“Do not let the algorithm write your story.”
That warning from Pope Leo XIV is the question hanging over Benedictine College’s 2026 Symposium on Transforming Culture: The Church in an Algorithmic Age.
From the Little Station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas — just down the hill from Benedictine College — we pull up a chair in The Common Room and ask what that warning really means.
Algorithms already help decide what we watch, what we read, what we buy, what appears in our news feeds, and even which answers we receive when we ask a question. Artificial intelligence promises extraordinary new tools for education, medicine, work, evangelization, and everyday life.
But there is a deeper question:
A machine may learn what we want. Can it know what we ought to want?
Using Benedictine’s upcoming Symposium as our starting point, we explore AI and human intelligence, technology and prayer, education and wonder, medicine and human dignity, and the efforts of Catholics working with tools such as Hallow and Magisterium AI.
And, naturally, G.K. Chesterton joins the conversation.
Chesterton never encountered artificial intelligence. But he had plenty to say about machinery, progress, education, common sense, human freedom, and the danger of making people fit the systems they create.
Perhaps the real choice isn’t technology or no technology.
Perhaps the opposite of the algorithm is something much older:
Wonder.
Join us at the Little Station on Commercial Street for a Chesterton Radio deep dive into one of the defining questions of our time.
Who is writing your story?
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Stories • Ideas • Wonder
Broadcasting from the Little Station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas.
