage Works. Not very glamorous, I know. But this institution not only solves the problem — it is also a means by which to form the people with the vision to address the problem, the ethos to fulfil that vision with care and moral concern, and the technical knowledge to do the job well. The same goes for solving any of the other social ills and questions that emerged with the Industrial Revolution.
The church was at the heart of this institutional world. Parishes and congregations shaped civic order at a local level. Christians laid the foundations of the university, the hospital, public education, and public housing. But by the end of the 20th century, that institutional imagination had faltered. Society became, in Robert Putnam’s evocative phrase, comprised of people bowling alone.
The deeper pattern underlying these dynamics is the shift from institutions of care and moral purpose to institutions that control and commodify, and that lack any sense of their meaning and purpose. Everything becomes a market. Every person, an individualised and atomised producer or a consumer who must brand themselves and sell themselves to be noticed. Hospitals, for example, are no longer institutions that serve the moral good of health. They are healthcare providers, and patients are treated as users or service users. The language is not neutral. It recasts what are properly moral relationships in purely transactional terms. When a nurse treats a patient as a data point rather than a person — mere biology rather than someone with a biography — both are dehumanised. The result is what psychologists now call moral injury: the wound that comes from acting against one’s moral conscience under systemic pressure.
Underlying and driving these shifts is the anti-humanistic vision of what the late Pope Francis — and then just this Monday, Pope Leo — called the technocratic paradigm. The technocratic paradigm has a wholly instrumental view of nature, separating and alienating us from creation. It operates with what Francis called a tyrannical anthropocentrism, as well as a hyper-individualism, and equates technical progress with human progress while denying any moral and spiritual basis to life — such that everything is subject to a will to power without moral limits, save for a kind of cursory utilitarian calculus. And it’s precisely this paradigm that fuels both post- and transhumanist visions that want to disassemble and re-engineer our shared humanity, so it can be either fired off to Mars or fed into a large language model.
The reality is, as you and I know in our bones, that life cannot be reduced to ones and zeros and then managed and optimised as either market share or some social engineering project. In short, we cannot live by money and technology alone.
At the heart of any theological vision for renewing human agency and reimagining our institutions in this context lies a simple but radical conviction: every human is made in the image of God. But this does not mean that human beings possess some fixed quality such as rationality. As we’ve been hearing over the course of our time together, it means that every human life reflects something of God’s own relational life. Each person is open to communion, filled with creativity and possibility, and presents us — each of us — with an invitation to discover our own meaning and purpose through learning how to care for and relate to this other person before us.
Let me say a little more about the theological vision that underlies this claim by turning to what’s been invoked this morning: Christian humanism. Christian humanism gives a striking answer to the question I began with — namely, what does it mean to be human? Its answer is this: if you want to know what humanity truly is, look to Jesus Christ. Towards the end of John’s Gospel, Pontius Pilate presents the beaten and humiliated Jesus to the crowd and says, “Behold the man” — or more literally, “Here is the human being.” Ironically, Pilate speaks more truth than he realises. The Christian tradition hears in these words the revelation that here is true humanity. If you want to know what a fully human life looks like, look at Jesus Christ.
For Christian humanism, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus provides the clearest picture of what humanity is meant to be. And the hope is that however much our humanity has been distorted by sin or idolatry — whether personal or structural — it can be restored through learning to imitate Christ. And that imitation takes many forms. One form is contemplation: looking at an icon or painting of Christ, or reading stories that portray a Christ-like way of life. Another is participation: doing the kinds of things that Christ did, especially caring for the vulnerable, the forgotten, and the excluded.
Christian humanism begins, then, from the conviction that our humanity is revealed in Christ. But it also insists that we recover our humanity not merely through ideas, but through practices — through acts of love, service, and solidarity. And it matters to notice which Christ we are invited to contemplate and imitate. The scene before Pilate is not one of triumph or worldly success. Christ stands there beaten, humiliated, bound, abandoned, and about to be executed by the state. The central image of Christian humanism is therefore not the powerful ruler, the autonomous individual, or the self-made success story. It is the wounded body of Christ.
That matters enormously, because it means that human flourishing is not discovered by leaving behind suffering, vulnerability, or difficult relationships. Christianity is not a form of spiritual escapism or inner consolation in a difficult world. It does not warrant a movement away from the messy, material realities of life. Rather, it demands a movement into them — into loss, into tragedy, into the traumatized and fragile places of our world. Christian humanism insists we discover our humanity precisely there.
You can see this clearly — picking up on what Anika was saying — in the Good Samaritan parable. The Samaritan encounters a stranger lying wounded by the roadside, abandoned, vulnerable, and in need of help. More than that, each of the people in this story belongs to a people regarded as enemies by the other. It is the Samaritan who acts in a truly human way in the story. His humanity is revealed at the moment of encounter and in how he responds. He crosses boundaries of fear, hostility, and social division in order to show mercy and loving kindness. The parable suggests something profound: we discover our humanity at the point of encounter with those who are not like us, especially those who suffer or those we consider our enemies. And in the Christian imagination, that is also where we most fully encounter Christ.
That is the central claim of Matthew 25. “When did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, or imprisoned?” — those questions asked by Jesus. And he answers: whenever you cared for the least of these, you cared for me. So the presence of Christ is not confined to sacred spaces like this, or to religious rituals alongside bread and wine and times of prayer. Christ also becomes a real presence for us in the encounter with vulnerable human beings — in the stranger, the prisoner, the poor, the excluded. That is one of the beautiful gifts, I think, of Christian humanism. It directs our attention not away from suffering and weakness, but towards them, because that is where Christ is found, and therefore that is where we discover most deeply our own humanity and what it means to be human.
As the film notes, early Christian writers such as Gregory of Nyssa built on this insight. In one remarkable sermon from the 4th century, Gregory condemns slavery by arguing that enslaved people must be recognized as fully human because they bear the image of God. His argument is deeply Christological: if Christ is present among the lowly and the oppressed, then to encounter the enslaved is also to encounter Christ. In other words, Gregory understands that in and through Christ, our humanity is discovered through solidarity with the neglected and the exploited. And Gregory’s brother, Basil of Caesarea, invented an institution inspired by and embodying this theological vision — namely, the hospital. For both Gregory and Basil, this institution that enabled care for the poor, the sick, and the socially excluded — like lepers, radical in its day — was a direct expression of Christian humanism and the recognition of the image of God in every person.
Christian humanism is not a theory. Rather, it’s a therapy for recovering our humanity in and through Christ.
Historically, this vision generated a series of interconnected projects. First, Christian humanism is a philosophical and theological project. It asks what it means to be human and explores that question through theological anthropology — human beings as creatures made in the image of God, as finite and fallen, as redeemed in Christ and open to a future fulfilment beyond the limits of history. Second, it’s an educational and formational project. Christian humanism has long been concerned with the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and good judgement. This is the world of paideia, Bildung, the liberal arts, and humanitas — traditions of education that aim not simply at producing workers or consumers, but formed and humane persons capable of living well with others. This aspect of Christian humanism took the institutional form of schools and universities. Third, Christian humanism became a civic and political project: because every person possesses dignity, political and economic life must be ordered in ways that resist domination, corruption, and dehumanization. This tradition therefore helped shape ideas and institutions that fostered equality, civic participation, liberty, and democracy. Fourth, Christian humanism is also an aesthetic project, and you see the fruits of that around you here. It asks how art, literature, music, and other forms of cultural production reveal the drama and dignity of human life — portraiture, the novel, poetry, the spirituals just sung so beautifully, classical music, everyday practices of cultural creation — all becoming ways of exploring what it means to be human. Christian humanism holds that humans are not reducible to rational or economic calculators. They are imaginative, desiring, meaning-making beings who shape and reshape culture through their longing for beauty, truth, and belonging. And finally, Christian humanism is a scholarly project — I have to get that in as an academic. The great humanist traditions of learning, though, were never simply about technique or method. Scholarship was understood as serving moral, civic, and spiritual formation through enriching our shared scientific and intellectual life. Figures such as Erasmus exemplify this ideal of learning in the service of human flourishing.
Taken together, these strands form a rich vision of the human person: relational rather than isolated, dignified rather than instrumentalized, formed through love, and always open to a transcendence beyond them.
To echo the film, this interconnected set of projects should not be seen as a solely Western or European development. Do take a look at the Seedbeds of Humanism exhibition — it’s just down there — which tells that story very eloquently. In its early modern form, Christian humanism emerges in response to the encounter with the new world and is taken up around the world. We can think of the indigenous Peruvian theologian Guaman Poma writing his thousand-page treatise The First New Chronicle and Good Government in 1612, or the formerly enslaved African Olaudah Equiano writing a spiritual autobiography and abolitionist treatise in 1789, or Sojourner Truth campaigning against slavery in the 19th century, or John Wu advocating for Christian humanism in China in the 20th century.
Christian humanism stands, though, in stark contrast to several dominant ways of understanding what it means to be human — ways of thinking that shape much of our contemporary cultural and political landscape, but which also have deep roots in the modern period. These alternatives appear across the political spectrum, taking both progressive and reactionary forms.
The first alternative is radical individualism or libertarianism. The human being is autonomous, self-sufficient, defined by choice, power, or achievement — a homo economicus whose flourishing consists of having a consumer lifestyle and material wealth. In this view, shared traditions, institutions, and forms of common life are irrelevant, ignored, or seen as restrictive rather than enabling. What matters most is the sovereign self: my choices, my desires, my self-definition. But if we define humanity that way, what happens to the elderly person who’s forgotten everything, the refugee with no status, the unborn, the one who is no longer economically productive or never will be — are they less human? Christian humanism answers no. Instead, while it sees much value in the modern concern for liberty and freedom of conscience, Christian humanism argues we do not become fully human alone. Human beings are relational creatures. We are formed through families, communities, traditions, and responsibilities and relationships of care. Freedom detached from solidarity and forms of thick association breeds not just loneliness, but deaths of despair — not just distrust, but a society which is devouring itself.
The second alternative is what we might call identitarianism — by this I mean the belief that human identity is fundamentally determined by belonging to a particular ethnic, cultural, or national group. In this view, we become organised around closed circles of belonging: friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders, those who authentically belong and those who don’t. This is seen in the family, faith, and flag identitarianism of the right, and the gender, sexuality, and race identitarianism of the left. On both left and right, this identitarianism often leads to the idea that human flourishing depends primarily on the recognition and expression of one’s group identity. If that identity is denied, then one’s humanity itself is understood to be violated. Christian humanism resists this way of thinking because it refuses the idea that humans can be reduced to inherited or ascribed identities. Such a view turns culture into destiny and denies the possibility of deep solidarities across differences.
The third alternative is determinism — the view that human beings are ultimately reducible to impersonal forces, whether biological, economic, technological, historical, or evolutionary. In different forms, this outlook appears in scientific materialism, Darwinism, fascism, certain strands of Marxism, technocracy, and many forms of contemporary post-humanism. The common thread is the belief that freedom, moral responsibility, and creativity are largely illusions. Human beings become products of systems, structures, instincts, or material conditions. Justice gives way to power. Human life is interpreted primarily through the prism of either domination, survival, or the efficient and effective management of biological and psychological processes. Christian humanism rejects this reduction of persons to mechanisms or historical processes. It insists that human beings are never simply programmable matter, nor expressions of collective forces. People possess agency, moral depth, creativity, and the capacity for change and transformation.
Underlying all three of these alternatives — whether it’s radical individualism, identitarianism, or determinism — is a diminished and reductive account of the human person. And tragically, we have to recognise that Christians have given weight to and baptised each of these alternatives, such that large sections of the church today identify their faith with policies and practices that institutionalise cruelty towards strangers, contempt for the poor, and the dismantling of the very institutions of social care that their forebears founded. In this process, core Christian doctrines are twisted and deformed beyond recognition. Jesus is remade into a tribal God, and love of neighbour is labelled toxic empathy.
Christian humanism, though, offers a path out of this world of shattered mirrors and its lacerating distortions of the image of God.
With all this in mind, let me return to the question of how do we renew our institutions and address the crisis of agency. If we follow a Christian humanist vision of what it means to be human, then institutions are not merely mechanisms for efficiency of administration or making money. They are means through which we realize our shared humanity. The image of God is not fully expressed in isolation, but in common life — or, to use more theological language, it’s realized through forms of covenantal fellowship or koinonia. Our hospitals, schools, and businesses are not just systems. They are, at least potentially, schools of mutual recognition, participation, and contribution through which we cultivate forms of common life that enable each of us to realise who we are as persons, in and through relationship with each other, over time and at scale. That is a sacramental vision of institutions — not places of production, but of re-humanization and shared flourishing.
Good institutions do not simply act on people. They enable people to act with and for each other. They distribute agency rather than centralize it. They cultivate participation rather than compliance. And in doing so, they create conditions under which human beings can genuinely flourish through free, mutually responsible relationships with each other.
The challenge before us — one of them — is to foster institutions that are genuinely agency-centred: what the Catholic social critic Ivan Illich called convivial institutions. They widen the circle of decision-making, they distribute power, they share knowledge, and rather than privileging only credentialled expertise, they recognise multiple forms of wisdom and experience. They thereby enhance and enable shared human agency.
And I think we already see examples of this kind of convivial institution around us — some of it historic, other forms of it just emerging. And this is, in some ways, the understory that is bubbling up new kinds of life. I’ve been involved for decades now in forms of broad-based community organising, exemplified in the work of the Industrial Areas Foundation, both in the UK and here in the US. That’s just one example. Others include credit unions, hospices, recovery spirituality and rehab communities of various kinds, worker cooperatives, schools and the micro-school movement, mutual aid networks, participatory forms of budgeting, primary healthcare co-production initiatives, community land trusts, the digital commons, community gardens, and social enterprises rooted in local participation. Across these exercises in co-production and co-governance, the goal is not ownership in the capitalist sense of possession and control, but ownership in the democratic sense — people having a real hand and a real voice in shaping the social and material worlds they inhabit.
What we need desperately is the creation of more convivial institutions, particularly around emerging technologies such as AI. Such institutions matter because through participating in them, people do not simply change the world — they themselves are changed. They grow into forms of responsibility, solidarity, and shared action through which their personhood is realized and deepened.
This connection between agency, participation, and human flourishing is why Christian humanism so often advocated for participatory forms of democracy, and why such forms of democracy are the antidote and alternative to authoritarianism. It is this theological conviction — that human beings are relational creatures created for communion with God, neighbour, and the wider creation — which leads Christian humanists like Jacques Maritain and Karl Barth to link faithful witness to participatory forms of democratic life. If humans are created for relationship, mutual responsibility, and shared tending of creation, then social and political institutions should reflect and nurture these capacities. To be made in the image of the Triune God is to be made for participation, relation, and shared life. And to follow Christ is not simply to wait for salvation in a distant future, but to begin participating here and now in forms of common life marked by justice, generosity, and mutual care.
In this sense, democratic participation is not merely politically useful — it is morally and spiritually formative. Through participating in shared decision-making, shared action, and practices of solidarity, people begin to realize something of their vocation as human beings created for communion rather than domination. From this perspective, democracy is not merely a mechanism for selecting governments — it is a moral and spiritual practice through which people learn to live together as free and responsible persons.
Participatory forms of democracy and their institutionalised embodiment are a vital way of responding to the contemporary crisis of agency, when our societies are struggling to cope with the destructive effects of unregulated markets, technological disruption, ecological breakdown, and widening inequality — and the profound loss of agency these generate. The economic historian Karl Polanyi observed in his 1944 classic, The Great Transformation, that such moments like ours inevitably generate counter-movements: collective attempts to counter the destructive effects of unchecked, impersonal forces like capitalism and technology upon human life.
Now some of these counter-movements become authoritarian. Fascism is one historical example; contemporary forms of authoritarian populism provide another. In such movements, people seek to recover their agency by concentrating power in a single leader who promises to rescue the people from chaos and disorder. Other counter-movements, however, take democratic form. The labour, environmental, and civil rights movements all represent efforts to reclaim agency through shared action, and each generated forms of participatory institution. Both authoritarian and democratic responses, though, do arise from the same crisis: the feeling that ordinary people no longer have meaningful control over the conditions of their lives. But they diverge sharply in how they respond. Authoritarian movements concentrate agency in the hands of the one, the few, or the party. Democratic movements seek to distribute agency more widely and cultivate what community organisers call relational power — the power generated when people act together for shared purpose.
And this brings us back to why small-d participatory forms of democracy and Christian humanism go together. Participatory democracy honours the dignity of each person precisely by enabling everyone to contribute in the shaping of a common life. Rather than being passive recipients of decisions made by distant elites, markets, bureaucracies, or algorithms, people become active participants in forming the worlds that they inhabit together.
Democracy is therefore not first about elections or party competition or constitutional procedures. Those are the mechanisms of a democratic system. At its deepest level, democracy is sustained by social practices through which people exercise agency together and participate in shaping their living and working conditions. Democracy in this sense is fundamentally a practice of neighbouring. It is one of the ways we discover our shared humanity across differences of class, culture, race, religion, and ideological conviction. And because it depends upon relationship, dialogue, and reciprocal recognition, democracy as a social practice is inherently opposed to violence. Violence destroys the conditions under which shared worlds can be built. Beatings, torture, terror, intimidation, and state repression all shatter the trust and communicative bonds that make genuinely common life possible. By contrast, participatory democracy bears witness to a deeper truth: that solidarity across difference is possible because human beings are already bound together in relations of mutual dependence and shared creaturely life in and through Christ.
Christian humanism, therefore, offers a radically different vision of the future from one born solely of capital accumulation, technological advances, and social control. It points instead to forms of economic, political, and cultural life that deepen human agency, strengthen solidarity, and cultivate ecological mutuality. And at its heart lies a simple but demanding conviction: human beings become most fully themselves not through domination, isolation, or consumption, but through participation in just and generous forms of common life. And in Christian terms, such a life bears witness, even now, to the work of the Holy Spirit, forming a people out of fragmentation, cultivating communion where there was alienation, and enabling strangers to become neighbours. Because ultimately, Christian humanism is not just an idea. It is an invitation to become more fully human by learning to see, love, and live like Christ.
I’m going to step out of my academic role and into my role as someone ordained — as a priest. I want to keep that part of being a priest, as you go: I want to say a blessing to each one of you for listening, that you may know that you are beloved of God — each one of you, in all your distinctness and in all the relationships you hold — and that that truth may sink into your bones today. Thank you.
